The FAA has opened an investigation into Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner after the company disclosed that employees in South Carolina falsified inspection records on work done where the wings are joined to the fuselage body.
Boeing informed the Federal Aviation Administration in April that, despite records indicating completion of required inspections, workers had not performed some of those inspections to confirm adequate bonding and electrical grounding at the 787 wing-to-body join.
“The FAA is investigating whether Boeing completed the inspections and whether company employees may have falsified aircraft records,” the federal safety agency said via email.
Boeing said its engineers have established that this newly discovered lapse does not create “an immediate safety of flight issue.”
Jesus fucking christ they are doing this on a plane that we don’t have any industry-wide long-term real-world durability data on because that’s the first fully composite airliner ever manufactured. Nobody really knows what long-term high-hour failure modes will look like.
We can simulate and guess, but when they cut corners like that, it introduces all kinds of horrifying possibilities involving cascading structural failures. Like, maybe the bonding surfaces between the fuselage and wing box starts to delaminate and, oh, I don’t know, the wing separates from the fuselage or something like that.
Perhaps I’m being sensationalist - I don’t know all the ins and outs of their manufacturing process. But I’m going to remain pretty fucking concerned until Boeing can conclusively prove it’s either not a problem, or that it can be correctly repaired back to original specs.