I used to work maintaining aircraft - both heavy maintenance and fixing snags - before moving over to pushing papers around.
Oh for Pete's sake, this is ridiculous.
FOD in the fuel tanks is not a serious problem and happens a LOT given how they are sealed and what it takes to actually work inside them. Then there are the thousands of pounds of fuel that flow through them that can often carries junk too. There are fuel filters, screens and all kinds of protections in place.
No. It isn't ridiculous - not if you want to maintain safety in the air and scheduled flights. What happens if a boot cover - for example - wraps itself around an intake filter and blocks it? If the fuel system in the Boeings are made on the same principles that the fuel systems I've worked with, that means the system will detect a blockage (pressure drop) and open a bypass valve - the assumption being that unfiltered fuel is better for the engine than no fuel, especially when airborne. Which in the case of large debris means that foreign objects can and will get into the fuel pumps, engine fuel controllers and so on... might not kill the engine outright, but will generate extra maintenance, costs and delays. So FOD in the fuel is a serious matter.
And even if the protections built into the system works 100%, why would you accept eating up your safety margins? Do you neglect using the seat belt in your car since you have air-bags?
FOD is nearly unavoidable and extremely hard to control completely. I'm not saying we shouldn't do better, or that Boeing shouldn't be trying harder to train their workforce and reduce the problem, I'm just saying that finding stuff in fuel tanks, where sealant is regularly scraped off and new materials blobbed on by people working in dark, cramped, awkward and dangerous conditions dressed in hazmat suits isn't a huge hairy deal.
We counted every single tool out of and into the toolbox. We signed things like disposable gloves and boot covers in and out. If we were scraping sealant, we had to present our supervisor with a bag of scrapings, and if he though it was less than it should be he went in to check for loose scrapings himself. Yes, it is dark, cramped and uncomfortable - but that isn't an excuse to do a substandard job.
If anything were missing - be it half a glove, a 3' torque-meter, or anything in between, we stopped work and found it - if necessary opening up hatches and panels that were already signed off and closed. The aircraft didn't leave the maintenance hangar until all tools and equipment were accounted for.
Bashing Boeing for this is crazy talk by folks who don't know anything about the problem or the conditions which Boeing struggles under to control the problem. But I guess, Boeing is the big bad corporate satan, always going for profits over safety, never really caring about their reputation or doing the job right for some of you.
So we are off to the races, bashing the company as bad, when in reality you are really bad mouthing the poor guys and gals who have to don the protection suits, crawl through barely large enough access holes to wiggle their way through a maze dragging a bag of tools and supplies, lying in jet fuel, barely able to see, trying to not pinch off their air supply so they can reach the place where they scrape off the existing blobs of sealant, hopefully recovering all the scraps. Then they blob on new sealant, making sure to get enough on to fix the problems. Then try to reverse the process of getting in, dragging everything they brought in, plus the sealant scraps they scraped off back out.
Yea these folks need to be more careful, but I dare you to try it yourself. It's an extremely difficult job they do, so cut them a bit of slack.
No, people are bashing on Boeing for letting their corporate culture deteriorate to the point where the people who are doing the difficult job - and I've been there - either don't care enough to call a halt when tools and equipment are missing, or don't dare to speak up. Once the main focus becomes getting the airframes of the assembly line and not doing the job right, quality and pride of workmanship deteriorates. The failure is not on the workers; but on their overseers, inspectors, management and bean counters - and this sort of failure can potentially kill a lot of people.
