Another one of these disconcerting stories has cropped up suggesting that we may have a wider problem than previously suspected. It’s not nearly as bad as the door plug blowing out of a Boeing 737 Max over Portland, but it’s still troubling. Back on January 15, a passenger at Manchester Airport in the UK was awaiting takeoff on a flight to New York City when he noticed something unusual out the window. He was seated near the wing of the aircraft and he saw that one panel on the wing had a number of screws missing. Somewhat alarmed, he called it to the attention of a flight steward. A maintenance worker was summoned and the flight was delayed while they attended to the missing hardware on the wing. (NY Post)

A New York-bound Virgin Atlantic flight was canceled just moments before takeoff last week when an alarmed passenger said he spotted several screws missing from the plane’s wing.

British traveler Phil Hardy, 41, was onboard Flight VS127 at Manchester Airport in the UK on Jan. 15 when he noticed the four missing fasteners during a safety briefing for passengers and decided to alert the cabin crew.

“I’m a good flyer, but my partner was not loving the information I was telling her and starting to panic, and I was trying to put her mind at rest as much as I could,” Hardy told the Kennedy News agency of the moment he spotted the missing fixings.

The passenger took photographs of maintenance people with screwdrivers fiddling around with the panel where the missing hardware was noticed. (You can see the pictures in the linked article.) But then the flight was canceled and everyone was booked on other flights while they pulled the plane back for additional inspection and maintenance.

This incident wasn’t closely related to the Portland mishap. This was a Virgin Atlantic flight, not Alaskan Air. Also, instead of a Boeing 737 Max, this was an Airbus A330, a plane with a fairly solid safety record. Both Virgin and Airbus stressed to reporters that there was “no impact to the safety of last week’s aircraft.” They said that the panel with the missing hardware was “a secondary structure used to improve the aerodynamics of the plane.” They also said that each panel has 119 fasteners and its condition wouldn’t have caused any flight issues.

Okay. Perhaps that’s true. But if the plane didn’t need those “improved aerodynamics,” the engineers wouldn’t have included it. And if they designed it with 119 fasteners, it’s supposed to have 119 fasteners. They wouldn’t have added extra ones just to be decorative. You don’t add any superfluous weight to planes.

This brings us back to one of the obvious questions raised by the Boeing incident. How was that plane lined up at the gate while there was hardware missing from the exterior frame in a fashion so obvious that a passenger was able to see it out the window? Is nobody inspecting these planes? Shouldn’t they notice something as obvious as a bunch of empty screw holes on the wing and say, ‘Huh. Do you think we might want to replace those?” And if not, what other details have they missed?

These are different airlines and planes from different manufacturers, but the same maintenance and inspection issues are cropping up. It would be nice to think that these were relatively minor, vanishingly rare incidents of failed oversight. But at least for the public, it’s hard to escape the worry that people really are traveling around in flying junkyards. Where is the Department of Transportation in all of this? Where is Pete Buttigieg? Someone needs to be inspecting the inspectors and making sure all of the appropriate maintenance is being done to ensure the maximum possible air safety for the traveling public because it certainly doesn’t seem like we’re covering all of our bases here.