Or at the very least, entered into the aircraft maintenance log. Back in my flying days, we had to enter every issue, large or small, into the aircraft maintenance logbook, and we also had to check it before each new flight to see what other crews had experienced, and whether the fault was signed off as 'fixed' or an 'up' fault that we could take into the air with us on the next flight.
I believe the tighter turnaround times of flights these day may either mean this step is rushed too quickly or omitted altogether...
These planes all come with handbooks that the manufacturer provides for anomalous situations, like when some landing gear don't work. Once the flight crew run through the checklists in the handbooks for the problem, that's pretty much it. In certain cases and time permitting, the crew might also be in contact with their airline's maintenance/engineering staff in case there's something else that might be done. But once those options are exhausted there's no point in staying in the air, and these checklists can generally be done fairly quickly by a trained crew.
Agreed. I know a fair bit about what keeps my single-engine piston aircraft in the sky, and many of the possible faults are routinely checked/confirmed OK during pre-flight inspection and/or run-up.
Still, I don't want to inadvertantly miss a 500-hr magneto IRAN, a wing spar or bolt NDT inspection interval, run my dry vacuum pump twice as long as I planned, or several other possible faults that aren't easily testable by other than maintenance technicians.
There are very clear requirements for reporting certain in-flight failures, and very clear requirements for dispatching with some equipment inoperative. In addition, log books can be inspected by the FAA for patterns of failure, or for information after a specific failure.
I think this is a complete non-issue for everyone except US-based Airframe & Powerplant mechanics. If you're worried about aviation safety, don't fly on regional carriers in Eastern Europe, South America, or any third-world country. Flying on any major (for flights operated by the major, not under a codeshare) is the safest form of long distance travel by quite a wide margin.
On the small private planes that I fly, we have annual inspections where the airplane is carefully inspected and in order to do that, lots of disassembly and re-assembly is required. It's inherently dangerous, and I do an extremely careful pre-flight and will not take passengers on the first flight post-maintenance. I've found an oil line only finger tight (dumped oil directly onto the exhaust at any speed over 1700 RPM), various electrical and avionics anomalies, and other smaller mechanical issues. And in my case, this is all done by FAA-certified, English-speaking, hard-working, dedicated A&Ps right here in the good old USA. That you can find examples of maintenance errors from overseas repair shops is unsurprising; it's because you can find it from any repair shop.
For flight data metrics, this makes sense, but this is significantly already happening with aircraft systems transmitting data back to central monitoring systems in realtime. Pilots can see an errant value (say a moderately high temperature somewhere) and call up an engine specialist and ask them if it's a concern and that specialist can look at a plethora of data on the plan in flight. The planes can also "phone home" and report things which should be looked over or fixed during the next downtime and maintenance organizations can proactively order parts or schedule personnel to fix issues before the plane even lands. This is all being done in the name of efficiency, but, it no doubt has positive safety benefits too. Airlines and manufacturers can already run a query like "how many hours between replacement of part X on average" and "how many hours between replacements of part X for planes which regularly fly to middle eastern countries (hot and dry)"
For audio recordings, in the absence of an incident, I see no reason to do it.
I understand that with physical systems, the cost and complexity of detecting is higher, but if you're putting other people on the line, you damn well better do a live test of your vehicle before another living soul not certified as a pilot or flight engineer is allowed on board.
The more I read about this, the more it appears to me that excessive trust is placed on filed paperwork. Nothing says a fix is done like a successful test flight that specifically attempts to recreate the conditions surrounding the original failure.
so you're saying, everyone complaining here about "remembering to check the condition every 5 minutes" needs to complain about THIS ALREADY HAPPENING ON FLYING PLANES??
They happen regularly! That's why you have checks between flights, no mater how short the flight. Daily, weekly, monthly and by cycles(flights) or hours maintenance. You have leaks, breakage, electronics get fried, conexions get loose.
Aircraft parts are numbered and tracked they hace a limited live span depending the function. I can not imagine an airplane wirking properly and safely without all this care.
I think this is one of the areas that airlines are super good at. Every single plane needs strict regular maintenance and tons of checklists in order to take off, so something like a 50-day requirement for a reboot would be in that list of items, and if the people aren't following those lists of items you're going to have things like turbine failures, so they get done.
Maybe if there's a really badly run airline it might be a problem, but there are much more severe problems than software in a case like that.
Boeing gets away with this software issue because it's not really a big issue. The scary point the media can tell you because you don't have context to understand why it's mundane.
The manufacturer gives airlines training, SOP's, manuals, etc. All the failures that occurred on previous flights were fixed according to the requirements set forth by Boeing.
This happens every single day on thousands of aircraft worldwide. Problems show up, the engineers fix them, and the aircraft are returned to service.
I'm not sure what you're suggesting should happen... if you want Boeing to sign-off every pitot-tube cleaning or AoA sensor replacement, most planes would be grounded waiting for Boeing to show up.
Nope. People in maintenance departments don't generally write blogs about this, and it's not like an airline is going to help publicize their issues. And judging by how even my post is downvoted, they're not likely to either.
They are, and now this is just an additional thing that's inspected for and dealt with as part of the regular service life. Every plane you've ever flown in has had an unexpectedly high failure rate of some component that wasn't discovered until it was in service, which resulted in a modification to the published inspection/maintenance/replacement routine.
>The manufacturer has said there is a documented procedure to handle the situation. A different crew on the same plane the evening before encountered the same problem but solved it after running through three checklists, according to the November report.
I'm kind of surprised it requires a software fix. With the amount of maintenance checks and checklist procedures in aviation, "reboot plane every 2 weeks" doesn't sound like a big issue. What's worrysome is that the manufacturer didn't know about it and didn't put it on the checklists.
> manual maintenance without the proper bookkeeping would be viewed as tampering/sabotage, and the plane would refuse to operate.
If that's true, it sounds like a solution is search of a requirement. IIRC, but I don't think the US military has had problems with tampering and sabotage of military jets.
In airframe maintenance this is rarely true. In theory you should be proactively dealing with these issues before they are report generating (in the sense of said reports remaining open a long time, all maintenance generates logs in planes). If an excess number of reports are being generated there is an underlying issue, like work is being deferred for profitability reasons, or the maintenance team is being rushed because they are falling far behind.
I believe the tighter turnaround times of flights these day may either mean this step is rushed too quickly or omitted altogether...
reply