https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232
The accident wasn't total only because of magnificent actions of the flight crew.
For further reading, https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/fields-of-fortune-the-cr...
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.That doesn't mean what I'd assumed it would by mean just looking at the term.
This was a very Canadian accident, in that they ran out of fuel halfway through their cross-country flight because of (in the end) conversion errors in calculating the required fuel amount for the then-new metric 767. Canada was still in the conversion process from imperial to metric, and the airline industry was a relative latecomer to that change.
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.
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?"
Though buying from a relatively little known Chinese vendor without thorough testing on your own seems a bit reckless.
[1]: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/aluminum-extrusion-manufactur...
[2]: https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-nasa-metals-fraud-201...
> Spirit is trying to determine where the titanium came from, whether it meets proper standards despite its phony documentation, and whether the parts made from the material are structurally sound enough to hold up through the projected life spans of the jets, company officials said. Spirit said it was trying to determine the most efficient way to remove and replace the affected parts if that ended up being necessary.
I worked in a turbine engine component repair shop for 8 years. We had an NDT inspector fall asleep a lot in his booth and miss cracks. I’m pretty sure they ended up firing him. But maybe not as quick as they should have.
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.
https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/...
Why are they even considering keeping the counterfeit parts in?
Is the situation that Spirit AeroSystems believes the eventual answer will be that the aircraft can't be used with known-counterfeit parts, but they're dancing around liability or PR, or they don't want to grandstand upon their customers' toes?
I talked with a business man who said that the Chinese would absolutely perform to contract but no more. Early samples would be excellent, full production would be exactly and only what you asked for. Almost malicious compliance.
I talked with a Chinese salesperson who said they always signed contracts with foreigners using their English name. Such contracts are unenforceable. Almost malicious compliance.
It's hard for me to have sympathy for complaining about people doing the least they can when you're trying to pay the least you can.
Heh, they're the good guys in this story apparently.
Not sure if you came up with that line but it's gold.
-- 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?
https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/...
e.g.:
> In tempering steel or iron, apply too much heat, so that the resulting bars and ingots are of poor quality.
> Mix good parts with unusable scrap and rejected parts.
> Misfile essential documents.
The FAA is constantly auditing, certifying and testing airmen, airplanes and plants. They have their hands full. But it's totally incorrect to say they're an ex post facto investigations agency.
Are they?
Much of the work that would be done to inspect and certify the planes being manufactured was outsourced to the manufacturers to increase efficiency.
They build their planes, inspect their planes, inspect and approve modifications and major repairs to their planes, and issue their own airworthiness certificates for their planes.
For a long while, the FAA was barely even involved in rubber stamping whoever Boeing et al appointed as FAA inspectors at their plants, never mind inspecting and certifying the planes themselves—in 2016 the Transportation Department said more than 85% of the tasks associated with certification were delegated from the FAA to the manufacturer’s own inspectors. By 2018, the FAA said that Boeing was handling 96% of the certification process.
There were some reforms around 2021 (737 MAX crashes were 2018 and 2019), but they were mostly focused on improving the self inspection program, not solving the fundamental problem of having companies certify their own work.
> But it's totally incorrect to say they're an ex post facto investigations agency.
While the inspections and certifications have been delegated by the FAA and _technically_ are still done in the name of the FAA, the reality certainly looks much more like the FAA proper is only involved _after_ significant safety issues.
I really don’t think it’s quite as clear cut as you make it out to be.
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 less with, umm, less seems a bit rich. Especially as others (not necessarily you in this comment) then use that a reason for more cuts to agencies.
They usually make sure the paperwork is in order. Less likely that they make sure the paperwork is actually correct, and vastly less likely that they make sure that the actual things happening in the shop are correctly done.
I worked in an FAA repair station that repaired commercial jet engine parts. We always got the same FAA inspector every year. We never seemed nervous when he would show up.
The only auditor that seemed to really be digging to find stuff was the GE financial auditor to make sure they were getting their repair royalties.
Oh and one time an auditor for an airline snuck in and stole one of his airline’s parts, or something like that. He was making the point that we had zero access control and literally anyone could just walk into the building.
They should really start testing the employees. It doesn’t matter what the paperwork says if the employees are incompetent.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/11/airplane-maintenance...
It's not really feasible to fake something like a raw metal. Nothing else looks like titanium, nothing has the weight properties, even things like smells are different between metals that come out of different processes and tarnish in different ways. Basically by the time you got something that wouldn't be noticed by the assembly crews you'd have spent so much you might as well just have bought stolen titanium on the black market.
No one is trying to pass aluminum or steel as titanium.
It's pretty straightforward to pass one titanium alloy as another, or claim provenance or material properties it doesn't have. I have two indistinguishable scrap pieces on my desk right now, one Grade 5 and one Grade 2. It's also possible to pass a billet or sheet of alloy with defects or poor quality control, voids, or inclusions. "Titanium" is a broad class of materials that are indistinguishable without exotic tools like XRF guns, or, in this case, a well documented and trusted supply chain.
Alloy substitutions and similar fraud happen all the time. It can even be the same alloy but have issues in post treatment and not meet spec. Here's a case where a NASA supplier was committing this fraud for over 20 years. It included fraudulent documentation, but the material itself was not up to spec:
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-supplier-was-delivering-fault...
Sure, but per my actual point: characterizing the wrong alloy as "counterfeit titanium" is misleading, no? If I hand you a nickel when you expected a quarter, did I give you "counterfeit money"? No, I gave you the wrong thing.
Cheating on material provenance is fraud. It's not "counterfeiting", and for a journalist to claim so is misleading spin. A counterfeit is something deliberately constructed in imitation of something else, it's not just a low grade substitute.
Imagine the rabbis at Hebrew National were out sick, but Hebrew National continued churning out “Kosher hotdogs” that hadn’t been properly vetted.
Sure it’s still a hotdog made with kosher ingredients. But it’s a major violation of trust. And trust is what consumers expect when flying.
But what if the lower grade substitute was specifically produced with the goal in mind of passing it off as this other kind?
Now, it could be ersatz titanium, except that the article specifically says that it isn't:
> 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.”
and
> Boeing said in an emailed statement: "This industry-wide issue affects some shipments of titanium received by a limited set of suppliers, and tests performed to date have indicated that the correct titanium alloy was used."
I agree with a sibling comment that this is probably about evading sanctions on Russian titanium, which is produced in such quantity that the US obtained it through intermediaries to build the SR-71 Blackbird.
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.
> 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.
Russia is what, third on the list of countries by titanium production? [0] Japan produces more. China produces quite a lot more. It should not be -that- hard to avoid using Russian titanium.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanium_production_by_country
Which they might do, if sanctions meant that the titanium was cheaper, and they could pocket the difference.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/boeing-air...
Metals come in various grades. That comes down to chemical purity, in case of commercially pure, and consistency, in case of alloys. But also crystal structure of the metal.
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.
Outside of medical usage I think most commercial use of "titanium" is actually titanium alloys.
I'm sure I read somewhere there's over 50 commercial grades so substituting one for another close but cheaper grade with forged paperwork is very plausible.
Clearly they are ordering this stuff on aliexpress!
I've glanced the article but didn't figure out the source.
Further traceability goes back into the parts inventory, where I'm not sure of the commingling requirements on something like screws, but (eg) brake pads would almost certainly be traceable to the supplier and then manufacturer.
https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fdisciples...
Are you kidding? I doubt there is a single industry which empathizes traceability more than aerospace.
He’s not kidding - just ignorant. Another long running comment on HN where folks think every other industry is as fucked as tech.
Your comment would be like the equivalent in computer science of saying "Why do you need to write a computer program; the computer either works or it doesn't..."
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09215...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal-induced_embrittlement
The carbon is an important part of the final material but it’s not really comparable.
Trying to back out what you actually have (if you don't trust the supply chain) can be expensive metallurgical analysis involving destructive testing, spectrometers, and electron microscopes.
The real way industry solves this problem is mill test reports produced by the suppliers and careful documentation of chain-of-custody.
Unless you don't care, then you just buy whatever from China and pretend you trust the counterfeit documentation that comes with it.
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 was destructively tested, then etched and examined with a metallurgical microscope. This level of inspection is achieved by every ASME BPVC VIII compliant fab shop in the US and Canada; many of which are very, very small.
Boeing is outright negligent here if they didn't qualify their parts.
I cannot imagine (I say hopefully) that there is not some level of testing here, but I wonder if they were relying on supplier testing and the authenticity of that. But in that case I would also assume that there would be some source inspection of the supplier. These might all be bad assumptions, unfortunately, but this is coming from my experience working in aerospace on the space side of things.
This seems to be about this titan: «Boeing and Airbus both said their tests of affected materials so far had shown no signs of problems.» I read this as implying that Airbus has been buying other things from the same source and done its own tests on samples: «“Numerous tests have been performed on parts coming from the same source of supply,” an Airbus spokeswoman said…»
Is the documentation process expensive enough that it's worth faking it even when the tested material is OK? Weird if so.
You can't prove the material is good, you can only trust that the material is good, and 50 years later observe how it held up.
You can't find out the distribution of the alloy ingredients, or detect voids, or crystal structures, or traces of other elements, except by sawing the part in half and looking at the cut surface.
You can't find out the critical properties by looking at it. All you can do is be sure you know the full truth of the history of the material and the part. You only know that if a certain recipe is followed, then the material will be good. You have to trust that the supplier did do the recipe exactly as specified. You can't look at the part after the fact and tell that. Even stress testing to failure doesn't tell you that because the material may pass the test today but fail from fatigue over time.
The only empirical test is actual use in actual conditions for the full actual time.
You can accelerate some tests, and failing an accelerated test obviously proves the material was bad, but it doesn't go the other way. Passing an accelerated test does not prove that the material is good for actual use in actual conditions for the full normal time.
The end of the article has it right, if the parts seem ok from what testing is possible, then they are probably ok for this minute, and it's probably good enough to just replace them at the first opportunity during routine maintenance.
Answer II: In theory, the headline should have said something like "Components which had falsified documentation to assert that they fully complied with Aerospace Engineering Specifications [long list of cryptic technical specification codes here] for Titanium...". But, outside of Ph.D.-authored articles in the (fake name) Journal of Aerospace Engineering Research, that's not how mass-market modern journalism works.
Side note: some things never change. Here's an ancient tablet, From someone complaining about the quality of copper they were sold.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%...
If you want an easily accessible intro to how metal treatment affects it's material properties go watch Forged in Fire. It is a blacksmithing game show where they make knives/swords but they go in to some of the reasons on why heating/cooling/forging metal in different ways can affect the structure of the metal and the strength of it with the exact same materials.
That looks like a binary split (All SWEs think in binary) therefore you are a SWE and should answer your own question.
2. Easiest, most accessible testing method is scratching it on tile or glass. When scratched against glass (or ceramic tile), steel will probably leave a real scratch, aluminum will do nothing, titanium will leave a pencil-like line.
[0] - https://youtu.be/GnSBSKTC834?t=504 - not super happy with this video for a quick overview to provide to people, but this timestamp does cover this specific discussion; if I find a different video that covers the differences more broadly, I'll link it here.
Conveniently, modern businesses and their leaders are judged and rewarded purely on short-term metrics.
I agree that it's a little bonkers that Boeing spun off it's own aerostructures, but since it seems like Boeing has it's own problems with internal fraudulent inspection reports, this sure doesn't seem like an out sourcing problem per-se.
Buying from an untrusted source without any verification of your own in place.
> Buying your titanium from a titanium supplier?
For all we know they bought it on wish.com.
> Is Spirit supposed to be refine and foundry all their own metal alloys?
Random sampling of materials to determine if the delivery is fit for purpose should be the absolute minimum.
The parent is blaming quality control steps of outsourced materials at Boeing (not third party).
"Outsourcing = bad" is missing the point.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/11/airplane-maintenance...
This is just hillbilly mom-and-pop bullshit.
Outsourcing is mandatory if you are a company in aerospace. How would you even start making an airplane without outsourcing?
But, just like that fraud-plagued business environment, scale is what really matters. If you had 10X fewer suppliers, each with 10X fewer second-tiers, and so on down the chain...then how much easier would it be for Purchasing's QC people to stop sub-spec crap from reaching your factory floor?
The retailers job used to be offering the best value to their customers by filtering out the crap that was too cheap or overpriced.
Even ignoring the political question of how things could be changed in practice, I am struggling to imagine ways to align incentives better.
For the division chief who smashed their targets, got a big bonus and a promotion, and used it to jump to a higher-paying role at another company? You better believe it was worth it!
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40679599
So basically, has nothing to do with safety? Is this simply Uncle Sam is mad he couldn't take a dip of the proceeds?
Gives you Haggis.
"Well it's all food so what's the big deal, stop regulating me."
No, because the structural integrity might not be there. A food analogy doesn't really work well, but the effect of mixing up different titanium manufacturing processes could easily be as extreme as having a completely different type of food. But much harder to test for!
FAA should just be rehoused under department of commerce where the job is actually to promote and protect American business interests.
At least then we can admit we have no regulatory oversight of aviation safety. Let’s be honest as a country for once.
