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.
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.
Engineering for failure management, for consistent performance of complex collaborative operations, through team organization, culture, and practices, is... nifty. Aviation, industrial engineering, medicine. An excellent obstetrics team can be breathtaking performance art. An antithesis of Dilbert organizational dysfunction. But wow is the transformation hard - a multi-decade, multi-generational slog. And many industries and professions are still in denial - "we don't have a problem, and anyway, we can't fix it". Decades of work ahead for them. For us.
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 complicated migration. I prepared a checklist for the migration, and someone other than me did it. There was no downtime. We used the same checklists for future migrations, and again, nothing forgotten, nothing missed. It may be obvious to say "landing checklist: gear down" but it's effective.
Checklists are amazing. Humans are really clever, but we're too good at context, and will completely miss steps, especially if the outcome of the previous step is unexpected.
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
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.
It was more confusion. One system was broken, and the alternate was taken out of service. The pilot was then confused because flying with only one sensor was considered acceptable, but he was asking about a both sensors out situation instead. So they did it the old school way with dipsticks, but the conversion formula written on the sheet was wrong because they were in the process of switching. Also, the person who's job it is to get this right didn't exist on the 767 and Air Canada had not finished figuring out how to divvy up the duties when that seat wasn't filled. It's one of those Frogger failures, so many things have to line up just right at this one point in history for the problem to happen. Luckily in this case everyone came out ok.
The fuel gauges were inoperative. Apparently this condition does not ground the plane, however the crew has to maintain awareness of the fuel level via alternate means. on the ground you put a stick in the tank and in flight you know how much fuel was loaded and you know much was burned(airplanes tend to have good fuel per hour meters). Only this time the amount of fuel requested was in gallons and the amount loaded was in liters.....
But absolute respect to the pilot for getting it down in one piece. I mean on one level he was just doing his job. but sometimes that is all it takes to be a hero, to do your job in the face of adversary.
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 where everything lined up perfectly feelsl weird!
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.
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.
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?"
Pilots need to be calm under high pressure, because they know that panic means certain death. I suspect that selects for a certain type of personality who can make light of any situation.
Critically the material is still titanium. Some of the paperwork is counterfeit so there’s concerns around quality control etc not what it is.
> 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.
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.
Technically it was in the fan disc, and not a turbine blade. And while there was a defect, a big part of the problem was that an inspector most likely missed a crack during overhaul. The crack was present at a previous inspection, which they knew because there some fluorescent penetrant remaining in the defect.
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.
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 bit offtopic. Nitpick regarding definition of “root cause”.
Let’s say there are two conditions X and Y.
Neither sole-X nor lonesome-Y, cause the disaster, but when X+Y happen together, they produce a very negative outcome.
It would seem that both are equally “root” of the cause. But human brain desires to declare one as primary.
In situation where disaster was “human died”, with conditions X=“bullet was shot at the human”, Y=“humans are squishy”, we naturally would lean towards X being the root cause, while Y would be treated as ”that’s just the way it is”.
On the other hand we could construct ”human died” situation with reverse root cause assignment, ie. X=“bullet was shot at human” is taken as a constant, while root cause is Y=“ humans are squishy” (employing some grotesque reader can construct a better one, but something like “The journalist should have followed the process and used a bulletproof vest. It is a war zone after all” seem to work)
“Root case” usually is the smallest and most easily changable part of situation that can prevent disaster.
Though the “ease of change” is not fixed. (“People must follow process” vs “invest milions to change process”)
I just wanted to ramble a bit on the concept of “root cause”. To highlight that on precision-of-terminology-spectrum that spans between mathemathics and astrology, “root cause” falls somewhere in the middle. (probably bit to the right of engineering)
> 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 1 fan disk that was manufactured by General Electric Aircraft Engines.
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 recommendations:
> Encourage research and development of backup flight control systems ·for newly certificated wide-body airplanes that utilize an alternative source of motive power separate from that source used for the conventional control system. (Class II, Priority Action) (A-90-168)
> Conduct system safety reviews of currently certificated aircraft as a result of the lessons learned from the July 19, 1989, Sioux City, Iowa, DC-10 accident to give all possible consideration to the redundancy of, and protection for, power sources for flight and engine controls. (Class II, Priority Action) (A-90-169)
>Analyze the dispersion pattern, fragment size and energy level of released engine rotating parts from .the July 19, 1989, Sioux City , Iowa, DC-10 accident and include the results of this analysis, and any other peripheral data available, in a revision of AC 20-128 for future aircraft certification. (Class II, Priority Action) (A-90-170)
Etc. 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.
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 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.
> 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.
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?
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.
I didn't downvote them, but didn't upvote either. "Chinesium" - the supplier it was traced to is Chinese, but the source is unknown beyond that because the documents are falsified. It's also not yet clear if there is a quality issue, the tested parts and materials are turning out ok so far but the lack of provenance makes it difficult to know with any confidence how long the material will last. It could be the right alloy but a low quality production process that will permit much earlier than anticipated failures (potentially critical ones, it's used in both structural and mechanical parts).
That's part of why they're investigating how to replace parts made from it, the quality is unknown since there's no way to verify the certifications passed on through the suppliers since it's already known that the certificates are lies.
For all we know, this is Russian in source but given false documents to get it sold on the open market bypassing some sanctions or getting some oligarch sitting on a supply some extra money.
Good point on the timing. But I didn’t make a claim, I said “for all we know”. We don’t know the real source, but yes drop the sanction example since it does predate current sanctions.
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.
It's difficult to enforce any international contract, particularly in a country like the People's Republic of China. That said, I don't think signing a contract with a different name gets you anywhere; if your counter-party can show that you signed the contract, or in a corporate context that someone who can reasonably have been presumed to have signing authority did so, you (or the company) is on the hook.
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.
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.
> My father used to complain that every new CEO at his company would first fire a bunch of people to make stock go up
Yup. My last company had a disastrous CEO who used public layoffs as his only lever. It worked once, despite a total of four pulls. The engineering departments were gutted and nobody really knew how everything worked anymore.
Somehow the company is still alive, though with a share price now about 1/20th what it was and 1/60th its typical highs.
Yes, but to be fair the reporting is incomplete because the Boeing-maintained records of the maintenance were incomplete in seemingly-deliberate ways. So... we just don't know. At least one, plausibly two bad guys there.
As far as I can make out, Spirit employees (probably with the knowledge and tacit approval of management, because that's the way these things usually go) found a loophole in the record system that allowed them to avoid triggering QA checks. Boeing has blame for creating a system with such a loophole, or failing to find it before it was used, but it was Spirit personnel who actually used it.
IIRC from one of the whistle-blower accounts, the main issue was that the Boeing computer system only had an option for fully removing the door, which wasn't done, only a partial removal to allow access to the parts needing work. There was then a disjoint between the Spirit work system and the Boeing one which resulted in someone saying "fuck it" and skipping it.
For anyone immediately going to UAF 232 as an example please realize that this is titanium used in the air frame not the engine. The engine is under dramatically higher loads and is far more material fault intolerant. I'm not saying this isn't serious issue but this is not as severe a concern, otherwise the planes would be grounded already.
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.
Ive 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).
This is a well known exploit, and is proven effective in times of conflict. I think it is safe to assume that such efforts are ongoing in many corners of the world at any given time.
The FAA has their hands full investigating problems _after_ they become problems. Are airplanes in a race to the bottom or is there an opportunity to inject quality and reliability into this industry?
> FAA has their hands full investigating problems _after_ they become problems
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.
> The FAA is constantly auditing, certifying and testing airmen, airplanes and plants.
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.
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 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.
> Seems like there is a lot of criticism of the FAA while ignoring real time cuts to their budget.
Certainly wasn’t my intention! I don’t _think_ I said anything in there that was assigning blame to the FAA, merely pointing out that in practice they are no longer actively preventing issues.
I know their overall budget has been decreased and there are sources implying that’s the cause of the failures, but I couldn’t (on my phone, to be fair) find any good source comparing the portion of their budget that went to these programs specifically over time. So I chose to stick to what I could source and mostly let people draw their own conclusions.
For instance, while I have Thoughts(TM) I left it to the reader to take a wild fuckin’ guess which political party controlled the presidency, house, and senate in the years we decided outsourced the regulatory role of the FAA to those they regulate.
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
I think the FAA generally performs audits, not inspections.
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.
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.
I’m not proposing deregulation. But it is possible to have bad regulations that don’t produce the desired outcome. Basically, you can’t just regulate by specifying every little detail. An analogy could be drawn to overfitting a system.
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. 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.
>It's not really feasible to fake something like a raw metal.
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:
> It's pretty straightforward to pass one titanium alloy as another,
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.
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 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.
> Russian titanium, which is produced in such quantity
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.
It's not spun, you're just being overly literal. They're not talking about pure elemental titanium, alloy is implicit here. And even if it were a matter of pure titanium, passing off an alloy as that would also make it counterfeit.
Not per the linked article. In fact Spirit goes so far as to claim they've done extensive testing to prove the material's airworthiness, which is pretty much a straight refutation. Are you reading from somewhere else?
> not really feasible to fake something like a raw metal
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.
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
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.
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.
Turkish supplier who reportedly got it from a Chinese supplier, and where they got it from is unknown since the Chinese supplier apparently forged the certificates using the name of a Chinese source (apparently in good standing) who say they did not make it. The actual source at this point is unknown, only a couple links in the supply chain.
LoL, I think aviation traceability goes down to which licensed individual installed each screw down to the date, time, hour, and minute.
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.
Supposedly, anyway. You also have the lovely incompetent folks at Boeing who can't even tell you who worked on removing a plug door and who forgot to put back the bolts holding it down. Thankfully that's a crime though, so hopefully someone (ideally both the fools who did this, and all their managers and managers' managers that cultivated such a culture to allow for such a thing to happen) will go to prison over it.
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 through solution heat treating, etc. The same goes for aluminum, steels, etc. This is the purpose of the entire field of metallurgy....
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..."
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.
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?
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.
> 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 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.
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 failed others"
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.
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.
> they had falsified coupon testing/inspection documentation
This is accomplished by specifying a separate testing house that you trust for this, if you don't have your own equipment. Many manufacturers don't have a tensile test specimen puller, Charpy impact test machine, fatigue test machine, mass spectrometer, x-ray machine, ultrasound technician, or metallurgical lab technician on staff to verify all this. But what you don't do is blindly trust documentation supplied by the vendor.
Not to say you verify every little aspect of everything documented- at some point it's not economically viable. But everything I've mentioned above is pretty reasonable to do, especially as reliability in the end application becomes more critical.
Oddly enough, this one seems to pass at least some testing even despite the phony documentation.
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 really test. The tests you can do don't actually tell you what you really need to know.
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.
Reminds me of when a favorite restaurant is bought and changes just enough to not be a favorite anymore, despite seemingly having the same menu. That feels like a similar analogy. Engineering has important details in the subtlety.
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)?
Because it's not just about testing. Like in high-quality software, testing is only the final step. The primary determinant of quality is the source material and how it's processed, and testing can't completely prove whether or not it was processed correctly.
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. Maybe 10, IF all 10 gave perfectly consistent results. But there is no such test anyway.
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?
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.
I hear what you're saying, but I don't think you understand my question. No doubt my phrasing is bad.
The manufacturer had to produce the material in a certain way, right? Mix specific amounts of other things into the titanium, use specific heat, specific cooling. (I don't know anything about metal, really, just assuming that these things are like how high-performance concrete is made.) Now, the choice of additives, amounts, temperatures, pressure etc. is based on testing, right? Someone chose a particular pressure after doing many tests using a range of pressures. The manufacturer isn't allowed to just set up a production process that matches that spec and just assume that the result will match the results elsewhere. But the manufacturer can't take decades to check the product at the normal passage of time either. So the manufacturer has to do some sort of accelerated test to check that the production process works as intended.
That testing is naturally not perfect. I understand that. And whatever testing Airbus/Boeing can do after taking delivery is also not perfect.
My question was rather: Why can't Airbus/Boeing reach the same standard of testing as the manufacturer? If the manufacturer can do some tests and document them (or just fake the documentation) and assert that its production process matches the spec, then I don't see why Airbus/Boeing can't. I do realise that it isn't sure to match reality, the thing I don't see is why Airbus/Boeing can't get as close to testing the spec as a (proper) manufacturer can. I'd like to understand that.
If the answer is that some significant aspect is unobservable afterwards, then my next question is how that was chosen to begin with.
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 casting and case hardening etc. Frequently the performance of the part actually requires that the interior be different from the surface, ie hard shell resilient interior.
You can observe a lot about a finished part in various ways, like just tapping it and observing the sound can be more useful than an xray. But there's a lot you can not know after the fact through observation, except by observation of the eventual failure or not.
For one example, dissimilar materials, either within a casting or even just 2 parts in contact with each other, or a part and a brazing material, can migrate and diffuse into each other over time. Small differences in the initial conditions change how that develops over time, and can result in big changes in the performance of a part later.
You can't examine a finished part to determine that it was fabricated according to the recipe. You can only detect gross problems. You must trust that the supplier and their suppliers all followed the various recipes.
Here's another angle:
They first detected the forged paperwork because the guys on the factory floor observed that the material looked wrong.
So, it's the opposite of "you can't detect the difference". They detected a difference just plain visually.
The counterfeit parts might actually be perfectly sound. We don't know they will fail early, we only know that we can't trust the paperworks claims about how they were produced, where the materials were sourced from, how they were processed etc. Whatever the source and processes actually were, the end result might be inferior, or might be equivalent or even superior. (although detecting pitting they didn't expect does not lean towards the parts being superior)
They are able to observe that there is something different about these parts. They visually looked different enough to raise the question. Yet so far, they haven't been able to say that the parts are actually unsound through any testing or that initial visual observation.
It's not only that a part that looks perfect might not be, it's also true that even when you do detect a difference, it doesn't mean the part is bad.
You can observe a lot, but there is no amount of after-the-fact observation or testing that can replace knowledge of how a thing was produced.
Answer I: Real-world materials are vastly more complex than "it's titanium, or it's not". Not that our craptastic modern educational system teaches such things, unless you're taking specialized engineering courses or technical training. For a skim, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy
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.
Most titanium has a small amount of ruthenium alloyed with it, which greatly increases corrosion resistance. So there should be chemical ways to test for it.
Treatment, alloyed metals along with it, grain structure, manufacturing process.
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.
What is it with SWE's and binary thinking? No, titanium and any metal alloy is a huge spectrum of materials. There are thousands of steels, aluminums and so on.
Ohh, I've done this. I bought some titanium bike parts and I was suspicious if they were titanium. I measured the weight of the bolts then dropped them in a graduated cylinder to get the volume, mass divas by volume is density, I then looked up the density and it was the same.
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.
I am guessing that it was real titanium, just a different grade/alloy/treating process being passed off as something it was not or it's possible it's even the same quality/grade, just of unknown provenance (fell off the back of a truck) and its documents were forged. Seems kinda likely as Boeing says (as I understand from the article) they have tested the parts and it's the correct grade of titanium.
You are correct that this is what the article says - testing suggests it is in fact titanium, just maybe not the right treatment.
That would be harder, but one would think that a company making airframes for aviation, in a highly regulated environment/etc, would occasionally send off samples to double check them.
Getting titanium analyzed to a degree you could tell whether it is the right grade/alloy is cheap and fast - I can get it done for <$100 per sample.
Given the cost of what they are producing, how few they produce, and how much they sell them for, and how quickly you can get this kind of thing done, they could test every single lot of titanium they get and neither increase cost, nor slow down production.
This also isn't a case where there are lots of people in the middle - this supplier is the ones machining and producing the final product from titanium alloys.
Also, if you change suppliers, wouldn't you at least test the stuff they give you the first time?
Except the article says they only tested it after they found corrosion reported back to them (IE they did not discover or test it ahead of time), and that testing they have now done says it is not treated properly.
So it doesn't appear Spirit has sufficient testing, or that the titanium passes all the tests.
Another literal answer to this question - spark testing. Take a sample to a grinder/belt sander and observe the sparks coming off - fairly crude, but you should be able to tell the difference between aluminum (no sparks), steel (mostly orange-ish) and titanium (white)[0]. That's really only enough to tell you the general material type though - the alloy and temper are also extremely important, as others in this comment chain have said.
[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.
What was the problematic outsourcing decision here? Buying your titanium from a titanium supplier? Is Spirit supposed to be refine and foundry all their own metal alloys?
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.
Spirit itself is an "outsourcing" from Boeing's point of view. They spun it off so they could put more aggressive downwards pressure on labor price and then play dumb when it had the obvious and well understood outcomes like "buying underspecced materials to save money" and "workers don't do all the work they should, to save money" and "having different systems to control work so you can massage the official one, to save money by doing less work"
If sufficiently intense oversight is needed at the boundary then outsourcing becomes uneconomical. This is something SpaceX found (and also because external sources were often slow and expensive.)
Are you sure that applies to commodities with extremely high capital costs like mining and refining ore?
It sort of makes sense to me with SpaceX. They’re presumably buying fairly boutique parts that likely already require custom manufacturing, so someone is spending capital either way. I can see how it might make sense for them to build a custom manufacturing line instead of paying someone else.
That seems odd for commodities like titanium, though. Even if Boeing were to do it themselves, that oversight process is already a subset of the mining and refining process. They’re going to have to build out their QA lab either way.
> If sufficiently intense oversight is needed at the boundary then outsourcing becomes uneconomical.
1. That doesn't make outsourcing "bad" before the cost benefit analysis. Commenters above are broadly blaming outsourcing.
2. As a thought experiment, specialized suppliers could be able to manage risks and costs cheaper due to absolute advantages. That's the whole point of outsourcing.
3. Mitigating the consequential and indirect damages to Boeing from this identity crisis could easily (my SWAG) justify hundreds of millions of dollars (another SWAG) in spend on better quality control audits.
Other countries in some cases seem to have much less enforcement of anti fraud. In the US if a company is knowingly selling fraudulent material, I’m guessing they can get in legal trouble for fraud? Does that happen in e.g. China?
That is an interesting point of view, however, needing to distrust and expect fraud from every outsource agency sounds exactly like their point, which was not the elementary “outsource = bad” that you make it out to be.
Not sure if this was technically outsourcing, but moving maintenance overseas to developing countries where agencies like the FAA have a much harder time to inspect the planes.
A company willing to have employees accidentally die when they come down with a case of the whistleblows would do things to make oversight more difficult? I’m shocked, shocked I tell you.
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?
Probably Airbus single most important supplier is CFM who is making most of their engines. CFM is a JV of Safran and General electric. How do you insource that?
I feel like this goes for personal life too. My particular problem du jour: some parts internal to my lawn mower engine crankcase self destructed and the engine needs a total rebuild or replacement. I replaced the camshaft 2 years ago with a cheapo Amazon part and I'll forever be kicking myself wondering if saving $20 on that destroyed a $1k (new price) engine.
Don’t beat yourself up…you’re probably right. Joking aside, with Amazon, you just never know whether you are going to get a hardened forged steel item, or pot-metal. You can’t even count on that “stainless steel bowl” actually being stainless at all these days. That whole marketplace is a grand example of the exact problem with outsourcing. These days you can’t even rely on price or brand being an indicator of what you will receive (with the counterfeits and intentional overpricing of sub-par items).
Amazon has turned into WalMart. Literally all of your choices for a product are a variation of the same cheap crap with different brand names. I would love to have a midling priced item of better quality. Not available.
The retailers job used to be offering the best value to their customers by filtering out the crap that was too cheap or overpriced.
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.
For the company as a whole, no, it's not worth it long term.
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!
No, but when you do that you have to make sure it's used in a maximally ironic way like making a spy plane to use against them. Double points for telling them (or saying you told them) a story that makes them look like mugs in retrospect like "it's for pizza ovens, don't worry about it".
Titanium needs to be processed carefully, to conform all specifications. Tiny impurities from atmospheric nitrogen can be fatal for a plane made from this titanium. So the supply chain must be known, certified or whatever.
Russia is the 3rd largest producer of titanium sponge. But titanium sponge does not come from a mine. Ilmenite and rutile come from mines, and then is industrially processed to isolate the titanium.
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.
> 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?
This is such a dull, reflexively anti-government take that has absolutely nothing to do with the situation, the government isn't involved in certifying the authenticity of materials. In any case, Boeing is massively _subsidized_ by the federal government and not the other way around.
> It's more like you got your croissants but without a name brand or receipt.
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!
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 first place a counterfeit of anything has to actually pass for the thing, and haggis most certainly does not pass as a croissant.
You misread me. I said a food analogy. The general idea of any food analogy, including yours, doesn't work well.
> 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.
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.
The false provenance was discovered by an Italian company, and then Spirit did their own investigation and found they had titanium from the same supplier with the same issue of false provenance. Spirit notified both Boeing and Airbus. Spirit produces parts for both Boeing and Airbus. This isn't about the FAA helping Boeing cover their asses, this is a real issue that impacts both Boeing and Airbus since the titanium ended up in planes from both companies.
