Jet, Other Doomed Flight Share History
The EgyptAir 767 that plunged six miles into the ocean off Nantucket Island on Sunday rolled off Boeing Co.’s assembly line immediately before another 767 jetliner that crashed eight years ago in a Thailand jungle.
Both planes were completed just days before Boeing’s aircraft assemblers went on strike, complaining of fatigue because they were forced to work too much overtime.
A Boeing spokesman said the company knew of nothing to indicate the two crashes were related, but added, “we’re going to look at every possible scenario.” The 1991 Lauda Air crash was caused when a mechanism designed to brake the plane on the ground deployed in the air.
The EgyptAir model 767-300ER, for extended range, was assembled at Boeing’s Everett plane factory in September 1989, the 282nd 767 to be built. The 767-300ER for Austria’s Lauda Air left the factory about two weeks later.
Boeing Commercial Airplane Group spokesman Doug Webb said the company has no reason to think anything was wrong with aircraft assembled at that time.
However, the planes were built during one of the most turbulent times in the company’s history.
Union Machinists at Boeing went on strike on Oct. 4, 1989, as the aircraft builder was struggling to meet delivery schedules during a period of record aircraft orders. In addition to money, a major issue in the 48-day strike was the heavy amount of overtime required of production workers, many of whom complained of being too tired to do their jobs properly.
During the crush of work in the late 1980s, some of Boeing’s largest customers complained about poor quality. Those carriers later praised the company for fixing the problems, however, and backed up the sentiment by ordering hundreds of more jets.
The struggles of the late 1980s led to a complete revamping of Boeing’s manufacturing, design and engineering processes, as well as the way the company worked with customers, employees and suppliers.
Both company and union officials have adamantly denied that aircraft could be sabotaged in the plant, saying there are too many safeguards and that any perpetrator would be easy to trace.
The 767, a twin-engine wide-body, went into passenger use in September 1982 and is a workhorse on trans-Atlantic routes. It has not had an unusually high accident rate, with three fatal crashes--the third occurring when an Ethiopian Airlines jet ditched in the Comoros Islands in 1996 after being hijacked and running out of fuel.
Before the Sunday crash, the EgyptAir plane had completed more than 30,000 flight hours over the course of more than 6,900 flights.
Investigators had no immediate indication of what caused the jet to suddenly dive from 33,000 feet into the Atlantic about 40 minutes after taking off on a flight from New York to Cairo.
The plane apparently had just reached cruising altitude. All 217 on board were believed killed.
The Lauda 767, which crashed on May 26, 1991, was climbing after taking off from Bangkok about 45 minutes earlier.
It had just passed 10,000 feet when the pilot and co-pilot received a warning light signifying a problem with the engine thrust reverser, a device that uses the power of the aircraft’s two engines to brake the plane after it lands. On a 767, the reversers--one per engine--are engineered to activate only when the plane is on the ground.
Minutes later, as they were discussing what action to take, an engine reverser activated, sending the plane into an uncontrollable plunge. The 233 passengers and crew members were killed.
The accident stunned Boeing and the aviation industry because experts believed existing safeguards should have prevented it.
Although there was never any official explanation for the malfunction in the thrust reverser, investigators strongly suspected a flaw in the mechanism that controls it. Boeing redesigned the mechanism on subsequent 767 and 757 models. The company and the Federal Aviation Administration recommended that airlines flying the jets make similar modifications.
Boeing’s Webb said he believed that all the affected aircraft had gone through the retrofit, but the company was trying to confirm that Sunday.
Both the EgyptAir and Lauda planes were equipped with Pratt & Whitney 4080 engines.
Webb said it was far too early to speculate on what might have caused the EgyptAir accident. But he said any similarities between Sunday’s disaster and the Thai crash would be explored.
“I think what we would do is look at the service record and maintenance record of the airplane, and obviously we’re going to look at every possible scenario,” he said.
Boeing does not want to speculate on the cause of the EgyptAir crash, Webb said. Rather, “we want to look at the data and let that lead the investigation.”
Boeing was sending a team of experts to Nantucket to assist the National Transportation Safety Board in its investigation, he said.
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
Boeing 767-300ER
The Boeing 767-300ER that disappeared early Sunday is the company’s longes-range aircraft and the type most commonly used for trans-Atlantic flights.
Delivered to the airline: September 1989. It had logged more than 31,000 flight hours and 6,900 takeoffs and landings.
Configuration: Two-aisle, twin-engine aircraft.
Range: Up to 7,080 miles.
Capacity: Up to 218 passengers in a three-class cabin.
Maxiumum gross weight: 300,000 pounds for the basic 767.
767 history: Estimated to have carried 813 million passengers on more than 3 million flights since it first entered service Sept. 8, 1982.
767-300 history: Program got underway in September 1983.The model is longer than earlier versions by more than 21 feet and has 20% more seating capacity.
Source: The Boeing Co.
