Birth of A Beno
Aviation is an aggregation of millions of "benos"–the detritus
of all lapses in procedure, attention and skill that cost money, time and lives.
Each makes someone declare, "There'll be no more of this!" -or- "There'll
be no more of that!"
When Doc's plane was just about to leave
England...
The
pause that depresses
So here's a pic of the aftermath of the encounter between the United
777 I was going to fly from Heathrow to JFK last Wednesday, and the Air Jamaica
plane that was the other party to the incident.
We were told that the tips of the two plane's wings nicked each other
somehow. From the looks of the picture, there wasn't much wrong with the 777.
The Air Jamaica plane, which appears to be an Airbus
A320, seems to be missing the lower half of winglet (that little fin at
the end of some wings). Hard to tell, though.
While I'm sure it caused lots of head-scratching (and worse) for the
two airlines, for most passengers the cost was a night in a local hotel and
other inconveniences — in my case, missing my AlwaysOn
panel. Thanks to J.D. for
filling in there.
Duty Above & Beyond
What Doc isn't telling you is that United Airline's insistence on total wingtip
integrity cost him dearly. He had qualified for an upgrade to the 777's Business
class, and was settling into the lap of high-mileage luxury when some dumbass
ran his plane into some other dumbass's plane. After the plane change, he ends
up in seat 43E next to a guy with altitude-related gas issues. Their new airplane
took off 4 hours late, including 2 hours on the tarmac with the engines and
A/C shut down.
Any aeronautical engineer would tell you that the pilot probably would not
even be able to tell the wing tip had a ding in it. One thing's certain: the
severity of an imperfect wing tip varies inversely with the frequency of incoming
mortar rounds.
11:45:07 PM 
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