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FAA investigating how counterfeit titanium got into Boeing and Airbus jets

nytimes.com

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Re: FAA investigating how counterfeit titanium got into Boeing and Airbus jets

#121

Post by janalsncm »

bell-cot wrote: post #2

However much you can "save" by outsourcing...in a sufficiently fraud-plagued business environment, it's seldom worth it longer-term. Conveniently, modern businesses and their leaders are judged and rewarded purely on short-term metrics.

It’s one of the things that’s fundamentally broken in our economic algorithm. There is genuine innovation, and then there is simply borrowing against the future. It’s really hard to tell the difference, and even if you can, the market can still behave irrationally.

Even ignoring the political question of how things could be changed in practice, I am struggling to imagine ways to align incentives better.

Re: FAA investigating how counterfeit titanium got into Boeing and Airbus jets

#122

Post by Jtsummers »

samatman wrote: post #118
ajross wrote: post #101

The headline is spun. The text of the article doesn't allege "counterfeit titanium", only that the paperwork chain contains (according I guess to an audit done internally at Spirit) counterfeit documents . What that says about the metal itself is unknown. It seems more likely to me to be legitimate but stolen titanium than it does to be fake material. It's not really feasible to fake something like a raw metal. Nothi…

Yes, this is clearly the case. The phrase "counterfeit titanium" doesn't even make sense, because something counterfeit has the wrong provenance, and the provenance of an alloy or element isn't a meaningful property. You could say "counterfeit Krugerrands", but "counterfeit gold" doesn't make sense. Now, it could be ersatz titanium, except that the article specifically says that it isn't: > Spirit added that “more th…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40679599 - NYT article and discussion, archive link at the top

> It's also possible that these are counterfeit titanium parts, as in, real titanium, but not from the source that the documents claim. The article doesn't make that clear one way or the other.

The parts were made by Spirit (so not counterfeit) using the "counterfeit" titanium. Both articles are discussing the provenance of the titanium used by Spirit (and others, but this article focuses on Spirit), not the provenance of parts made of titanium.

Re: FAA investigating how counterfeit titanium got into Boeing and Airbus jets

#123

Post by hinkley »

dr_orpheus wrote: post #116
albrewer wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> expensive metallurgical analysis involving destructive testing, spectrometers, and electron microscopes I used to work in a pressure vessel fabrication shop (for customers like Shell and Exxon). We had a few handheld mass spectrometers for exactly this purpose. Destructive testing was achieved with what we called a "coupon", a piece of metal that ostensibly went through every treatment the base part did. The coupon…

The article mentions that the CoC may have been falsified, but I also wonder if part of this is they had falsified coupon testing/inspection documentation (or likely pulled a "good" coupon test and said it was for that batch). They definitely did not test any coupons after receipt though since the testing by Spirit after the fact confirmed that "the material passed some of the materials testing performed on it but fa…

CoC -> Chain of Custody for those out of the loop.

That’s how you make sure Honeywell actually made this particular part, that your QA signed off on it, and that this particular one was used for stress tests and thus must never, ever end up in the spare parts bin.

Re: FAA investigating how counterfeit titanium got into Boeing and Airbus jets

#125

Post by loeg »

ajross wrote: post #107
nickff wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also possible that they're using an alloy which is not easily detected, or that the titanium is in a part which was painted or otherwise coated before receipt by Spirit

> an alloy which is not easily detected Seems implausible. Again, Ti is way out on the edge of properties, being intermediate between steel and aluminum in weight and stiffer than either. That alloy would be a pretty novel thing, and novel metallurgy is more expensive than the hot Titanium someone stole from a bomber graveyard in Siberia.

Titanium isn't stiffer than steel. It's around half as stiff. It is also about half as dense, so the strength-for-weight is somewhat better. But you need more of it to achieve the same strength.

Re: FAA investigating how counterfeit titanium got into Boeing and Airbus jets

#126

Post by dr_orpheus »

Animats wrote: post #109
mk_stjames wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you hear 'Titanium' mentioned in an engineering sense, rarely is this a reference to elemental titanium alone; structures use alloys of titanium which means small percentages of other metals are added (aluminum and vanadium for example are the two principle alloying metals in Grade 5 titanium, 6AL4V, probably the most common in aerosapce applications), and then the wrought products are even further processed thr…

Titanium is metallurgy on hard mode.[1] Iron and steel behave in a much more consistent way. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09215...

And even after you get past the manufacturing, titanium also seems to have some weird corner cases. I learned recently about metal induced embrittlement of titanium [0]. The Wikipedia article mentioned cadmium embrittlement of titanium, but is also possible with copper and silver. So if you have a silver plated washer pressed in to titanium it can cause issues.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal-induced_embrittlement

Re: FAA investigating how counterfeit titanium got into Boeing and Airbus jets

#127

Post by exabrial »

> Spirit added that “more than 1,000 tests have been completed to confirm the mechanical and metallurgical properties of the affected material to ensure continued airworthiness.”

So basically, has nothing to do with safety? Is this simply Uncle Sam is mad he couldn't take a dip of the proceeds?

Re: FAA investigating how counterfeit titanium got into Boeing and Airbus jets

#128

Post by throwaway9143 »

exabrial wrote: post #127

> Spirit added that “more than 1,000 tests have been completed to confirm the mechanical and metallurgical properties of the affected material to ensure continued airworthiness.” So basically, has nothing to do with safety? Is this simply Uncle Sam is mad he couldn't take a dip of the proceeds?

"I'm selling croissants."

Gives you Haggis.

"Well it's all food so what's the big deal, stop regulating me."

Re: FAA investigating how counterfeit titanium got into Boeing and Airbus jets

#130

Post by refulgentis »

kylehotchkiss wrote: post #129

[flagged]

This has nothing to do with anything in the article, or related material, it was China. and even if it did, is oddly flippant and fallacious, it's not sourcing that's the issue, it's the fake titanium.
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