Boeing admits repair faults

Press, 19 September 1985, Page 8

Boeing admits repair faults

NZPA-AP Tokyo The Boeing Commercial Airplane Company had officially notified Japan Air Lines that it had made faulty repairs on a jet that crashed last month, killing all but four of the 524 people aboard, J.A.L. officials said yesterday. A J.A.L. spokesman, Geoffrey Tudor, said that the Seattle-based company had sent a telexed reply on Tuesday to J.A.L.’s queries about the repairs. J.A.L. had questioned Boeing after it said earlier in the month, without notifying J.A.L., that its repairs made to the plane’s aft pressure bulkhead after an accident in 1978 had been faulty. The same Boeing 7475 R plane crashed on August 12 into a remote mountainside north-west of Tokyo in aviation history’s worst singleplane disaster. After the aircraft scraped the runway in a landing mishap Boeing technicians replaced half of the damaged aft bulkhead that separates the pressurised cabin from the unpressurised tail cone. Boeing said in a statement made from Seattle that it had improperly riveted one of the three rows, or about 17 per cent of the riveting, along the seam in the umbrellashaped barrier after the accident in 1978. In the letter to J.A.L., Boeing apologised for failing to notify J.A.L. at the time of the announcement, but cited such reasons as time difference between Tokyo and Seattle and the fact that the announcement had been made on a week-