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Boeing Dreamliner Safety Concerns Are Specious
SoyChemist writes in to note his article at Wired Science on the uproar Dan Rather has stirred up with his claim that Boeing's new 787 Dreamliner aircraft may be unsafe. "Dozens of news agencies have jumped on the bandwagon. Most of them are reporting that the carbon fiber frame may not be as sturdy as aluminum. Few have bothered to question Rather's claims that the composite materials are brittle, more likely to shatter on impact, and prone to emit poisonous chemicals when ignited. While there is a lot of weight behind the argument that composite materials are not as well-studied as aircraft aluminum, the reasoning behind the flurry of recent articles may be faulty. The very title of Rather's story, Plastic Planes, indicates a lack of grounding in science. Perhaps the greatest concern should be how well the plane will hold up to water. Because they are vulnerable to slow and steady degradation by moisture, the new materials may not last as long as aluminum. Testing them for wear and tear will be more difficult too."
...Dan Rather is making good use of his PH. D.'s in Materials Science and Molecular Chemistry when he says these things.
Really, Dan is just cranky after being outed by CBS for his lack of thorough background information checking, so he's taking it out on Boeing, probably because he had to wait for a flight at JFK.
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You've got the sequence out of order. The guy gets canned for acting like a racist prick, then he pulls these "safety concerns" out of his ass.
Completely wrong.
Weldon is a seasoned veteran with decades of experience and was the senior engineer for composites, and was the pioneer in this field who developed and brought composite aeronautical structure technology to the forefront. He was raising many valid concerns for a very long time because of the way they were trying to cheapen the project against the safety principles he and his teams had established over the years of composite R&D, and voicing them to a management who did not only not want to hear these concerns, but wanted to totally quash them. Knowing Weldon for all these years, they knew that if they deliberately placed someone over him as his new supervisor who was instructed to torment and taunt him they could push him over the edge, especially to provoke a racial outburst from him (he probably does have more than a wee bit of racism in his personality), that they could easily give him enough rope to hang himself and provide a reason to fire him and make it look like he is a complete kook. Large corporations have experts on staff who carefully and craftily develop and implement such schemes... especially if they want to drive away older, well established employees who otherwise would be getting a large retirement or pension if they are allowed to retire normally after decades of service to the company. Most of these "experts" have extensive formal training as both attorneys and psychologists, so that they know exactly how to "push someone's buttons" and get away with it. I ought to know, I am one of these "experts" and I am a ruthless son of a bitch.