Warbird Information Exchange

The news both on TV and on your local on line rumor sheets either is, or wil soon be full of stories screaming 'CRACKS FOUND IN 787 WINGS' (oh, the humanity). The potential locaton of these cracks is in an easily removed and replaced aluminum stringer tie clip, caused by a change in procedures at Mitsubishi who makes the wing assembly that had an assembler there administer an overtorque to the bolts through that clip and has ZERO to do with affecting the structural integrity of the CFRP structure.
But you can rest assured that REUTERS and MOTLEY FOOL will spend a day or so waving a burning chicken around and runnning through the halls about this because they stampede to report that a reading lamp bulb has burned out in a 787.

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Don't make me go get my flying monkeys-

Well, can you blame them? Who needs 787s anyway? There are plenty of perfectly good 727s and DC-9s rotting away in the deserts of the western USA. . .

Sarcasm... a free service I offer...

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Dean Hemphill, K5DH
Lake Dallas, Republic of Texas

Just remember, the European press did the same with the A380 and all its delays and it'll happen more with the A350 when it hits its teething problems here before too long (maybe...if it actually makes it out of flight testing...which seems to still be in doubt since they still haven't set a certification date goal...)

Remember the 777 "engine surge" panic?

I don't think there's been a design ever that doesn't have teething problems. Some more than others. I think today though, the first move is to ground the fleet instead of making reasoned decisions because everyone's afraid of the lawyers.

YEP! Douglas nearly lost the DC-1 prototype on it's first flight because of an auxillary airfoil mounted between the engine nacelles and the forward fuselage (most photos of that installation have 'vanished' over the years ) as much as because of wrongly installed carburetors on the engines.

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Don't make me go get my flying monkeys-