[LINK] Flash drives in the sea?

[Scott Howard]

On Wed, Apr 30, 2014 at 9:59 AM, Fernando Cassia <fcassia at gmail.com> wrote:

> FAA gave Boeing  and the airlines THREE YEARS to install two light
> bulbs for extra safety...
>
> "In March 2011, the Federal Aviation Administration in the United
> States released an airworthiness directive requiring all Boeing 737
> aircraft from −100 to −500 models to be fitted with two additional
> cockpit warning lights. These would indicate problems with take-off
> configuration or pressurization. Aircraft on the United States civil
> register were required to have the additional lights by 14 March 2014"
>

For starters, you are understating the actual work included (for at least
some planes it's more than just 2 lights), but lets let that one slide...

If you actually read the Airwirthiness directive, you'll see it states :

*Boeing Alert Service Bulletin 737-31A1325, dated January 11, 2010,
specifies an estimate of *
*32.5 work-hours to do the modification. Continental declared that it has
historically found that *
*Boeing estimates given in service bulletins are unachievable. Continental
believed it would be *
*possible to accomplish the modification in approximately 50 work hours, if
the modification *
*is done during a heavy maintenance visit.*

40+ hours, times the 3000 of these planes built (ok, not all are still in
service, but even so) is a fairly non-trivial amount of work - and a lot of
downtime for planes that would never otherwise sit idle for even 12 hours
except during planned maintenance.

The FAA normally gives 3-5 years for such directives as it fits in with the
airlines existing maintenance schedules. I don't know if anyone has done
the math, but I wouldn't be surprised to find out that for a change like
this where the gain was relatively minor, that doing it outside of a
regular maintenance program actually had an increased risk to safety over
not doing the change at all!



> Yes, three years for two bulbs on each plane. Makes me want to setup a
> donations web site for the poor Boeing and the USA airlines.
>

For the US airlines I'm sure that would be welcome, given that many of them
either are in, or have recently been in, "Chapter 11" bankruptcy protection.

  Scott