alt.hn

6/4/2026 at 3:37:16 PM

Several injured in Boeing 787 nose-gear collapse in Frankfurt

 https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/lufthansa-787-jet-suffers-front-wheel-collapse-frankfurt-gate-2026-06-04/

by karakoram

6/4/2026 at 4:11:54 PM

Same thing happened to British Airways a few years ago on a 787, a misplaced security pin that was inserted in the wrong place during a maintenance operation. There are two very similar holes next to one another that can receive the pin, there's a picture at the bottom here : https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/318989

Wondering if the same mishap is behind it again.

by cwizou

6/4/2026 at 4:27:46 PM

The report on that incident says there was a hardware modification to make this impossible, to be incorporated before Jan 2023.

(It also says this happened to Boeing in 2018 and they ignored it, of course)

by stefan_

6/4/2026 at 4:40:50 PM

I missed that part, and since it's a newly delivered plane (this January), it's safe to assume the mitigation was in place. Preliminary report will be interesting here.

by cwizou

6/4/2026 at 5:55:46 PM

Wonder why they don't just grab a huge permanent Sharpie and write in huge letters "Do not insert pin here" on one hole and "Insert pin here" on the other hole.

I'm actually serious, it seems to me they resist these kind of short-term helpers that would save lots of injuries.

by dheera

6/4/2026 at 5:57:17 PM

I think the report says they just put a little cover on the hole where the pin shouldn't go (but can).

by stefan_

6/4/2026 at 6:21:50 PM

Sure, but they probably took 3 years to have a design review, an executive review, some firings and layoffs, re-hire, orientation, a sprint planning meeting, a sprint retro, a post mortem, an OKR meeting, a KPI meeting, an all-hands, and then the cover probably got stuck in customs with tariffs, and then the tolerances probably weren't correct.

Meanwhile the sharpie would take 1 minute.

by dheera

6/4/2026 at 9:40:07 PM

> Meanwhile the sharpie would take 1 minute.

And eventually be missed/ignored by a rushed ground tech and fail again.

Other than making it easier to blame someone, labeling is just a short term interim fix for such things. You design it to be physically impossible or as close to that as possible.

Been there, done that in much less high stakes environments. Upping the training, documentation, and labeling simply makes the mistakes happen less often for a physical process obviously prone to a common mistake.

Sure as an immediate airworthiness directive giant bright lettering is a great immediate “this month” fix. Certainly not a permanent one though.

If you make a hole multiple things can be fit into, eventually someone will try.

by phil21

6/4/2026 at 4:25:17 PM

Yikes, mojibake in 2021.

edit: actually, how did that happen? The apostrophes show up correctly, they’re just all preceded by a  that doesn’t seem to represent anything?

by wvbdmp

6/4/2026 at 4:50:05 PM

The page is declared as ISO 8859-1, but the actual bytes of the text appear to be UTF-8. In UTF-8, characters from U+0080 to U+00AF happen to be encoded as C2 <codepoint value>. For example, U+0092 is encoded as C2 92.

C2 in ISO 8859-1 is ””. U+0092 is the control code Private Use 2 in Unicode, and 92 is the same in ISO 8859-1. However, the standard Western Windows code page 1252 extends ISO 8859-1 by assigning “’” (right single quotation mark) to 92.

HTML5/WHATWG requires an ISO 8859-1 charset declaration to be interpreted as Windows-1252 (https://blog.whatwg.org/the-road-to-html-5-character-encodin...), hence the displayed result is “Â’”.

The original Windows-1252 content must have previously been converted to UTF-8 under the assumption that the source is ISO 8859-1, i.e. mapping 92 to U+0092 (Private Use 2) instead of to U+2019 (Right Single Quotation Mark). The resulting UTF-8 encoding was placed in the web page, which however is declared as ISO 8859-1.

by layer8

6/4/2026 at 4:58:56 PM

Delicious, thank you!

by wvbdmp

6/4/2026 at 5:24:08 PM

I edited my post after verifying the actual bytes, it turned out to be slightly more complicated.

by layer8

6/4/2026 at 5:32:56 PM

The double-encoding path gets you there too: the original UTF-8 \xE2 \x80 \x99 mis-decoded as iso-8859-1 or Windows-1252 and saved back as UTF-8 gives \xC3 \xA2 \xC2 \x80 \xC2 \x99, which in Windows-1252 renders as ’. A WYSIWYG cleanup replacing that mojibake with the Windows-1252 ' (byte 0x92) and saving back as UTF-8 gets you to \xC2 \x92 on disk.

Edit: Although maybe that's not the most parsimonious explanation.

by well_actulily

6/4/2026 at 7:16:43 PM

In my post the sequence is:

1. Mis-transcode Windows-1252 as ISO 8859-1 to UTF-8.

2. Mis-decode UTF-8 as Windows-1252.

by layer8

6/4/2026 at 5:25:03 PM

this one does g11n....

by root-parent

6/4/2026 at 4:33:50 PM

They're probably Microsoft's "Smart Quotes", which are Unicode. They were presumably stored in UTF-8 but retrieved as ASCII (or ISO-8859-1).

by netsharc

6/5/2026 at 1:01:02 AM

Anyone who has any mechanical inkling would see that the NLG rotates around the massive bushing and putting a pin in there won’t stop anything.

by thedrbrian

6/4/2026 at 4:43:30 PM

The aircraft is 1 year old and was delivered in January...

But, fucking hell, apparently Boeing "engineers" are so dumb they never learned about Murphy's law.

by netsharc

6/4/2026 at 9:33:56 PM

I’d be far more likely to suspect Boeing’s management for pushing unsafe schedule or staffing and having things slip through the cracks. They have a reputation.

by QuiEgo

6/4/2026 at 6:25:33 PM

I bet you would blame the automotive engineers too after reversing your car through the garage door.

by 866-RON-0-FEZ

6/4/2026 at 8:28:59 PM

Grandparent post:

> There are two very similar holes next to one another that can receive the pin, there's a picture at the bottom here : https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/318989

> Wondering if the same mishap is behind it again.

I'm commenting on the genius of this design. Even if yesterday's accident isn't due to this design, how dumb can you be to design something like that, it's what Murphy's Law says to not do.

by netsharc

6/4/2026 at 7:20:56 PM

You mean like the death of Anton Yelchin, where poor gearshift design made it incredibly easy to confuse whether the car was in gear or in park?

Yeah, that is indeed primarily on the engineers.

by crote

6/4/2026 at 11:54:09 PM

What kind of person parks on a hill without setting the parking brake?

by 866-RON-0-FEZ

6/5/2026 at 2:02:15 AM

Well, Chekov is not Scotty

by earleybird

6/5/2026 at 7:37:49 AM

Advice: You really should look up how the engineers designed the gear lever, before voicing more of your ignorant "knowledge".

Edit: Oh you're talking about the parking brake, not the gear lever. Smells of victim-blaming.

by netsharc

6/4/2026 at 4:04:47 PM

So a plane which has withstood probably countless landings, had its nose gear collapse while sitting statically at a gate of all times and places? Weird.

by midiguy

6/4/2026 at 4:45:27 PM

There's a story that during the testing of a fighter plane - I think the F-35 but not sure - the "developers" claimed the new computer systems made most pilot errors all but impossible.

QA engineer's first check was, what happens if I try and retract the wheels while the plane is sitting on the ground and not moving. Oops.

by red_admiral

6/4/2026 at 9:24:43 PM

There are plenty of older planes with "retract wheels automatically when airborne" buttons that work by detecting a reduction in pressure on the wheels. There are also plenty of runways with slight bumps in them. The two do not work well together.

by rjsw

6/4/2026 at 6:30:59 PM

This is the third time in three years that a nose gear has collapsed while stopped or moving slowly: https://avherald.com/h?article=52292bd1 https://avherald.com/h?article=51816daf

Each time has been on different aircraft models, but there's not a lot of variation in nose wheel retraction design on airliners. There's a myriad of ways something could go wrong to make it happen, but considering how many flights there are per day, it's still an extremely rare event.

by dlcarrier

6/4/2026 at 6:26:28 PM

The video looks more like the gear was intentionally retracted.

by 866-RON-0-FEZ

6/4/2026 at 4:11:50 PM

Collapsed while it was sitting at a gate, with no passengers yet on board - meaning the the gear was under far lower loads than during a landing.

While slowly-failing gear could have collapsed anyway just then, the obvious question is whether the nose gear had just been serviced. By mechanics who (say) forgot to re-install the bolts holding everything together.

by bell-cot

6/5/2026 at 3:00:27 AM

"Lufthansa operates the 787-9 variant" and "is planning to gradually phase out less efficient jets and simplify its fleet." Do the efficiencies come from not having to burn fuel for it to crash into the ground?

by LegitStupid

6/4/2026 at 4:15:25 PM

Not yet at the https://avherald.com/

by root-parent

6/4/2026 at 3:50:22 PM

> That’s not very typical, I’d like to make that point

by jaydenmilne

6/4/2026 at 3:57:58 PM

I duckduckgo'ed "nose gear collapse" earlier and it seems it may be an issue that's more common than expected? At least there were lots of images of airplanes with broken front wheels and the nose touching the floor.

by binaryturtle

6/4/2026 at 4:07:50 PM

This is a joke about "The Front Fell Off", a classic comedy video from a few decades ago.

by dragontamer

6/4/2026 at 4:10:36 PM

If you haven't experienced the awesomeness of "The Front Fell Off", do yourself a favor and seek it out on youtube... you won't be disappointed.

by buredoranna

6/4/2026 at 4:37:07 PM

Also check out All Birds Are Cats by the same duo.

by PyWoody

6/4/2026 at 6:06:33 PM

I learned something new. That also explain why it was a quote and I didn't found the quoted part in the news item itself. :)

by binaryturtle

6/4/2026 at 6:39:03 PM

Congratulations, you are one of today's lucky 10,000! https://xkcd.com/1053/

by dlcarrier

6/4/2026 at 4:16:24 PM

Joke ? Those people were serious.

by hulitu

6/4/2026 at 4:13:08 PM

From the picture and the text this aircraft was parked at the gate. During a hard landing the nose gear may collapse but not while being parked. And while parked there are protections to prevent retraction. However, these can be overridden by maintenance.

by dust42

6/4/2026 at 4:08:21 PM

[dead]

by redsocksfan45

6/4/2026 at 4:08:54 PM

Well this time it at least didn't fall into the environment.

by dragontamer

6/4/2026 at 3:52:30 PM

Can someone tell me if this is just confirmation bias or is Boeing really going down this hard? I mean management was obviously tanking since the McDonnell Douglas takeover, but did it really take almost 30 years for this to shine through? Or were these things underreported in the last decades?

by sigmoid10

6/4/2026 at 4:09:20 PM

The 777 and 787 programs have never seen a passenger fatality resulting from an engineering defect. That is a monumental achievement in light of the passenger miles served. Boeing has its problems, but that record speaks for itself

by ak217

6/4/2026 at 4:22:07 PM

Another thing I'd point out is how often planes regularly fell out of the sky as recently as 40 years ago - my first flight 32 years ago or so, they still had kiosks in the airport to sell you life insurance.

Even with the MAX and the recent (last ~2 years) spate of incidents, flying is safer now than it ever has been, and certainly safer than it has been over its lifetime.

by Aloha

6/4/2026 at 4:20:07 PM

From 787 wikipedia page: "On June 12, 2025, Air India Flight 171, an 11-year-old Boeing 787-8 registered as VT-ANB[398] operating from Ahmedabad Airport to London Gatwick Airport, crashed into the hostel building of B. J. Medical College shortly after takeoff. According to the preliminary Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau report released on July 8, 2025, the crash was caused by both engines shutting down after their fuel control switches moved from the "RUN" to "CUTOFF" position.[399]: 13–14 The cause of the switch movement remains under investigation. The report did not recommend any actions to Boeing, or 787 operators.[400][399]: 15 All but one of the 242 people on board were killed, as well as 19 people on the ground.[401] The sole survivor was a British national "

by hulitu

6/4/2026 at 5:46:05 PM

That has not been determined to have been an engineering defect.

by HeyLaughingBoy

6/4/2026 at 8:38:58 PM

Fun fact: Neither of the 737 Max 8 MCAS crashes were determined to be an engineering defect either.

by Bratmon

6/4/2026 at 11:35:58 PM

Neither of those were caused by moving both fuel control switches to “off” during takeoff.

by adampunk

6/4/2026 at 4:16:52 PM

This and we don't know yet what happened. It could have structurally collapsed - very unlikely, it could have uncommanded retracted, or maintenance has overridden the protections. I'd place my bets on #3, handling error in maintenance mode.

by dust42

6/5/2026 at 12:13:13 AM

It's mostly, but not entirely, a combination of biases working in a feedback loop. Because of the 737 MAX crashes, which were legitimately at least partially Boeing's fault, stories about incidents involving Boeing planes are more likely to get covered in the media and become popular on social media, essentially selection bias. Confirmation bias means both the media and readers are more likely to view it the new story as Boeing's fault whether or not that's accurate, and this first impression becomes solidified in peoples' minds, anchoring bias.

This is very important because aircraft accident investigations take time and few aviation incidents generate enough attention that there is much if any follow up once the full cause is known. This first impression is what people remember the next time there is a Boeing story, further strengthening the confirmation bias. It's a self reinforcing feedback loop.

Which is not to say that Boeing doesn't deserve some bad press. The MAX story, the door plug blowout, and some others are legitimate evidence of issues at Boeing. But the bias feedback loop ensures that every Boeing story is treated that way, significantly distorting the reality of the issue.

by rainsford

6/4/2026 at 4:28:14 PM

The 1997 McDonnell Douglas acquisition led to their arrogant management culture replacing Boeing's, represented symbolically by the reference to The Economist cover September 10th-16th 1994 of camels fucking.

There have been many other safety defects and scandals swept under the rug, but they rarely make the news because they're detailed and complicated and corporate "news" isn't interested. Also, US presidents have defended them and US regulators run PR interference for them too.

The biggest one is the fact that unknowable 737 NG -6xx/-7xx/-8xx/-9xx structural fuselage elements including bear straps manufactured grossly out of spec by subcontractor Ducommun, declared "airworthy", and pounded into place on the Boeing fuselage assembly line on orders of management present greater risks of fuselage breakup during severe turbulence, runway overruns, and hard landings. There have already been fuselage breakups of NG airframes that 737 Classic aircraft survived more intact in similar circumstances. Most worryingly, there has been extensive retaliation against whistleblowers.

https://christinenegroni.com/boeing-workers-warn-of-737-ng-s...

by burnt-resistor

6/4/2026 at 4:07:48 PM

Confirmation bias, instant communication, hyper focus on Boeing mishaps, etc.

by timw4mail

6/4/2026 at 4:36:01 PM

"If it's Boeing, we ain't goin'"

by vr46

6/4/2026 at 4:04:23 PM

[dead]

by onetokeoverthe

6/4/2026 at 6:21:19 PM

I used to bring up issues in good faith regarding Boeing because it needs to improve. But it seems like HN is taking out anti-Americanism sentiment and a bit of Euro pro-Airbus, so I kinda stopped because it went from productive to attempts to create a false narrative.

by _DeadFred_

6/4/2026 at 4:06:36 PM

The only reason boeing exists today is because they've paid off Trump

by sourcegrift

6/4/2026 at 4:10:33 PM

[dead]

by redsocksfan45

6/4/2026 at 4:15:46 PM

I don't understand how that caused several injuries among a pretty small group (staff)?

Google says front wheel is about 1.68m. High but not crazy high. Plane body and people fall at same speed and it would be slower than actual freefall since the plane is vaguely balance-ish on rear wheels

I'm sure the reporting is right but feels counterintuitive to me

by Havoc

6/4/2026 at 4:25:31 PM

My uneducated guess is that crew members in the back galley could have been injured by unsecured items they were loading falling or sliding. The service cart itself is 200-250 lbs. With the rear galley accelerating upward, then a sudden halt to the acceleration when the front nose impacts the ground, I could imagine the cart lifting off the ground and landing on feet or legs. Or putting the cart aside, other items such as drink cans, galley appliances, etc. falling from cabinets or counters could cause injury

by connorbrinton

6/4/2026 at 6:36:21 PM

I have relatives that work in the industry. There's liability reasons why staff regularly get taken to a hospital and evaluated, for the most minor things. If it were full of passengers boarding, there'd likely be more staff injuries reported than passenger injuries, despite the latter group being an order of magnitude larger.

by dlcarrier

6/4/2026 at 4:17:26 PM

If you are inside the cabin and not expecting, would be sliding down quite a bit.

by root-parent

6/4/2026 at 4:27:30 PM

+1. And honestly you can injure yourself pretty badly by just falling down. Especially if you’re a bit older.

by Insanity

6/4/2026 at 6:15:31 PM

A ground level fall can be fatal for a senior. Throw in freak accident factors and other vulnerable demographics it's not very surprising to me.

by bgirard

6/4/2026 at 8:17:02 PM

There may have also been additional ground crew on board the plane for changeover duties (cleaners, catering staff, etc)

by pimlottc

6/4/2026 at 4:26:44 PM

Because the tow guy called in the problem 10min prior and the mechanics were clustered around it deciding it it was a "get a new plane" sized problem and they did something and dropped it or whatever. Someone's hand got mashed, someone got bonked on the head and the boss spilled his coffee. Meanwhile inside the cabin whoever was febreezing vomit off the wall of the bathroom reached out to grab anything that was nearby when the plane lurched which turned out to be his coworker's ass and the fake nail grazed his eye when he got slapped for that. Some asshole manager probably slipped and fell rushing to chew them all out. And another guy got a bloody nose when he crashed his baggage tractor into a parked forklift at at 3mph because he was watching the whole deal rather than where he was going but he didn't report that one so he's not included in the total.

Yeah I'm pulling all that out my ass but I bet I'm closer than anyone around here wants me to be. However mundane and stupid you think ground ops are at an airport triple that and you'll be in the ballpark.

by cucumber3732842

6/4/2026 at 4:29:27 PM

Yep. My brother was ground ops at Stansted. Knocked himself out cold falling over a traffic cone he just put out.

He's now an estate agent. Must have been the concussion.

by cryo32

6/4/2026 at 4:09:32 PM

Given that it's their turf, is it reasonable to consider sabotage by an Airbus-affiliated entity?

by focusgroup0

6/4/2026 at 4:13:40 PM

It was the same sniper that blew up that Starship

by heyitsguay

6/4/2026 at 4:24:41 PM

And New Glenn. This guy gets around!

by creaturemachine

6/4/2026 at 4:37:27 PM

"reasonable"...

How insane do you want to sound?

"Yeah, let's sabotage a competitor's plane, I'm sure it won't cause a major scandal and millions of dollars of lawsuits if one of them falls out of the sky and kills ~300 people, and they caught us as the cause...".

What the hell dictionary are you using where you're asking if the word "reasonable" could apply to this idea? Is your hovercraft full of eels?

by netsharc

6/4/2026 at 4:37:10 PM

About as likely as the repairman getting lost in Frankfurt Airport

by vr46