10-foot Panel Falls Off Aircraft

I like to keep up with industry news (and world news for that matter). From time to time in this blog, I have commented on some strange news items that I have seen come across the newswires. There was the story of an Air Force staff sergeant who was sentenced to three months in jail and received a bad conduct discharge for his part in an incident where a frog was thrown into a running F-16 engine. Then there was the blog where I discussed the Turkish aircraft technicians who sacrificed a camel on the tarmac of Istanbul's Ataturk International Airport. Well another odd news item came through the wire this week. It didn't involve the killing or sacrificing of an animal, but it was odd nonetheless. The Associated Press reports that this past Tuesday, workers at Indonesia's main airport found "a piece of a wing from a passenger jet on the runway." A senior air transportation official at the airport says, "it has been identified as a side engine cover, but we do not yet know which plane it came from." The story goes on to say that last month, a similar-sized piece of wing fell from a jetliner minutes after it took off from the same airport. Are you kidding? How do you recover a 10-foot panel and not know which airplane it came from? A missing screw, I can understand, but a 10-foot panel? And how the heck can you have two similar panels depart aircraft at the same airport in a month's time? How are these panels being secured? Bubble gum? The article closes by noting that the country suffered a series of accidents earlier this year that killed more than 120 people, leading to the European Union banning all the country's airlines from landing there and the FAA downgrading the nation's rating to its lowest category. It also notes that experts say the industry is plagued by poor maintenance, rule-bending and a shortage of trained professionals. Gee, you think? You can read the entire article here. Thanks for reading, Joe Escobar