During stress testing prior to flight, Boeing found that metal bolts where the wings join the fuselage had caused wearing – technically known as delamination – or cracking of the composite. So the plane went back to the drawing board before it took its initial test flight.
That issue is similar to problems with carbon seat posts being squeezed too tight by the metal clamp atop the seat tube. As a bicycle tour director, I saw catastrophic carbon seat post and fork failures, and the rider injuries that resulted. I opted for an aluminum fork when I had a custom tandem built. The thought of flying down a hill at 50-plus mph and having the front wheel fly off as the fork cracked in a pothole did not leave me with warm feelings. Nor does the idea of flying in a carbon fiber plane prone to having its wings fall off.
No doubt Boeing will solve the problem, as bicycle manufacturers have seemed to do, albeit with admonitions to carefully inspect carbon bikes before each ride. But I’m still uncomfortable with the idea of riding on plastic. I’m old enough to recall when everything made in Japan out of plastic broke.
No, I’m not a scientist specializing in plastics. But I did do more than stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night. In an early foray into a career in organic chemistry, I did an award-winning research project called “Polymeric Experimentation to Determine the Specific Characteristics of Macromolecular Substances.” A long-winded way of saying “making plastics to see what their properties were.”
If nothing else, it taught me plastics definitely have their places, but maybe one of those places ought not be having your life riding on it.
top of page
Visitor Comments »
top of page