“The fittings at the top of the door plug fractured, Homendy said. The NTSB examination has shown that those fittings were fractured, allowing the plug door to move upward and outward, she said.”
“We don’t know if the bolts were loose. We don’t know if bolts were in there fractured, or possibly the bolts weren’t there at all,” she said. “We have to determine that back in our laboratory.”
Well, the fittings fractured. The aircraft was virtually new, so metal fatigue could not be a factor. It looks like one of two possibilities: 1) The fittings fractured because the metal was inferior and brittle, or 2) The fittings fractured because the bolts that held them were loose, fractured themselves, or were never installed in the first place. The CEO of Boeing refers to “our mistake,” so draw your own conclusions.
I had a fantasy where the captain came back to use the rest room, then the first officer came back to sip coffee with the cabin attendants – so who was flying the plane? At first I thought this fantasy involved only air travel. But now I understand that it involves the country as a whole. We just spent days – not minutes, days – when no one, not the president, not the national security advisor, not the acting secretary of defense, knew the secretary was incapacitated in the hospital.
A vital link in the chain of command was missing, but no one knew. Like the fractured door fittings, the life-threatening danger became obvious only when it was too late. The only difference was that, unlike the cabin door, the Defense Department was not stressed. No major outbreak in the Middle East. No 9/11. No thanks to these jerks.
My fantasy became reality. No one was flying the plane. Fractured door fittings. Fractured national government.
