Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
FAA investigating how counterfeit titanium got into Boeing and Airbus jets
251–260 of 267 posts
Re: FAA investigating how counterfeit titanium got into Boeing and Airbus jets
#252Earlier 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. 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…
If you get the wrong brand of croissants you can still eat them safely. That's what's different, so different the analogy falls apart.
> 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.
It's not new or unique, but it's especially hard or impossible to test these parts without melting everything down and completely remaking them.
Re: FAA investigating how counterfeit titanium got into Boeing and Airbus jets
#253A 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.
To belabor the point and repeat a bit from Wikipedia, this was bar-none the absolute perfect flight crew possible. A flight crew with over 65000 hours experience and, riding as a passenger, a training pilot with a further 23000 who had specifically practiced this exact failure (total loss of hydraulics) after a lost craft four years prior. For further reading, https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/fields-of-fortune-the…
Astonishing read. Thank you.
Re: FAA investigating how counterfeit titanium got into Boeing and Airbus jets
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
voids and crystal structures can be detected by x-rays and routinely are. you're right that the precise composition of the interior can't be, but the precise composition of the surface can be (spark spectroscopy or xrf, also both routine), and the suspicion is not that spirit made fake parts and thinly plated them with the correct metal; it's that they got fake metal. so i don't think any sawing will be needed
You can only detect gross structures with xrays. It cannot tell you that a material will not be more likely to fail early due to included contaminants, or lack of, or grain structure etc. By interior composition and distribution I'm not talking about anything as comically stupid as plating like the inside is aluminum. The surface of a finished part is routinely intentionally quite different from the interior, ie spin…
i see, thanks! this has been very educational
Re: FAA investigating how counterfeit titanium got into Boeing and Airbus jets
#255Re: FAA investigating how counterfeit titanium got into Boeing and Airbus jets
#256I'm curious if anyone suspects which is the more likely justification for the forged paperwork -- -- is it most likely lower-quality or wrong-quality titanium being passed off in an effort to fraudulently save money? -- or is it probably the real deal, but stolen from a warehouse somewhere and the certificate is fraudulent merely to conceal that it was stolen?
Could just be Russian titanium. They're the #3 producer and probably aren't selling much to the West, these days. Looks like some predates the war, though.
Oh that's interesting too -- yup a black market source is definitely another possibility. Something to avoid sanctions.
Re: FAA investigating how counterfeit titanium got into Boeing and Airbus jets
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious: I assume that the documentation asserts something acceptable about the manufacturer testing (accelerated, destructive, what have you). In theory it could assert that the production process was such and such without any information about resulting quality assurance, but that seems improbable. Why can't those tests be repeated (on samples, obviously)?
What tests? I just told you there are no tests which can actually tell you what you need to know. Even destructive tests. Even if there was a destructive test that actually predicted lifetime performance, the total sample sizes are probably too small for statistics to be valid unless you destroy something like 10% or more. If you only have say 100 of something, a random samling of 1% is too few. 2 or 3 is no better.…
There's a bottle of water on the table next to me. The label says it's... basically official wording for "high quality" and that the source, result and production process was thoroughly tested on a named date, and with a less thorough using continuous testing regime.
I find it difficult to believe that aircraft metal production has less testing. And if not less, then surely that which the manufacturer does can be repeated on a sample by the aircraft company?
Re: FAA investigating how counterfeit titanium got into Boeing and Airbus jets
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
What tests? I just told you there are no tests which can actually tell you what you need to know. Even destructive tests. Even if there was a destructive test that actually predicted lifetime performance, the total sample sizes are probably too small for statistics to be valid unless you destroy something like 10% or more. If you only have say 100 of something, a random samling of 1% is too few. 2 or 3 is no better.…
There's a bottle of water on the table next to me. The label says it's... basically official wording for "high quality" and that the source, result and production process was thoroughly tested on a named date, and with a less thorough using continuous testing regime. I find it difficult to believe that aircraft metal production has less testing. And if not less, then surely that which the manufacturer does can be rep…
There are all kinds of tests you can do, and they do do all those tests of course, and they can tell you a lot, but they can not tell you what kolnowledge of the raw material source and production process tells you. Tests can prove that a part is bad, but can not prove that a part is not bad.
All the xrays and ultrasound and strain guages and spark chromatography in the world don't tell you how a part will perform and develop over time. But prior observation of a parts full lifetime and knowledge of it's production does.
Even destructive examination of random samples aren't sufficient for high stakes items when the total quantity is small.
Find it difficult to believe all you want. Or look into it and then not rely on uneducated lack of credulity to decide if something is bs or not.
When it comes to a chunk of alloy, the only way to trust the end product is to know that you created it according to a known protocol that previously has been shown to produce a certain performance result.
That protocol starts right with where the raw materials were sourced from, and every process they've been subject to along the way.
The only way to really know is if you did it all yourself.
Next best is to have documentation that you have reason to trust, ie, the supplier has a valuable reputation that they wouldn't dare risk all future jobs for the small short term gain from lying about any one job.
In this case, the supplier was a nameless supplier several subcontractor levels deep away from Boeing, and had no such reputation to worry about. The small immediate gain from a single sale was all they were ever after and they got it. Tomorrow they can do the same thing again just fine under a new random name to a new customer. And most customers won't even care because they are making bike parts and camping equipment and gimmik wallets and phone bodies not jet parts.
Re: FAA investigating how counterfeit titanium got into Boeing and Airbus jets
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
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_embrittl…
If I remember correctly, in Ben Rich's book he mentioned that LA's water in the summertime was chlorinated enough that the titanium welds on the early A-12 would sometimes fail because of a chemical reaction they didn't anticipate - they were embrittled because they were flushed with that water, I think?
Re: FAA investigating how counterfeit titanium got into Boeing and Airbus jets
#260Ive often wondered whether poor quality counterfeit parts are being inserted into the supply chain as a form of industrial sabotage by competitors (including nation-states).
If only Ivan was that clever and foresighted what trouble we’d be in