by Joseph P. Farrell, Giza Death Star:
Regular readers here know my attitude toward flying: I do not do it, and won’t do it, ever again. When I returned from Oxford to America in 1987, that was my last flight on an airplane. I simply will not fly, anywhere, ever. Period. My reasons for that are personal, but you may number terrible vertigo among them, and a curmudgeonly insistence in the teeth of clear statistical evidence to the contrary that flying is always, somehow, a crap shoot, a roll of the probability dice, that I simply don’t want to take. you can add to that those grim pictures of American Flight 191, or Pacific Southwest Airlines flight 182, both from the late 1970s, and that more or less settles the issue for me.
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But even i will admit that those grim reminders from history were not so much faults of the equipment itself, or of design flaws, but of human maintenance or piloting errors.
Not so with the recent problems that seem to be afflicting American manufacturer Boeing’s commercial airliners. We’ve see an spate of problems, from problems in the computerized automatic pilots pitching noses up or down too much, altimeter problems, doors or windows falling off in mid flight, tires coming off on takeoff or landing and bouncing down the runway, Dutch rolls, and more recently, reports of “counterfeit Chinese titanium” that somehow made its way not only into Being aircraft, but Airbus aircraft as well.
Well, now you can add cracked cockpit windshields to the list, according to this story shared by V.T.:
The opening lines in this one say it all:
Here we go again.
While flying from Heathrow to San Francisco, a Virgin Atlantic Boeing jet’s windshield cracked at 40,000 feet.
Photographs show that a central window pane is shattered with cracks in several areas, but investigators have been unable to determine what caused the damage.
…
Experts have said that the plane’s altitude meant it could not have hit a bird and no immediate other course have been highlighted but temperatures outside the aircraft were -50 degrees Celsius.
Now anyone who has flown from the United Kingdom to the United States will know that route. You do fly high, and temperatures are going to be very cold outside the aircraft. And you’re flying much too high for the windscreen to be hit by any bird. And aircraft have been making that journey for decades without cracked windshields. But in the wake of all the other problems Boeing seems to be suffering, we can probably write this incident off to the same cause: cultural agenda-driven incompetence, behind which one may also suspect lies some good old-fashioned industrial espionage and sabotage.
The article goes on to mention the following incident:
Earlier this month, a passenger jet with 163 passengers and nine crew members barely cleared the runway by ten feet due to a software glitch that caused it to take off with insufficient power.
The TUI Boeing 737-800, departing from Bristol Airport’s 1.2-mile runway 9 to Gran Canaria on March 4, had difficulty gaining enough lift during takeoff.
The 15-year-old jet eventually managed to get airborne but passed over the nearby A38 road at less than 100 feet before making its way to the sunny island.
Back in the 1970s, there were many crashes of the emerging jumbo-jets that seemed to involve a flaw in the McDonnell-Douglas DC-10, and accordingly, even when I did fly, I would always make certain that the flight was not on a DC-10. In fact, on my final flight from the United Kingdom back to the States, I had been booked on a DC-10, and actually had to ring up the travel agency ande have them book another flight – on a Boeing! – that would avoid any DC-10s. Well, as you might have guessed, with all the problems Boeing seems to be having lately, customers are now actually voicing concerns, if not abandoning Boeing aircraft altogether (presumably for Airbus):
