In the Sunday, February 23 issue of the Tulsa World, well hidden on page A-8, was a small story that carried the headline: “Debris found in fuel tanks of 70% of inspected 737 Max jets.” There was no credit given to any reporter and it carried a dateline of “Chicago (AP).”
The last paragraph stated, “The number of planes with debris was reported Friday night by the Wall Street Journal. The headline immediately caught my attention because of my long involvement in things aviation and safety in general.
Nothing further has come to my attention in any media form to either verify or expand on the story, leaving a number of questions in my mind.
It was explained that the problem was found in 35 of the “about 50 jets that were inspected.” These were among 400 undelivered new planes still grounded at the factory following the crashes of two of the same model in other parts of the world last year that were blamed on a problem with the new model of autopilot. One wonders if those planes could have had the same problem that caused the autopilots to fail to operate, since the debris was stated to be of a metallic nature, which could cause a short in the fuel gage equipment and disrupt the electrical supply to the instrument panel.
But that is supposition on my part. The debris was described as “metal shavings, tools and other objects left in the planes during assembly.”
In my experience with aviation maintenance, and that relayed to me by son No. 3 who spent 24 years as a mechanic with one of the major airlines, it seems that tools and parts would not be left anywhere in a plane because line mechanics, and by my observation in factories, the workers furnish their own tools, so are not very likely to walk away and just leave them. Further, if one did so and was caught he/she would be terminated and probably lose the mechanics certification for that make and probably also lose their A&P license from the FAA.
That being my thought gives rise to another couple of possibilities, with much more sinister origins and potential outcomes. First to come up is the possibility of one or more Islamic radicals could have gained employment with the sole purpose of killing as many “infidels” as possible, since it is my understanding that it is written in the Islamic scripture that it is a believer’s duty to capture and kill any such non-believer. Second would be that there has been some unreported disagreement with the union that has caused one or more of the members to do some damages in retaliation for a perceived wrong by management.
My memory is still more or less clear of a situation where an acquaintance had a recurrent and persistent problem with a metallic noise in a new Chevrolet. After a number of shop checks a thinking mechanic went deeper into the body of the car and found that during assembly someone had carefully tack welded a wrench at one end against the body in a non-visible location.
At every bump it would bang against the metal body. At the very least, the result of this reported problem could be a number of unexplained crashes, or at the very least, “declarations of emergency” by flights because of unexpected failures of systems.
Back to the case at hand, the story states that only 50 of the 400 planes on the ramp undelivered to purchasing airlines had been inspected in the course of normal maintenance and 35 had been found with the problem. It will be most interesting to see the result of a presumed finishing to inspect the other 350 aircraft, which common sense would dictate to be absolutely mandatary, not to mention required by FAA. It will be extremely interesting to have the result of a report of results. Hopefully they will be open and we will be kept informed on their progress in this matter.
As an aside, first-hand information has been received by me of such mischief being done in home construction, such as trash in HVAC ducts and even soft drink cans in toilet sewers, and in my experience in pipeline construction.
However none of those rises to the tragic results as in the subject case.