“On my word of honor and on one wing”: in the USA, a vigilant passenger before departure noticed a flaw in the technicians (5 photos + 1 video)
Looking out the window, the man saw that four bolts were missing on the wing of the plane.
A Virgin Atlantic flight from Manchester to New York was delayed after a passenger noticed the condition of the plane's wing. Briton Phil Harley asked the flight attendant if it was normal that there were four bolts missing?
The flight attendant called technicians who added the missing fasteners.
And although a representative of the Virgin Atlantic airline later assured that the safety of the ship would not have been affected without the four bolts, Harley preferred to play it safe, recalling the incident with a door plug and a piece of the fuselage of an Alaska Airlines plane falling off during the flight.
Neil Firth, chief aeronautical engineer for the Airbus A330, noted that the damaged panel was a secondary structure used to improve the plane's aerodynamics.
“Each of these panels has 119 fasteners, so this did not affect the structural integrity or the load-carrying capacity of the wing, and the aircraft was safe to operate,” he said, however, just in case, technicians checked the technical condition of the entire aircraft, which is why passengers had to take another flight.