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A famous crash caused by a hidden defect in titanium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232 The accident wasn't total only because of magnificent actions of the flight crew.
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Reminds me of the Gimli Glider, and the incredible coincidence of having an experienced glider pilot as the Captain of that flight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider
You hear about the coincidences that work out, you're unlikely to hear about the pilot who was a professional glider who landed his regular flight at Dulles. Thousands of planes in the air every day, that one with engine failure has a pilot who practices without engines isn't surprising. I'd be more surprised if he was a skilled mechanic who repaired the engine in situ.
But it's also amazing just how few fatal air crashes there are! I know that the FAA is pretty incredible at their job, but there just aren't that many incidents of planes going down and killing everyone on board - and out of those few bad incidents, having two where everything lined up perfectly feelsl weird!
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Unfortunately it's not enough for it to just be titanium. A hard alpha inclusion in an ingot used to make turbine blades was the root cause of the deaths of 112 people aboard United Airlines 232.
I disagree. Poor design leading to the loss of all flight control surfaces in the event of an uncontained engine failure is what led to their deaths.
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I disagree. Poor design leading to the loss of all flight control surfaces in the event of an uncontained engine failure is what led to their deaths.
I said the root cause. There is always more than one factor in an air accident. But if the ingot hadn't had an inclusion, none of the other factors would've mattered.
A famous crash caused by a hidden defect in titanium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232 The accident wasn't total only because of magnificent actions of the flight crew.
Sioux City Approach: "United Two Thirty-Two Heavy, the wind's currently three six zero at one one; three sixty at eleven. You're cleared to land on any runway."
Haynes: "[laughter] Roger. [laughter] You want to be particular and make it a runway, huh?"
How the fuck do you counterfeit titanium it’s one of those things that is either or it’s not.
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…
The carbon is an important part of the final material but it’s not really comparable.
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There is a concept of a “moral minimum” where having a regulation might produce worse work than if the regulation didn’t exist, because companies will frequently work up to the minimum required by law and no more.
This strikes me as an extremely weak argument for removing regulation. Like yea that's a nice thought if you already believe in efficacy of private organizations, but on the other hand trust in any organization goes out the window the second a profit motivation is introduced.
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This blurb from the wiki stood out to me Despite the fatalities, the accident is considered a good example of successful crew resource management. A majority of those aboard survived; experienced test pilots in simulators were unable to reproduce a survivable landing. It has been termed "The Impossible Landing" as it is considered one of the most impressive landings ever performed in the history of aviation.
> crew resource management That doesn't mean what I'd assumed it would by mean just looking at the term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management
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I watched a documentary that said Spirit came when the Boeing bean counters divided up the company to make a quick profit and be able to shift Blake to Spirit. They replaced vertical integration with circular blame.
> They replaced vertical integration with circular blame. Not sure if you came up with that line but it's gold.
The Boeing documentaries I've seen have all been great. It really shows the issues with the Jack Welch model of business that only cares about short term quarterly profits. My father used to complain that every new CEO at his company would first fire a bunch of people to make stock go up even knowing the long term implications would be disastrous. He used to say you could train a monkey to press a button and do that. In the case of Boeing, they used to have an engineering culture that prized innovation and safety. Now they don't even know how to make planes anymore from scratch. All they seem to be capable of is modifying existing designs that are now practically ancient. In my eyes it's like having to do a 5000 mile car race and using a bunch of NOS at the beginning. You get ahead of everyone and then blow out the engine and everyone ends up getting way ahead (ok, I don't know much about cars). It's just overly short term thinking.
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> The National Transportation Safety Board determines that the probable cause of this accident was the inadequate consideration given to human factors limitations 1n the inspection and quality control procedures used by United Airlines' engine overhaul facility which resulted in the failure to detect a fatigue crack originating from a previously undetected metallurgical defect located in a critical area of the stage…
Cropping the cause is misleading, this is all under cause: > determines that the probable cause of this accident … Aircraft Engines. The subsequent catastrophic disintegration of the disk resulted in the liberation of debris in a pattern of distribution and with energy levels that exceeded the level of protection provided by design features of the hydraulic systems that operate the DC-10's flight controls. Under reco…
My purpose of quoting that wasn't to be a wholly inclusive description of the situation (that's what the full report is for), it was to refute the above idea that engine defect was not the root cause.
> So calling this a design issue rather than an inspection issue is quite reasonable. Inspections are guaranteed to eventually fail, the aircraft being 100% dependent on them is a recipe for future disasters.
Likewise, we don't just require "good designs" instead of inspections, because even a "good design" will experience failures. In the swiss-cheese model of safety, all of the slices are important. In this case, the inspection was the first failed slice.