Airlines, airplanes and other kerfuffles

Not much in the maintenance report from WCNC. Most folks probably don't want to know, but airplanes get cracks all the time. Some you stop drill and monitor, some you fix right away, some don't matter. Total nothing burger Not much to learn from that report other than UPS was trying to keep the plane legally in the air and, at that point, not fudging on maintenance.

Edited to Add: I missed the corrosion part initially. The corrosion is more of a concern, but the fact the maintenance company turned it loose and UPS accepted it would tend to make me thing neither organization thought it was all that bad. Finding it is not all that uncommon, either; but, unlike cracks, corrosion can be a bit more difficult to deal with, so there may yet be more to follow up on there.

I don't know who's in charge of maintenance up there, but I imagine he's sweating bullets right now.
 
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I don't know who's in charge of maintenance up there, but I imagine he's sweating bullets right now.

I'd guess anyone who has touched that plane in the last 5-10 years is sweating bullets. Any maintenance work, any post-maintenance flight, the dog catcher who drove by the plane. The NTSB and FAA will hoover up every scrap of paper related to the plane.

As an outsider it looks like those agencies do a very thorough job of investigating fatal accidents.
 
I'd guess anyone who has touched that plane in the last 5-10 years is sweating bullets. Any maintenance work, any post-maintenance flight, the dog catcher who drove by the plane. The NTSB and FAA will hoover up every scrap of paper related to the plane.

As an outsider it looks like those agencies do a very thorough job of investigating fatal accidents.


Oh, they're very, very thorough. And the process works well--given the amount of flying that goes on every day in US airspace, these types of crashes are exceedingly rare.
 
Late to the game--was out of town for a bit--but the Turkish C-130 crash was ugly. Inflight breakups are not common so it's easy to say the crash is very similar to Yanky 72. The breakup is somewhat similar, but there were a lot of issues with this theory.

While a blade separation (Yanky 72's causal factor) is distinctly possible, there can be multiple reasons for the fuselages to come apart like this. The first to come to my mind is a failure to properly handle a prop gearbox seizure in a timely manner; witness the missing prop on the #2 (?) engine. Midair and combat damage will do it, but I believe those have been ruled out at this point. There is some scuttlebutt about a center wing box failure, but I doubt this, as both wings were still attached to the wing box and appeared straight.

There's a lot of questions I have, and most everything I've seen on line has been pure speculation; here's where I'll say we should wait for the report.
There's a lot to be gleaned out of this one just yet.
 
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