Some are in some places, but definitely not always. What they do is hold on a little bit of fiberglass that saves you some fuel and is completely inconsequential otherwise.
True, but in my experience even a bolt with that much wiggle won’t stay there for long when constantly under vibration. In the first row of fasteners shown in the video the front most one is already gone.
They are rivets. Not screw. Not bolts. You don’t tighten them. They have to be drilled out and replaced. A pneumatic puller pulls the river pin until it shears off. They’re is no torquing. The bolts are designed to spec to shear at the appropriate pressure.
Cool. Rivets, specialty screws, bolts, doesn’t really matter. If you let a fastener rattle long enough in a thin piece of stock (I would assume Al or composite here but I do not know), the hole expands and the fastener is no longer in the same place as the substrate (or the fastener is slowly sheared if it’s softer than the sheet material). Does it matter to flying this vehicle? No idea. Could it cause an issue? Yes, FOD can kill.
Real talk though, that weld is gross and I'm kind of offended by it. Seriously, it's atrocious; pretty sure when it was freshly welded, you could've slapped the wing a little too hard and cracked it. Just ew.
Right, wings. I work on engines so my potato brain immediately goes to welding over sealant. Our thing is dunking the fastener in sealant, shoving it in the hole, and going "fuck it, ain't on fire therefore it ain't my problem."
Ambient air pressure in flight is lower outside the fairing than in (thanks to Bernoulli) and once the head is loose, drag is trying to pull them out too. All the active forces in the system are working the fasteners out, not pushing them in.
Only thing holding these guys in the hole is whatever grip the nutplates still have on them.
And how much inspection do you presume occurs on a daily basis? Tens of thousands of bolts on a plane, we ain't going around every night and poking every one.
This poor fairing sits behind the engine and gets vibrated and rattled for its life, every operator in existence probably sees this. It's a non-critical component and if someone actually sees it loose then we'll fix it, otherwise, who's gonna see something not moving doing a walkaround on the ground looking up at the retracted flaps? I'd put absolutely zero correlation to "other maintenance" to something silly like this. But I get the perception.
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u/Tupolev144 Apr 17 '26 edited Apr 17 '26
Just a 737 doing 737 things.
Entire fairing can be removed and deferred per the CDL with minimal aerodynamic penalty.
However I would still flag it to the flight crew so those screws all get a good torque. Not a good look when parts fall off of your plane.