787 Safety Issues

From an article in the Seattle Times

Is this just an angry engineer or something more?

He sure has gone out of his way to make his point, you be the judge.

Any bean counters out there? How many people would have to die for Boeing to pull the plug on the 787? 857 planes ordered times $150 Million = $128.5 Billion! I think a human life is valued at something like $5 Million each. Corporate execs don’t listen to engineers in these matters - they listen to accountants! What are they gonna do… cancel the program? I think not!

You’d have to know their development cost to calculate the current losses if they walked away. The future sales income would then factor into the decision. Then possible lost sales of other planes due to the incompetence factor. I think the question at this point (if they’re even looking at it) is what would the delay cost be for further testing and possible modifications in relation to potential liability. Highly doubtful they’d drop the entire program although the future liability IF one of these crashes and falls apart in the short-term would be phenominal.

Of course I’m not sure these are real issues in my book. Let’s see, it took 17 years to put a 777 on the ground hard enough to really say it’s a tough bird. If the passengers had perished it would suck, but as far as airliners go that’s 150 deaths over how many airline miles? Seems like a lot of folks die as a result of smoke inhalation during crashes so would the potential of more deadly smoke really matter much? I know it sucks if it’s you, but some of it seems a little over the top.

Sounds like a highly unstable ex employee that is looking to smear the company in any way he can. Looks like revenge tactics, specifically since he uses the word “plastic” so much.

He has worked with composites since 1973.

I’ll bet if you called his materials ‘plastic’ anytime in that time period that guy would have gone off about composites being superior and how ‘plastic’ is something they make toys from. However, now that his motivation is to create fear and spawn distrust of the design he throws the word ‘plastic’ around left and right:

The brittleness of the plastic

A crash also could shatter the plastic fuselage

plastic material burning in a jet-fuel fire

Plus, this article is dated 9-18. It’s not as if his campaign has caused any canceled orders.

There are many composites flying for many years now, including fuselage parts, so he doesn’t sound very credible.

His threating his boss with hanging and meat hooks doesn’t exactly sound like a stable person and OSHA, no friend to large corporations, dismissed his whistleblower claims against Boeing. Since it is on the public record, you can bet that the FAA will look at this closely during certification.