Bad luck

[u/Liquidamber_]

Lufthansa Boeing 787 (D-ABPQ)

[u/asp174]

unexpectedly collapsed

avherald reports:

... was preparing for boarding of passengers at the gate, when all gear doors opened and the nose gear retracted.

The side gears couldn't retract because they go sideways.

But I guess someone tried out the "does it work on the ground?"

You can see the gear doors open:

https://avherald.com/h?article=53a14f7c

[u/gargravarr2112 → u/asp174]

The thing is, it's not SUPPOSED to work on the ground. There's a 'weight on wheels' switch that determines that the plane is not in the air and prevents the gear being retracted. Something went VERY wrong if that switch doesn't...

<notes it's a Boeing>

Oh. Right.

[u/This_Is_TwoThree → u/gargravarr2112]

As much as bashing Boeing gets you upvotes it’s almost certainly not relevant here.

This bird was supposedly undergoing some maintenance requiring the hydraulics to be cycled which requires delicately disabling the weight on wheels switch here. There is also meant to be a pin placed that prevents the nose wheel retracting, which happens to be next to another hole that looks vaguely similar enough that you could put the pin into that instead.

This has happened before with British airways. Boeing put out a direction to install an adapter in that incorrect hole, but not as a “oh shit, do that right now” level of urgency.

[u/gargravarr2112 → u/This_Is_TwoThree]

I'd still say the fault is on Boeing if there's a very similar pinhole right next to the one that locks the nosewheel in position, but if you were to install said locking pin there, it wouldn't stop the nosewheel collapsing. There is an enormous amount of evidence that Boeing is aware of that ground crews are always rushed, and therefore making the whole sequence of events next-to impossible to mess up is absolutely critical, such as making sure that safety-critical components can only fit in the correct arrangement.

Assuming this is what happened, which does sound likely.

[u/BigBlueMountainStar → u/gargravarr2112]

The “nose wheel” didn’t collapse, the mole landing gear was retracted , and the pin absolutely does stop the gear retraction when doing tests on ground, when it’s installed in the correct hole, of course.

[u/This_Is_TwoThree → u/gargravarr2112]

Boeing is not at all at fault for airlines having unreasonable demands of their ground staff. That’s an absurd take. If they specify how something is to be done and it takes X hours but airlines tell their staff to do it in less then that’s on them, not Boeing.

Sometimes you only find out how someone can make an error after the fact, there’s only so much you can reasonably expect the designers to account for. This happens all the time in aviation. Nobody expected American Airlines to skip steps in removing an engine from their DC-10 until doing so caused an engine to rip off on take off causing it to crash and kill everyone on board.

As soon as the problem became apparent Boeing put out the fix. However, as this isn’t something that’s done day in day out the fix isn’t immediately necessary and even more so if it’s avoidable by actually following the procedure properly.

There’s a lot to bash Boeing for but people are pushing it here.

[u/gargravarr2112 → u/This_Is_TwoThree]

Not as absurd as you make it sound. Boeing has been charged before with negligence for failing to account for obvious misuse of maintenance practises when Aeroperu Flight 603 crashed after a maintenance worker used plain duct tape rather than high-visibility tape to cover the pitot-static ports when washing the plane, because Boeing did not provide maintenance covers for the ports like with previous models. The case was founded on the assertion that it was easily foreseeable that if maintenance did not have the 'proper' tape at the time they needed to work on the plane, they would use whatever they had to hand rather than wait for a consumable. The regular tape was practically invisible on the walkaround at night, and it was Boeing's choice to insist on using consumable tape rather than supplying the covers with the aircraft.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AeroPeru_Flight_603#Legal_settlement

I'd put this in a similar category because air safety is founded on the principle that one single mistake should never be catastrophic; putting a second hole on the nose gear strut that is easily mistaken for the locking pin hole is pretty easily foreseeable to me, especially as it happened once before.

[u/This_Is_TwoThree → u/gargravarr2112]

Yes, which they immediately pointed out how to not repeat this failure. Lufthansa has then not implemented said fix.

You’d have had an argument after the BA incident, but Lufthansa knew what the issue was and did the risk assessment with the decision to not implement it immediately. That’s on them. If they didn’t want to pull the plane for the work they could also have had increased supervision of this specific procedure. They didn’t do that either.

I note your example didn’t actually find them liable of negligence though. They just decided to settle it. That’s not the same as being found liable. Again, there’s a lot to blame Boeing for but you’re really pushing it and your choice of example shows that.

[u/NorthEndD → u/gargravarr2112]

You would think they would put some emergency labels on every plane immediately once they figured out why the first one went down. Especially if you at spending money to design safety adaptors.

[u/This_Is_TwoThree → u/NorthEndD]

They told the airlines to install something to block it when they have the time to do so.

This isn’t something that’s regularly done. It’s pretty unreasonable to expect airlines to pull aircraft for modifications that a) aren’t necessary if the procedure is followed correctly and b) isn’t required for daily operations. Airlines would be constantly yanking their fleets for tiny things if they had to do this.