Ten days after the cabin door of an Alaska Airlines flight blew off midair, an observant passenger on a Virgin Atlantic flight noticed several fasteners were missing from the plane’s wing moments before takeoff.
The British passenger, 41-year-old Phil Hardy, notified the crew on his flight from the UK to New York.
“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, reports the New York Post. “I thought it was best to mention it to a flight attendant to be on the safe side.”
Engineers were called out to inspect the wing and can be seen using a screwdriver to address the issue in video Hardy recorded.
Airbus and Virgin claim no safety issues were posed by the missing fasteners.
“The safety of our customers and crew is always our top priority and this was not compromised at any point,” a Virgin representative said in a statement. “We always work well above industry safety standards and the aircraft is now back in service.”
Neil Firth, an engineer for Airbus, echoed those remarks.
“Each of these panels has 119 fasteners, so there was no impact to the structural integrity or load capability of the wing, and the aircraft was safe to operate,” he said, according to the Post. “As a precautionary measure, the aircraft underwent an additional maintenance check, and the fasteners were replaced.”
The flight was then canceled to “provide time for precautionary additional engineering maintenance checks.”
It’s going to get worse https://t.co/8Cy9YrvN0P
— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) January 22, 2024
Apparently @VirginAtlantic is a DIY airline
— Phil Holloway ✈️ (@PhilHollowayEsq) January 22, 2024
Passengers do their own preflight inspection of the aircraft https://t.co/r6Tq3G3ndp
It’s time to audit every airline for their DEI hires and bring meritocracy back. https://t.co/N9RHSYbTXe
— Manhattan Mingle (@ManhattanMingle) January 22, 2024