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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

#241

Post by Sakos »

ornornor wrote: post #232
jrockway wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Airlines are almost "lucky" in the sense that when they mess up training and processes, people die. As a result, they are somewhat motivated to fix it. In other industries, we say "that didn't work, VCs, can I have another $2M" and are just told "yup, of course!" As a result, we learn slow. Personally, I stole checklists from aviation and love it. I remember one week I was on vacation and we needed to do a complicate…

What do you use to create, update, and recall your checklists?

Other checklists? It's checklists all the way down

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

#242

Post by pfdietz »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #212
abofh wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. 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…

This is illustrated by another thing discussed on the UA 232 wikipedia page.

There were some "lap children" on the flight, some of whom died in the crash. So it was proposed that all children be in their own seats on commercial flights. This regulation was in place for less than a decade before being revoked. The reason? Economists estimated that because this would raise the cost of a family flying, it would encourage some to drive instead of flying -- and for every 1 life saved by the regulation, it would cost 60 lives due to the much more dangerous driving.

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

#243

Post by p_l »

brookst wrote: post #192
1jbdg wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like there is a lot of criticism of the FAA while ignoring real time cuts to their budget. Looking at 2005 they had 14bn, 22.5bn in today’s money. Last years budget was 18.5bn. I am sure there is waste and opportunities for improvement but… that ignores the significant increase in flights, new planes etc. that has ballooned much faster than the crude time value of money calc above. Criticising them for doing le…

We should separate two propositions: 1) whether or not the operations of the agency are too weighted toward ex post facto investigations and therefore, and 2) whether or not the people involved are competent and doing they best they can It’s perfectly possible that the FAA has correctly optimized for the constraints they are under and the FAA is not sufficiently effective at delivering its charter.

The outsourcing of some routine operations to manufacturers was a presidential mandate during Bush Jr. administration, to make aviation business more "agile" or something /s

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

#244

Post by pfdietz »

DannyBee wrote: post #7
smcin wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article says it needs to be treated to be aviation-grade, in some Boeing-approved process.

Depending on the alloy, they solution treat it and heat treat it.

Some titanium is subject to repeated vacuum arc remelting (VAR).

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

#245

Post by Retric »

kube-system wrote: post #220
Retric wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In aviation safety investigations, all contributing factors are considered, and there are usually multiple factors involved in any incident. 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 reas…

> was to refute the above idea that the engine defect was not the root cause

You misunderstand what a root cause is. An accident has multiple root causes in the swiss cheese model.

Each process update is supposed to address a root cause.

This is separate from contributing factors. IE: It happened at night.

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

#246

Post by [deleted] »

codedokode wrote: post #229
tim333 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not exactly counterfeit parts. It's that the paperwork for the titanium supplied wasn't right. So I guess it could be ok titanium with just bad paperwork rather than bad titanium. Also I guess it costs a lot to change.

If the material was good, they would not need to make fake documents, right? Either it is low quality, or it is high quality, but from Russia.

[deleted]

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

#247

Post by filleduchaos »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #225
filleduchaos wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Titanium is an elemental metal. You don't "manufacture" it so much as extract it, and like any other metal it has clear, known, rather easily testable qualities. So do its alloys. The analogy didn't just not "really work well", it made zero sense. Like, in the first place a counterfeit of anything has to actually pass for the thing , and haggis most certainly does not pass as a croissant.

> Titanium is an elemental metal. You don't "manufacture" it so much as extract it, and like any other metal it has clear, known, rather easily testable qualities. So do its alloys. You manufacture pieces, and you do so in very specific ways. This wasn't just a pile of titanium in a box. Scraps don't need the same kind of certificates. > The analogy didn't just not "really work well", it made zero sense. Like, in the…

> This wasn't just a pile of titanium in a box. Scraps don't need the same kind of certificates.

Precisely, and that's why I compared it to receiving croissants but without any brand name or receipt. You don't know who made the croissants using with what ingredients under what quality control. That doesn't change that they are in fact croissants and not a completely different type of food.

And unlike croissants, it's comparatively quite easy to test the relevant properties of elemental metal and alloys, especially when those are intended to be used in manufacturing (as opposed to decorative pieces like jewelry). In fact, TFA states that the counterfeit titanium in question is currently being tested for its grade and quality.

This isn't even a new or unique thing when it comes to metals. Forged or missing bar codes/certificates are often used to smuggle very much real gold bars that were either stolen, sourced from a country that blocks trading gold with the destination, or have some other reason to be passed under the radar. That there's no proper trail to trace their origin doesn't somehow mean that it's not feasible to determine whether they are actually gold (and what grade of gold they are) or counterfeit bars made from other metals.

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

#248

Post by throwaway7ahgb »

nnurmanov wrote: post #231
iancmceachern wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus one for checklists. Checklists are secret sauce

We call them procedures, if you don’t have written step by step procedures with rollback steps, you are not supposed to do any production stuff

We call them runbooks. In SRE good practices, they are required for all actionable alerts.

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

#250

Post by dghlsakjg »

pfdietz wrote: post #242
pavel_lishin wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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…

This is illustrated by another thing discussed on the UA 232 wikipedia page. There were some "lap children" on the flight, some of whom died in the crash. So it was proposed that all children be in their own seats on commercial flights. This regulation was in place for less than a decade before being revoked. The reason? Economists estimated that because this would raise the cost of a family flying, it would encourag…

I hear this story all the time, but would love to see a source. The FAA takes flight safety seriously, but one thing they famously don’t do is listen to outside expertise. Anyone vaguely familiar with their medical approval process can tell you that.
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