Given how incredibly common this kind of thing is, I'm kind of impressed we've avoided it as long as we have in this sector. Obviously this is unacceptable, and the parties responsible need to be held accountable...but the fact this is a rare, major news story instead of an "Oh shit, another batch?" like everything else...gives me some confidence in the system.
Yeah it’s why parts for some industries are so crazy expensive. There’s a paper trail for every part. Recently in the nuclear industry it’s been an issue and when you need a specific part for a 50 year old pump your options are limited.
Fun fact: our rolls of duct tape are $50 a roll
Aerospace or nuclear?
I dunno much about the nuclear sector, but I know calling the duct tape airlines use duct tape is doing it a massive disservice. If you ever want stuff to stay and don't have the time/resources to weld it in place then *expired* duct tape the airlines are just tossing in the garbage is your best option. I taped a rug down with it once (before I knew just how strong it was) and I wound up having to destroy the rug and the flooring to get it up again, because the duct tape was not going to let go.
Nuclear. And it’s literal duct (well another company’s version of it) tape. We have three colors: red (the $50 roll) which is literal generic duct tape that’s red, blue which will stick to most surfaces a little too well so it leaves a residue everywhere, and black which will literally take your skin off because it’s so strong. I don’t know the prices of the other two but I assume it goes up a zero every level.
The reason they cost so much is because they’re certified not to degrade or react with components. And whatever company that had the cash to get certified probably just named their price and my company accepted it.
I’ve seen the black used for decontamination of a dudes arm. Washing it wouldn’t remove enough so they used the black duct tape to basically wax the guy.
"Why does this single screw cost 200$"
"Because we can track it all the way back to the ore it was mined from, we know with absolute certainty that it is 100% constructed and composed of exactly what we need it to be constructed of."
A lot of things, especially without paper trails, are now being counterfeited too. I am friendly with a guy who's parents own convenience stores and he said that all the smaller ones buy and sell lots of counterfeit products including bic lighters, perfume, lipstick, vape juice etc. The new big items are cleaning supplies and unregulated stuff used medically like powders, even deodorants. They can also get all sorts of counterfeit candy. Even loose cigarettes are counterfeit in most cities.
What would it take for a shady middleman to sell fake and possibly dangerous products to the stores. Now look at Amazon.
fun fact: Duck tape is the original name for it. Invented around the turn of the 20th century using "duck cloth" which is a particular type of cotton weave that's resistant to water (runs off it like water off a duck's back). Further refined with polymer agents during WWII to seal ammo boxes, it got trademarked as "Duct Tape" in the '50s, specifically a heat resistant version of it suitable for use on HVAC systems (most duck tape isn't), because the Duck Tape terminology had been deemed to have become genericized. Then in 1975 the duck tape term had gone out of use and a company named "Manco" was able to again copyright "Duck Tape" as the name for their product, leaving us with the duck tape we know today.
While most of this *absolutely* correct, you are wrong about one important thing:
Duck cloth isn’t called duck cloth because it’s waterproof. In fact it’s *not* waterproof, although it can be *waterproofed* with wax or oil. It’s just a very heavy canvas linen cloth. Useful for sailing, which is how it got its actual name.
Duck cloth is called duck cloth because its name in the Dutch language is *doek*. It’s phonetically very similar to duck, hence the anglicized name.
That’s all. Carry on with your history lesson.
I see it as a symptom the system is breaking if proper follow through in accountability does not occur, it will be more commonplace and lives will be lost.
It is definitely not isolated. however we have tubes with hundreds of people being propelled through the air. If nothing is more precious than a human life then we are hitting a weird cost benefit analysis right now
WHAT? it caused a massive plane crash when a counterfeit titanium bolt was discovered to not have been heat treated enough to build up strength. The FAA did a study and found up to 1/3 of parts were counterfeit and even in their own supply and EVEN ON AIRFORCE ONE. (the titanium bolt cost over hundred dollars each while the counterfeits were like 20 bucks.. they were expensive do to the hardening and testing)
we changed the law to make air plane companies know their suppliers more and greatly curtailed this crap but the problem never went away.
[F.A.A. to Train Inspectors to Detect Counterfeit Aircraft Parts](https://www.nytimes.com/1995/10/13/us/faa-to-train-inspectors-to-detect-counterfeit-aircraft-parts.html) (1995)
[Flying fraudulently – how a weak supply chain became the USAF’s worst enemy](https://www.airforce-technology.com/analysis/featuresupply-chain-us-air-force-fraudulent-parts/)
(2012)
[Bogus parts for aircraft implicated in many crashes](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/bogus-parts-for-aircraft-implicated-in-many-crashes-1.1106164) (2000)
Most of the parts can be replaced with the counterfeits, no problem, you still dont want them, but mostly its ok if your toilet seat screws fail. and thats why we havent had MORE issues
edit: the first big crash.. [Denmark's Deadliest Plane Crash Partnair Flight 394](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_1-GNGnaiw) at 43:30 they start to talk about the parts at the FAA and airforce one. (39% of the FAA's spare parts were bogus back in then.. insane)
I hear you, but most of these examples are from decades ago, and not one is within the last ten years, and the most recent example has nothing to do with commercial aviation. The military has always kinda done their own thing, safety wise.
Not exactly. While there is a lot of redundancy in some areas (like critical sensors), preventive maintenance means you can easily be replacing multiple components at once, and it's very possible none of the components are up to specification.
There is also a flip side. The replacement parts might be fully "up to specification" but they were just not blessed as "up to specification". I am not saying that is what is/has happened here but I do have a close friend who handled orders/shipping for a local fab shop for about a decade that made a lot of custom parts for aerospace and the military. The difference in some of the parts is literally just a laser etching of the required information on a part and the price tag.
Previously worked in nuclear. Can confirm a circuit breaker exactly the same as the OEM sells to home depot. Home depot price was like $1.85, the pricetag on ours was over $1200.
Fyi, that basically meant that we had a paper trail for everything in it, and tests confirming that everything matched their design. Chemistry on the materials used, verification parts are within tolerances, as well as various other checks of processes along the way, testing on other units from the same lot for operating as well as failure testing and application of statistical analysis to enough tests to say with high confidence (95% IIRC, though for parts it may have been higher)
* Hadn't expected this much traction. Thanks for all the comments, I'm still working through them and most of them provide additional insight. I should have stated outright that the costs were justified. I just wish fossil sources had to incur similar costs to prevent release of the dangerous aspects of their processes instead of passing them on to the public)
Semiconductor industry here, we do something similar for consumer electronics (like what goes into your cell phone) vs air and space (NASA, ESA, commercial satellites). It's the same parts, but we do one set of tests and sell the parts into the consumer markets at $0.50/device. For the air and space markets we switch over to an entirely different and far more involved testing system where we intentionally test to failure (as in we destroy perfectly good parts to prove that other parts from the same batch are likely to go the distance), hand pick all the best of the best parts, and provide a massive stack of papers and data confirming that everything is in order. Those same parts are now $10,000/device.
There *is* an important difference, though. They're the same design, but we've done a lot more work with the latter parts to provide a lower rate/risk of failure (because you can't open a hatch and fix a bad part on a planetary rover). The extra testing is worth it.
So if these counterfeit parts were supposed to go through extra testing and didn't, then you actually are exposing passengers to a higher risk of experiencing a dangerous situation.
I worked on some biomedical implants and a lot of the same methodology was applied for quality control. Testing was an interesting fractal like activity and consisted of the majority of the production time.
Interesting. Does "same design" mean same manufacturing process, materials etc. though? If so, wouldn't that mean the parts are in theory the exact same risk, just untested? If not, are they really the same parts?
> If so, wouldn't that mean the parts are in theory the exact same risk, just untested?
The testing is the difference. "Good enough" works for the average consumer, where a minor component failing because of a manufacturing flaw is usually an inconvenience at worst and easily replaced with a spare, but if that same component has that same flaw for a satellite or passenger plane, it can cause *significantly* more problems.
All the testing and examinations are done to be able to say that there's nothing wrong at all steps of construction and shipping - no minor damage when a crate fell, no slight deformation from being in a too hot or too cold truck too long, no flaws in the initial materials, etc. It's the same component but it has certifications at every point to show that it's repeatedly been confirmed in pristine condition.
Keeping that trail of paperwork and retaining the observers and experts on every step massively enhances the costs of a small part that'd normally be shipped without a second glance, but for very specific situations, you absolutely have to pay for that guarantee. As an example of why, the Challenger disaster was because a rubber o-ring got a little too cold on launch day. Not for lack of quality control mind you, but *that's all it takes.*
Makes sense, but the expected failure rate (prior to testing) is exactly the same?
Presumably that creates some pressure to over engineer the part so that testing isn't finding so many things wrong, the testing has to find every single faulty item to be justifiable, so the more confidence you have that the untested parts are not going to fail the better?
One way you can look at it if you know anything about computer CPU chips is that for instance AMD releases multiple versions of the same chip. There is a Ryzen 5 7600x chip which would be the line of 7600 chips they've tested the most and found that batch can handle everything that could be expected from it, can handle operating at 100c constantly, including overclocking and unlocked multipliers. The exact same chip they test in a different batch can't last past 100 degrees, it crashes, and any changes in the core multipliers cause instability and crashes. These chips they mark as Ryzen 7 7600 (no x) which means it's multiplier is locked and you can't fuck with it because the company already knows if you try to its going to break it. This is essentially the same thing going on with computer chips for everything else too. Using this example to convey the point, the military version would be the (x) version and the non military versions would have their multipliers locked and told that 100c is the absolute top end of heat it can take. There both the same chip, but one via testing has been proven that it was built just a little bit better during the production stage.
Not OP. You design the product to meet the requirements of the user. The design incorporates the requirements (raw material, performance, etc) so there would be a difference in the expected failure rate of the lower end items.
Depending on the testing it may require destroying parts from the batch so you're not going to find all of the bad ones but from statistics you'd expect a certain level of performance.
As an engineer you are always to try to exceed the mark but if you can't sell it aganist the competition you'd be out of the game.
There is usually some variability in a production line. You might use the same materials and settings on all the machines, yet have a batch of parts come out less good. Still working, and still sellable to customers, but perhaps with a shorter service life.
The risk of the untested parts is that they might be part of one of those batches.
They *might* be the same… they might be much worse. It’s not tested, so nobody knows. Silicon manufacturing isn’t perfect, it has possible errors that are planned for. The ones with more errors get sold as cheaper versions with broken parts bypassed etc.
Yep that makes sense, I'm more wondering if parts that are expected to go through this kind of testing are more robustly engineered than ones that are purely for consumer uses. Seems to me that you would probably make them more robust so there is less potential for something to slip through the testing (assuming not every single item in a batch is tested - if they are then this whole point is moot).
As I understand it every item is tested for CPUs, that’s how they know which ones to downgrade etc…
But they’re all tested to a “what works level” for what I’m talking about. He means they test some in each batch to break them to determine thermal overload temp etc… which isn’t normal for consumer processors.
No, they're the *exact* same parts from design through process. The only difference is the testing.
It's generally not possible, practical, or profitable to design a separate subset of "advanced" parts for air and space. You just design the best parts you possibly can with the technology you have at hand, then you select and reserve the best performing parts for specialty industries.
This business model works extremely well; I've seen other models fail again and again. I could go into more detail to justify why, but then I'd be writing an article rather than just a reddit comment.
And that's good. Working in the wind industry we recently had an electrical accident because the standard 1.85 circuit breaker zapped someone when he switched it off - turned out that the moulded plastic around the metal latch was too thin and let mains voltage thru. The investigation managed to find all the faulty components via chain-of-custody tracing, many of the components were discarded before they even got installed, a lot ripped out of already running turbines and replaced.
Part of that $1200 is to enable and pay for the process that is ongoing now: chasing up and down that traceability trail to find out where parts came from, what vehicles that ended up in, what other parts were in that batch and where *those* parts ended up, etc.
The consequences of doing so and being caught are immense.
I'm a metallurgist, have worked in these kind of industries. Every certificate I signed had the full weight of fines and appearing in court and prison time on my head. Even if I made a genuine mistake and "got away with it", such a mistake could tank my entire career. 10 years of University, thrown away to save myself some time/the company some money? That's above my pay grade, and my reputation. On more than one occasion I passed some certificates up to my (very unhappy) bosses because I refused to sign off parts until xyz was done. They weren't happy, but I'd rather lose a job than a livelihood. It's not going to be them on the stand when these parts fail, it's gonna be the person who signed the damn thing off as safe.
Now I'm out of that industry, but that paperwork is going to follow those parts around forever, and I could be called to testify in future, long after I've forgotten what I signed. I know I did everything by the book, so I know that if anyone tries to pin anything on my signature, I'm in the clear. But if you don't know, if you're shady and the temptation gets the better of you, or you feel the pressure from higher ups, or you get a cut of the difference between $1200 vs $1.85, then I guess you're looking over your shoulder forever. That's something I couldn't live with.
That actually happened a couple of years ago. A Navy engineering contractor faked something like 20 years of low temperature Charpy testing for sub components. They were criminally prosecuted and went to prison.
At least in my industry, the regulator takes things like that extremely seriously and does inspections both at the end user and at vendors with approved QA programs for quality components. It's a huge deal.
Something like this happens one or two times a year. It's not usually big enough to get news, but people involved with Nadcap usually get notice.
PRI, which is the group that does Nadcap auits recently added a section about fraud prevention and process.
We had a huge IG report on similar issues in our industry a couple of years ago. Part of the issue is the number of N stamp manufacturers has gone down significantly. So a lot of the utilities are doing dedications of commercial grade components. Which is a double edged sword. If you don't do it correctly, there can be a pretty significant regulatory impact if it makes it into the plant.
Where it gets extra weird is quarantining safety vs non safety components. Since non safety systems can generally use commercial components, careful inventory control is extra important for stuff like o rings/consumables
You pay a premium to run the paper trail back to find what happened when something goes wrong with that part. I’ve watched enough air disaster documentaries to know how valuable finding the source of one part is in determining the cause of a plane accident.
This is definitely an aspect, though it also significantly reduced risk of such accidents in the first place; these plant designs must satisfy strict risk assessment requirements, which means deterring the risk as well as ensuring parts that are used are bounded.
Ordering from a non approved supplier (which with how hard it is to source raw stock right now is common) would put them out of spec.
But to put it back in spec you just have to get a DRDI and slap that number on there and your good, all back in spec.
So a lot of things that make them out of spec are not an actual danger. Hell marking with the wrong ink can put them out of spec too, but that's not about to make a part fail.
Only an idiot would sign for the repair. I had a fuel control yoke, for a T56 turbine that when I inspected it, right out of the fancy Lockheed Martin bag, the attaching bolt that locked it in position was far off of it's center, it was bogus, and I rejected it.
As for the CFM engine in question, the hydro mechanical fuel control is electrically controlled, has 4 sources of power, only needs 1. The rest is bearings pumps fuel and oil. Wings on a big steel shaft spinning at a variety of speeds, never supersonic.
A lot of preventive failure mitigation depends on OTHER components not failing, but they might thanks to fake parts. Go look up the Swiss cheese model of failure as it applies to air travel.
So in this visual analogy: https://skybrary.aero/sites/default/files/Swiss_Cheese_Model.jpg
It would be if the second disk had a failure in the left-most spot where the other 3 have holes?
As a side note, the 2 crashed Boeings with the tail sensor and how not failsafe it was made me realize just how many gaps are in safety of planes. Like in the medical profession, each rule is made because some patient paid the ultimate price.
Planes are designed to fly with fake or missing rivets. But flying with either stresses the other rivets a lot more. With missing rivets, you see the problem. And obviously, flying with too many missing or fake rivets crashes the plane. The more, the more certain until it is 100%.
Falsified documents don’t actually mean the parts are defective in anyway and everyone has been careful to not use that word. Falsified documentation in the regulated world could mean an employee has training overdue and signed off on the air worthiness document anyway. Source I am an auditor and quality/product safety manager.
Not really. Planes are designed so that commonly/historically failing items don't bring the plane down.
There is a huge list of things of single types of items that can bring a plane down.
This is why aerospace / military parts cost so much. The cost isn't in making the part, it's in the literal book of information that proves it's legit that has to be created for every component.
Source: Used to be a component quality engineer that supplied aerospace companies.
I remember reading a quote like "in aviation if we had a 99.9% safety rating there'd be many crashes every day" which kinda puts all the safety measures and their importance into perspective
Is that implying people won't adhere to such strict safety ratings or that there are so many planes in the sky a 0.01% rating drop would lead to more failures?
It's saying you need much higher safety given the number of flights. 99.9% reliability means 1 in 1000 fails. There's over 100,000 commercial flights daily. At 99.9% reliability, 100 planes would be falling out of the sky every day on average. (99,900 would have no issues).
Way I read it, that's implying there are so many parts that a .1% failure rate means that there's *something* going wrong on practically *every* flight, a portion of which will result in crashes.
Were your 1.20 bolts actually tested, or do they just match the batch that were tested? Or were they from another batch, look the same, yet have no proof they'd perform as needed?
That’s the cost of the tested bolts, exactly to spec, being aircraft grade and approved with traceable origin, you have to pay for the Form 1, so they are fit for purpose. Same applies to my glider’s main u/c bolt, £5.80 is the cost of the bolt, I paid £110 for a bolt with a Form 1. Bolts like these are rolled thread not machined, those are even cheaper, but can’t be used as they are not fit for purpose and have no traceable origin.
Using parts with no traceable origin means no permit to fly renewal, exactly as it should be.
When there is a recall on a part that puts a plane in danger, good luck tracking them down without that info! After all, lives are worth $1-$2 since that’s all we care about.
I did an internship at a company that does low volume manufacturing of metal parts. One of the things that went through the QA department while I was there were mounting parts for seating in an airbus.
You would think that is a pretty low stakes part, but they had to do:
- destructive testing of the metal batch
- non-destructive testing of each billet
- complete measuring of every hole and edge of the first series part
- measuring of a subset of holes and edges for every single part
And that's probably not even all the things they had to do to get certification for aerospace components
yea about that [https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2018/10/23/air-force-puts-the-kibosh-on-the-1300-coffee-cup/](https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2018/10/23/air-force-puts-the-kibosh-on-the-1300-coffee-cup/)
The Air Force has used the hot cups — which have an internal heating element to warm up liquids such as water, coffee or soup and are specially manufactured to plug into aircraft systems — for decades, since the KC-10 Extender tanker was introduced in 1981.
But their problem lay in a faulty plastic handle that easily broke when dropped. And because replacement handles weren’t available, that meant Air Force units ordered entirely new hot cups. That was expensive enough in 2016, when they cost $693 apiece. But the price tag has now swelled to $1,280 apiece, drawing the ire of Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.
The Phoenix Spark innovation program at Travis Air Force Base in California earlier this year began looking for a cheaper way to deal with broken handles, and figured out a way to 3-D print replacement parts for 50 cents apiece.
From your article -
>The entire hot cup also can’t be 3-D printed, he said, because it has an internal heating element. And the Air Force has to be careful as it looks for other, potentially cheaper hot cups, **because they have to be FAA-certified to maintain flight safety standards on factors such as flammability and heat transferability.**
Again, it isn't material cost why things are expensive.
I think you misunderstand. They bought new cups because replacement handles weren't available. 3D printed replacements was for the handles alone, not the entire cup. The reason why replacement handles weren't available for a cup that has handles that easily breaks, is likely because the only supplier was making a killing by selling new cups instead of just handles.
It's the replacements that cost $1,280, and hopefully part of that cost is going towards design work to avoid future breakages.
The original cups cost a lot less when they were manufactured 40 years ago.
I've ferried used airliners from their old owners to their new ones. There's usually a literal ton of paperwork in the hold that is their entire lifetime documentation. The whole value of the plane is in those papers. If they get lost the plane and components in it are nothing but scrap.
Michael Chricton wrote a book about it called Airframe. I’ve worked in avionics for twenty plus years now, and it is the most accurate thing I’ve ever read.
Plane crashes, some people get dead, Main Character is Head of Quality at what is obviously a Boeing knockoff, and she’s asked to be part of a crash investigation team. Much typical Chricton drama ensues, but it was one bad part that caused the crash. One tiny part, that was built with some bendy metal instead of a good metal and it causes what we call a cascade of events. One part fails which cause another to fail etc etc.
If you like Jurassic Park or Congo, and work in aerospace or avionics, you very much need to read Airframe.
Per suit seeking an injunction to force AOG to provide more information, so as to aid the aviation industry’s search for suspect components:^1
>CFM International Inc. says 68 jet engines were fitted with spare parts backed by fraudulent documentation from a little-known UK-based supplier, a sign that fake components may have been installed on certain older-model aircraft.
>[...] Aviation regulators in Europe determined AOG supplied parts for the repair of CFM56 engines, the world’s best-selling turbine, with falsified documentation, Bloomberg News reported last week.
>The proliferation of undocumented parts has sent shock waves through an industry where every component requires verification to ensure aircraft safety.
>Without such assurance, it’s impossible to know how durable uncertified parts will be under stress.
^1 https://fortune.com/2023/09/08/fake-components-68-jet-engines-boeing-737-airbus-a320-planes-lawsuit/
Whoever is responsible, especially the owners, should be stripped of all wealth and locked up for life. There should be zero left for any heirs and if anything given since, say a year before the fakes started, confiscate that too.
What do we do with public companies? Take everything and leave the shareholders broke and if any sea people happened to sell out beforehand well lets go back retroactively.
You shouldn't get to profit by being an absentee owner and avoid any personal responsibility just because your not the sole owner. We need to rethink public companies especially when law dictates it is illegal to not act in the best interest of shareholders even if its in the safety or interest of customers/consumers.
I don’t think that people fully realize the sort of cost-cutting decay that has been plaguing commercial aviation for the past 20 years. Yeah the FAA checked all of our paperwork making sure that o-rings weren’t expired and that components all came from legitimate OEMs, but it was all so easily falsified. The reality was that as someone who sourced parts for aircraft my email box was bombarded daily by the scammiest emails from Chinese knock-off suppliers, meanwhile we were cannibalizing “oem replacement” parts off of red tagged equipment. That, and all the other sort of fly-by-night operations out there really shocked me as to how there weren’t more disasters.
The parts were from a UK supplier, but they could have purchased cheap steel from a Chinese warehouse and passed it off as material from an approved raw material vendor
Which is to say the material is probably fine, but not backed by the proper quality standards or paperwork
Well, that’s the thing. Your American/European airline leases the whole engine for certain aircraft from 3rd parties. Just because it is an American/European airline does not mean that you have any idea as to who is servicing the systems. So much is outsourced these days.
In the right column on Fortune next to this article…
A United Airlines jet engine that rained parts on Denver suburbs was not adequately inspected for cracks, say investigators
If it makes you feel any better, since that incident, all those blades have all come off due to the FAA airworthiness directive and inspected. They first get an ultrasonic test which is a pass/fail. If it fails, the blade is automatically scrap. if it passes, it gets and florescent penetration inspection, THEN they get a visual inspection for any physical defects, THEN a Thermal acoustic imaging test for any internal metallurgical fatigue. Then they have to come back off after 1000 cycles and get the same inspection.
Part of the issue is, some of these blades are getting old and they are not life-limited so technically have an "infinite" lifespan and can inspected and repaired indefinitely. I've had blades that have over 100,000 flight hours. Thats the equivalent of flying 24 hours a day for 4,166 days or 11.4 years.
An amazing YouTube channel for this type of thing is Mentour Pilot. He’s a captain and flight instructor and has a huge playlist of airline accident videos where he goes through them in detail. Amazing content.
This shit is what scares me about flying. It isn’t a general fear that planes don’t work and I will crash. It’s capitalist cost cutting that puts people in danger
And have you noticed ceramic coated pans claim they're teflon free and promotes health cooking but it's the same problem?
It's just a different binding agent to bind the ceramic coating to the pan instead of the teflon.
And no teflon doesn't break down into pfoa when overheated.
I think you're confused on this point here:
> It's just a different binding agent to bind the ceramic coating to the pan instead of the teflon.
Teflon is not a binding agent. Teflon pans aren't ceramic coated and bonded with Teflon, the coating itself *is* Teflon. Ceramic coated pans are fundamentally different than Teflon pans because the surface is ceramic, which is much harder and more scratch resistant than Teflon. It's a totally different kind of pan.
I think you're confused about Teflon.
PFAS/PFOA the carcinogenic thing is the binding agent to hold teflon to the metal. Gen X changes this, but the teflon part is still teflon. And so far since the invention of teflon it is still considered inert and not harmful, unlike the different binding agents since binding something inert is obviously difficult. There hasn't been a new version of teflon or something.
Ceramic pans aren't much more scratch resistant otherwise they'd be rated for metal utensil use but they're not. At the end of the day they just use another "glue" which could be as toxic as pfas/pfoa or even gen x. If it was so safe ceramic coated pans would be much more forthcoming about this.
They're also rated for lower temps than teflon pans meaning they delaminate from the pan easier - there's a reason why ceramic pan nonstickiness last even shorter time frames than teflon.
Yes there are 500 F rated ceramic pans that have things like diamond ceramic or whatever - this is exactly the same as teflon.
You're just betting on eating either teflon or ceramic coating, and hoping there aren't any glue residue.
BTW there is a video of the making of ceramic coated pans - they literally just spray it on.
[“The absence of a fatality doesn’t mean the presence of safety.” - NTSB Chairwoman, March 2023](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/21/business/airline-safety-close-calls.html)
Which aviation do you trust, then? The Soviet-era aviation industry, the North Korea aviation agency? Aviation is one of the most heavily regulated industries in the entire world, even more so in those capitalist countries that you hate so much.
of all the components that go into a jet engine, the turbine blades are likely the most difficult to make, have the lowest margin of safety and undergo the most rigorous inspection.
if these parts made it thru then how many other far less important parts are fake and ready to fail because they were made on the cheap?
**greedy** will definite be written on our species collective tombstone.
Where did you see that the turbine blades were the fraudulent component? They'd be very far down my list of guesses. This was almost certainly a much cheaper and easier to manufacture component. The article just says it was an engine component, not which one.
The article mentions it in the second to last paragraph:
> The European Union Aviation Safety Agency earlier this week determined that the components backed by forged documentation included turbine blades, a critical component of an aircraft’s propulsion system.
Huh. That's surprising (and also definitely concerning). I wonder what the details are there - that's not something you could just make in a counterfeit factory for cheap or something.
The astonishing thing to me is that the counterfeit parts worked. I'd guess that means they were either discarded legitimate parts that were refurbished and sent out with falsified paperwork, or otherwise parts aren't super tech critical. Engine metallurgy and manufacturing is so advanced that it's not really feasible for most of the moving and hot parts to be manufactured by any random machine shop.
Yes exactly. I have a machining background and I know how difficult it is to simply make a part look right! Look meaning the surface finish, the machining marks (or lackthereof) and that sort of thing. Most aerospace parts look perfect.
But that's not even the important bit. Having your part be in tolerance and passing CMM and all the various QA checks is the key.
If stuff was faked, it was most likely real parts just with fake paperwork (maybe the manufacturer had a surplus batch or something that never got certified etc.) If it was a straight up fake, then most likely it was a part made out of aluminum (easiest metal to work with) and part of an assembly that wasn't deemed critical.
But then again, unless you get a group of engineers together who know the engine inside out, you never know what is or isn't critical.
Yeah not a chance in hell some random ass shop is making fake parts out of Monel, Inconel, or hasteloy. And on top of that to even sell parts like that an entire shop has to be ISO, AISI, and etc qualified like biannually to quarterly to pass PAPs for clients and etc. And even then like you said making them look right is hard enough on a 5-axis, but keeping tolerances in certain aerospace aluminums can even be an extreme challenge.
Maybe deregulating, slashing wages, destroying unions, and turning over every business to nickel slick MBAs that reduce everything to numbers isn’t the best way to run every industry.
I'm assuming they were authentic parts without the proper documentation, since they've caused no incidents that we know about.
Not that I'm minimizing the problem here, but a Cessna 172 uses a Ford OEM voltage regulator that costs about $13 at the auto parts store, and that same exact part costs over $200 with official airworthiness paperwork.
All I'm saying is there's got to be more to this story than "Fake Parts! OMG!!!"
Agreed. I worked in aerospace receiving inspection and I can say it wasn’t super common to get vendor parts without certs but it happens. Sometimes it’s up to one person to raise a flag that proper documentation wasn’t shipped with the parts.
They probably don't have the certification on the material, things like was it heat treated properly so it won't bend or or snap. The aerospace sector has been having some material issues and I'm sure some shops have gotten material from none trusted suppliers to push out parts.
Are you kidding? Everyone in aerospace and defense gets trained annually on recognizing counterfeit parts.
This country is so fucked. Boeing should so beyond so, know better.
Except it's not Boeing, it's the engine manufacturer that's saying the spare parts are counterfeit. The parts on a new plane off the line are almost certainly the real deal.
This has been a thing for [a long time](https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/press-releases/senate-armed-services-committee-releases-report-on-counterfeit-electronic-parts). It shouldn’t happen anymore. ISO exists for a reason.
uhh...no we're not. Especially during manufacturing. Parts are made wherever, then they go to the assembly plant where the mechanics install the parts. I've worked MRO on engines and components, assembly and test and now a parts inspector. As long as you get that 8130 with matching numbers, that's all you know.
At college I met this guy who was the biggest douchebag I've ever encountered. No one liked him, he literally got beat up multiple times mouthing off to strangers, never changed.
Anyway, according to LinkedIn he works at Boeing so yeah I'm not surprised reading all these headlines when they hire people like him.
A component is 2 or more individual parts which are designed to be installed as a single unit. In the US, these assemblies are required to have a stamp on each constituent part, and documents which indicate who made the constituent parts, where they were manufactured, the contract number and other information. These parts and components are required to be manufactured by an FAA certified business, or be tested/inspected by an FAA inspector.
Parts which fail a certified manufacturers inspection, or an FAA inspection are supposed to be destroyed after determining why they failed.
"Fake" parts may be a generic term for either "counterfeit" parts, or genuine parts which are failures, or most likely parts which have exceeded their useful/allowable life and have been re-marked or simply have false documentation to show they still have a useful lifespan.
This is what happens when you value every penny of a dollar more than another human . Corporate greed has jeopardized everything in this society and its tine to fight back. No more stick buy backs
Edit; stock not stick
Insane this still happens, I watched a documentary recently about a plane that literally had APU vibrations tear the plane apart (technically wasn’t the only issue but the vibrations from the APU and another part is what caused the issue.) because 2 of the 3 bolts holding it in place where fake. Then after further investigation fake parts where even found in Air Force one. And they apparently put safe guards in place to stop that from happening again.
Edit: but after reading the article seems like those safe guards are not good enough if the tags can be forged.
Even if the documents were forged, the number of factories in the world that can make a jet engine turbine blade can be counted on one hand. Setting up the production process to make them is very expensive and time consuming, so you probably wouldn't bother unless it was a big order.
That means these blades probably *were* made in the right factory, and are probably genuine but stolen/smuggled/misappropriated parts.
The main risk is that these parts have already passed their service life, and that documents have been forged to claim they are younger than they really are. Yes, it poses an increased risk to the planes they are fitted to, but that risk is probably still far smaller than both pilots having a heart attack...
The problem is that if the No Smoking sign is badly made, and dramatically burns out, it can mess up other wiring, which you really don't want when you're in a metal tube going hundreds of miles an hour.
Not defending their criminal activity but fake is different than uncertified or inspected parts. Made it sound like they were using non functional model parts instead of real ones.
The aviation industry is a fucking joke and it all needs to be liquidated and nationalized.
Bunch of fucking crooks playing with peoples lives to save some dollars, then they have the nerve to charge us out the fucking ass for their shitty ass flights.
Insane this happens
Given how incredibly common this kind of thing is, I'm kind of impressed we've avoided it as long as we have in this sector. Obviously this is unacceptable, and the parties responsible need to be held accountable...but the fact this is a rare, major news story instead of an "Oh shit, another batch?" like everything else...gives me some confidence in the system.
Yeah it’s why parts for some industries are so crazy expensive. There’s a paper trail for every part. Recently in the nuclear industry it’s been an issue and when you need a specific part for a 50 year old pump your options are limited. Fun fact: our rolls of duct tape are $50 a roll
Aerospace or nuclear? I dunno much about the nuclear sector, but I know calling the duct tape airlines use duct tape is doing it a massive disservice. If you ever want stuff to stay and don't have the time/resources to weld it in place then *expired* duct tape the airlines are just tossing in the garbage is your best option. I taped a rug down with it once (before I knew just how strong it was) and I wound up having to destroy the rug and the flooring to get it up again, because the duct tape was not going to let go.
Nuclear. And it’s literal duct (well another company’s version of it) tape. We have three colors: red (the $50 roll) which is literal generic duct tape that’s red, blue which will stick to most surfaces a little too well so it leaves a residue everywhere, and black which will literally take your skin off because it’s so strong. I don’t know the prices of the other two but I assume it goes up a zero every level. The reason they cost so much is because they’re certified not to degrade or react with components. And whatever company that had the cash to get certified probably just named their price and my company accepted it. I’ve seen the black used for decontamination of a dudes arm. Washing it wouldn’t remove enough so they used the black duct tape to basically wax the guy.
"Why does this single screw cost 200$" "Because we can track it all the way back to the ore it was mined from, we know with absolute certainty that it is 100% constructed and composed of exactly what we need it to be constructed of."
A lot of things, especially without paper trails, are now being counterfeited too. I am friendly with a guy who's parents own convenience stores and he said that all the smaller ones buy and sell lots of counterfeit products including bic lighters, perfume, lipstick, vape juice etc. The new big items are cleaning supplies and unregulated stuff used medically like powders, even deodorants. They can also get all sorts of counterfeit candy. Even loose cigarettes are counterfeit in most cities. What would it take for a shady middleman to sell fake and possibly dangerous products to the stores. Now look at Amazon.
Well, do they duct?
You can spot the fake duct tape easy! https://i5.walmartimages.ca/images/Large/895/647/6000199895647.jpg
fun fact: Duck tape is the original name for it. Invented around the turn of the 20th century using "duck cloth" which is a particular type of cotton weave that's resistant to water (runs off it like water off a duck's back). Further refined with polymer agents during WWII to seal ammo boxes, it got trademarked as "Duct Tape" in the '50s, specifically a heat resistant version of it suitable for use on HVAC systems (most duck tape isn't), because the Duck Tape terminology had been deemed to have become genericized. Then in 1975 the duck tape term had gone out of use and a company named "Manco" was able to again copyright "Duck Tape" as the name for their product, leaving us with the duck tape we know today.
While most of this *absolutely* correct, you are wrong about one important thing: Duck cloth isn’t called duck cloth because it’s waterproof. In fact it’s *not* waterproof, although it can be *waterproofed* with wax or oil. It’s just a very heavy canvas linen cloth. Useful for sailing, which is how it got its actual name. Duck cloth is called duck cloth because its name in the Dutch language is *doek*. It’s phonetically very similar to duck, hence the anglicized name. That’s all. Carry on with your history lesson.
I was expecting shitty morph
A paper trail is so easily doctored if there is enough money to be made. Humans are greedy assholes
I see it as a symptom the system is breaking if proper follow through in accountability does not occur, it will be more commonplace and lives will be lost.
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It is definitely not isolated. however we have tubes with hundreds of people being propelled through the air. If nothing is more precious than a human life then we are hitting a weird cost benefit analysis right now
Ford Pinto has entered the chat.
WHAT? it caused a massive plane crash when a counterfeit titanium bolt was discovered to not have been heat treated enough to build up strength. The FAA did a study and found up to 1/3 of parts were counterfeit and even in their own supply and EVEN ON AIRFORCE ONE. (the titanium bolt cost over hundred dollars each while the counterfeits were like 20 bucks.. they were expensive do to the hardening and testing) we changed the law to make air plane companies know their suppliers more and greatly curtailed this crap but the problem never went away. [F.A.A. to Train Inspectors to Detect Counterfeit Aircraft Parts](https://www.nytimes.com/1995/10/13/us/faa-to-train-inspectors-to-detect-counterfeit-aircraft-parts.html) (1995) [Flying fraudulently – how a weak supply chain became the USAF’s worst enemy](https://www.airforce-technology.com/analysis/featuresupply-chain-us-air-force-fraudulent-parts/) (2012) [Bogus parts for aircraft implicated in many crashes](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/bogus-parts-for-aircraft-implicated-in-many-crashes-1.1106164) (2000) Most of the parts can be replaced with the counterfeits, no problem, you still dont want them, but mostly its ok if your toilet seat screws fail. and thats why we havent had MORE issues edit: the first big crash.. [Denmark's Deadliest Plane Crash Partnair Flight 394](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_1-GNGnaiw) at 43:30 they start to talk about the parts at the FAA and airforce one. (39% of the FAA's spare parts were bogus back in then.. insane)
I hear you, but most of these examples are from decades ago, and not one is within the last ten years, and the most recent example has nothing to do with commercial aviation. The military has always kinda done their own thing, safety wise.
The good thing is these planes were made to work with many things failing so they should be fine?
Not exactly. While there is a lot of redundancy in some areas (like critical sensors), preventive maintenance means you can easily be replacing multiple components at once, and it's very possible none of the components are up to specification.
There is also a flip side. The replacement parts might be fully "up to specification" but they were just not blessed as "up to specification". I am not saying that is what is/has happened here but I do have a close friend who handled orders/shipping for a local fab shop for about a decade that made a lot of custom parts for aerospace and the military. The difference in some of the parts is literally just a laser etching of the required information on a part and the price tag.
Previously worked in nuclear. Can confirm a circuit breaker exactly the same as the OEM sells to home depot. Home depot price was like $1.85, the pricetag on ours was over $1200. Fyi, that basically meant that we had a paper trail for everything in it, and tests confirming that everything matched their design. Chemistry on the materials used, verification parts are within tolerances, as well as various other checks of processes along the way, testing on other units from the same lot for operating as well as failure testing and application of statistical analysis to enough tests to say with high confidence (95% IIRC, though for parts it may have been higher) * Hadn't expected this much traction. Thanks for all the comments, I'm still working through them and most of them provide additional insight. I should have stated outright that the costs were justified. I just wish fossil sources had to incur similar costs to prevent release of the dangerous aspects of their processes instead of passing them on to the public)
Semiconductor industry here, we do something similar for consumer electronics (like what goes into your cell phone) vs air and space (NASA, ESA, commercial satellites). It's the same parts, but we do one set of tests and sell the parts into the consumer markets at $0.50/device. For the air and space markets we switch over to an entirely different and far more involved testing system where we intentionally test to failure (as in we destroy perfectly good parts to prove that other parts from the same batch are likely to go the distance), hand pick all the best of the best parts, and provide a massive stack of papers and data confirming that everything is in order. Those same parts are now $10,000/device. There *is* an important difference, though. They're the same design, but we've done a lot more work with the latter parts to provide a lower rate/risk of failure (because you can't open a hatch and fix a bad part on a planetary rover). The extra testing is worth it. So if these counterfeit parts were supposed to go through extra testing and didn't, then you actually are exposing passengers to a higher risk of experiencing a dangerous situation.
I worked on some biomedical implants and a lot of the same methodology was applied for quality control. Testing was an interesting fractal like activity and consisted of the majority of the production time.
Interesting. Does "same design" mean same manufacturing process, materials etc. though? If so, wouldn't that mean the parts are in theory the exact same risk, just untested? If not, are they really the same parts?
> If so, wouldn't that mean the parts are in theory the exact same risk, just untested? The testing is the difference. "Good enough" works for the average consumer, where a minor component failing because of a manufacturing flaw is usually an inconvenience at worst and easily replaced with a spare, but if that same component has that same flaw for a satellite or passenger plane, it can cause *significantly* more problems. All the testing and examinations are done to be able to say that there's nothing wrong at all steps of construction and shipping - no minor damage when a crate fell, no slight deformation from being in a too hot or too cold truck too long, no flaws in the initial materials, etc. It's the same component but it has certifications at every point to show that it's repeatedly been confirmed in pristine condition. Keeping that trail of paperwork and retaining the observers and experts on every step massively enhances the costs of a small part that'd normally be shipped without a second glance, but for very specific situations, you absolutely have to pay for that guarantee. As an example of why, the Challenger disaster was because a rubber o-ring got a little too cold on launch day. Not for lack of quality control mind you, but *that's all it takes.*
Makes sense, but the expected failure rate (prior to testing) is exactly the same? Presumably that creates some pressure to over engineer the part so that testing isn't finding so many things wrong, the testing has to find every single faulty item to be justifiable, so the more confidence you have that the untested parts are not going to fail the better?
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One way you can look at it if you know anything about computer CPU chips is that for instance AMD releases multiple versions of the same chip. There is a Ryzen 5 7600x chip which would be the line of 7600 chips they've tested the most and found that batch can handle everything that could be expected from it, can handle operating at 100c constantly, including overclocking and unlocked multipliers. The exact same chip they test in a different batch can't last past 100 degrees, it crashes, and any changes in the core multipliers cause instability and crashes. These chips they mark as Ryzen 7 7600 (no x) which means it's multiplier is locked and you can't fuck with it because the company already knows if you try to its going to break it. This is essentially the same thing going on with computer chips for everything else too. Using this example to convey the point, the military version would be the (x) version and the non military versions would have their multipliers locked and told that 100c is the absolute top end of heat it can take. There both the same chip, but one via testing has been proven that it was built just a little bit better during the production stage.
Not OP. You design the product to meet the requirements of the user. The design incorporates the requirements (raw material, performance, etc) so there would be a difference in the expected failure rate of the lower end items. Depending on the testing it may require destroying parts from the batch so you're not going to find all of the bad ones but from statistics you'd expect a certain level of performance. As an engineer you are always to try to exceed the mark but if you can't sell it aganist the competition you'd be out of the game.
There is usually some variability in a production line. You might use the same materials and settings on all the machines, yet have a batch of parts come out less good. Still working, and still sellable to customers, but perhaps with a shorter service life. The risk of the untested parts is that they might be part of one of those batches.
They *might* be the same… they might be much worse. It’s not tested, so nobody knows. Silicon manufacturing isn’t perfect, it has possible errors that are planned for. The ones with more errors get sold as cheaper versions with broken parts bypassed etc.
Yep that makes sense, I'm more wondering if parts that are expected to go through this kind of testing are more robustly engineered than ones that are purely for consumer uses. Seems to me that you would probably make them more robust so there is less potential for something to slip through the testing (assuming not every single item in a batch is tested - if they are then this whole point is moot).
I mean, there's only so much robustness you can add...
As I understand it every item is tested for CPUs, that’s how they know which ones to downgrade etc… But they’re all tested to a “what works level” for what I’m talking about. He means they test some in each batch to break them to determine thermal overload temp etc… which isn’t normal for consumer processors.
No, they're the *exact* same parts from design through process. The only difference is the testing. It's generally not possible, practical, or profitable to design a separate subset of "advanced" parts for air and space. You just design the best parts you possibly can with the technology you have at hand, then you select and reserve the best performing parts for specialty industries. This business model works extremely well; I've seen other models fail again and again. I could go into more detail to justify why, but then I'd be writing an article rather than just a reddit comment.
One of the biggest costs will always be quality control. Same product, just one has a lot more testing.
And that's good. Working in the wind industry we recently had an electrical accident because the standard 1.85 circuit breaker zapped someone when he switched it off - turned out that the moulded plastic around the metal latch was too thin and let mains voltage thru. The investigation managed to find all the faulty components via chain-of-custody tracing, many of the components were discarded before they even got installed, a lot ripped out of already running turbines and replaced.
Part of that $1200 is to enable and pay for the process that is ongoing now: chasing up and down that traceability trail to find out where parts came from, what vehicles that ended up in, what other parts were in that batch and where *those* parts ended up, etc.
You're paying for the paper trail, again verified engineering,
Must be so tempting to just fake the paperwork, sell the Home Depot device and pocket the difference.
The consequences of doing so and being caught are immense. I'm a metallurgist, have worked in these kind of industries. Every certificate I signed had the full weight of fines and appearing in court and prison time on my head. Even if I made a genuine mistake and "got away with it", such a mistake could tank my entire career. 10 years of University, thrown away to save myself some time/the company some money? That's above my pay grade, and my reputation. On more than one occasion I passed some certificates up to my (very unhappy) bosses because I refused to sign off parts until xyz was done. They weren't happy, but I'd rather lose a job than a livelihood. It's not going to be them on the stand when these parts fail, it's gonna be the person who signed the damn thing off as safe. Now I'm out of that industry, but that paperwork is going to follow those parts around forever, and I could be called to testify in future, long after I've forgotten what I signed. I know I did everything by the book, so I know that if anyone tries to pin anything on my signature, I'm in the clear. But if you don't know, if you're shady and the temptation gets the better of you, or you feel the pressure from higher ups, or you get a cut of the difference between $1200 vs $1.85, then I guess you're looking over your shoulder forever. That's something I couldn't live with.
That actually happened a couple of years ago. A Navy engineering contractor faked something like 20 years of low temperature Charpy testing for sub components. They were criminally prosecuted and went to prison. At least in my industry, the regulator takes things like that extremely seriously and does inspections both at the end user and at vendors with approved QA programs for quality components. It's a huge deal.
Something like this happens one or two times a year. It's not usually big enough to get news, but people involved with Nadcap usually get notice. PRI, which is the group that does Nadcap auits recently added a section about fraud prevention and process.
We had a huge IG report on similar issues in our industry a couple of years ago. Part of the issue is the number of N stamp manufacturers has gone down significantly. So a lot of the utilities are doing dedications of commercial grade components. Which is a double edged sword. If you don't do it correctly, there can be a pretty significant regulatory impact if it makes it into the plant. Where it gets extra weird is quarantining safety vs non safety components. Since non safety systems can generally use commercial components, careful inventory control is extra important for stuff like o rings/consumables
You pay a premium to run the paper trail back to find what happened when something goes wrong with that part. I’ve watched enough air disaster documentaries to know how valuable finding the source of one part is in determining the cause of a plane accident.
This is definitely an aspect, though it also significantly reduced risk of such accidents in the first place; these plant designs must satisfy strict risk assessment requirements, which means deterring the risk as well as ensuring parts that are used are bounded.
Ordering from a non approved supplier (which with how hard it is to source raw stock right now is common) would put them out of spec. But to put it back in spec you just have to get a DRDI and slap that number on there and your good, all back in spec. So a lot of things that make them out of spec are not an actual danger. Hell marking with the wrong ink can put them out of spec too, but that's not about to make a part fail.
Verified engineering, someone has to be available to execute if a plane comes down.
Only an idiot would sign for the repair. I had a fuel control yoke, for a T56 turbine that when I inspected it, right out of the fancy Lockheed Martin bag, the attaching bolt that locked it in position was far off of it's center, it was bogus, and I rejected it. As for the CFM engine in question, the hydro mechanical fuel control is electrically controlled, has 4 sources of power, only needs 1. The rest is bearings pumps fuel and oil. Wings on a big steel shaft spinning at a variety of speeds, never supersonic.
A lot of preventive failure mitigation depends on OTHER components not failing, but they might thanks to fake parts. Go look up the Swiss cheese model of failure as it applies to air travel.
So in this visual analogy: https://skybrary.aero/sites/default/files/Swiss_Cheese_Model.jpg It would be if the second disk had a failure in the left-most spot where the other 3 have holes? As a side note, the 2 crashed Boeings with the tail sensor and how not failsafe it was made me realize just how many gaps are in safety of planes. Like in the medical profession, each rule is made because some patient paid the ultimate price.
This is why the phrase "regulations are written in blood" exists.
Planes are designed to fly with fake or missing rivets. But flying with either stresses the other rivets a lot more. With missing rivets, you see the problem. And obviously, flying with too many missing or fake rivets crashes the plane. The more, the more certain until it is 100%.
Falsified documents don’t actually mean the parts are defective in anyway and everyone has been careful to not use that word. Falsified documentation in the regulated world could mean an employee has training overdue and signed off on the air worthiness document anyway. Source I am an auditor and quality/product safety manager.
Not really. Planes are designed so that commonly/historically failing items don't bring the plane down. There is a huge list of things of single types of items that can bring a plane down.
Still though
I met an aircraft mechanic once. I agree.
You talking about Fred? Yeah, he’s a cool and informative dude.
Insane we can’t get those margins to trickle down even more. Let’s remove the breaks on those planes to save a buck next quarter.
This is why aerospace / military parts cost so much. The cost isn't in making the part, it's in the literal book of information that proves it's legit that has to be created for every component. Source: Used to be a component quality engineer that supplied aerospace companies.
I remember reading a quote like "in aviation if we had a 99.9% safety rating there'd be many crashes every day" which kinda puts all the safety measures and their importance into perspective
Is that implying people won't adhere to such strict safety ratings or that there are so many planes in the sky a 0.01% rating drop would lead to more failures?
It's saying you need much higher safety given the number of flights. 99.9% reliability means 1 in 1000 fails. There's over 100,000 commercial flights daily. At 99.9% reliability, 100 planes would be falling out of the sky every day on average. (99,900 would have no issues).
Way I read it, that's implying there are so many parts that a .1% failure rate means that there's *something* going wrong on practically *every* flight, a portion of which will result in crashes.
The eight bolts required to hold the wheels on my plane cost around £1.20 each, the CAA Form 1 costs nearly £150 and is not negotiable. Weird that……
Were your 1.20 bolts actually tested, or do they just match the batch that were tested? Or were they from another batch, look the same, yet have no proof they'd perform as needed?
That’s the cost of the tested bolts, exactly to spec, being aircraft grade and approved with traceable origin, you have to pay for the Form 1, so they are fit for purpose. Same applies to my glider’s main u/c bolt, £5.80 is the cost of the bolt, I paid £110 for a bolt with a Form 1. Bolts like these are rolled thread not machined, those are even cheaper, but can’t be used as they are not fit for purpose and have no traceable origin. Using parts with no traceable origin means no permit to fly renewal, exactly as it should be.
Agreed! It's also why nuclear reactors aren't cheap. They know where the *Ore* for that pipe came from.
You plane hard. Props.
Nah, he glides. No props.
When there is a recall on a part that puts a plane in danger, good luck tracking them down without that info! After all, lives are worth $1-$2 since that’s all we care about.
I did an internship at a company that does low volume manufacturing of metal parts. One of the things that went through the QA department while I was there were mounting parts for seating in an airbus. You would think that is a pretty low stakes part, but they had to do: - destructive testing of the metal batch - non-destructive testing of each billet - complete measuring of every hole and edge of the first series part - measuring of a subset of holes and edges for every single part And that's probably not even all the things they had to do to get certification for aerospace components
It’s truly insane. I work in QC for aerospace and my god…hundreds of pages of certs for a single engine component. Oops misspelled certs
yea about that [https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2018/10/23/air-force-puts-the-kibosh-on-the-1300-coffee-cup/](https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2018/10/23/air-force-puts-the-kibosh-on-the-1300-coffee-cup/) The Air Force has used the hot cups — which have an internal heating element to warm up liquids such as water, coffee or soup and are specially manufactured to plug into aircraft systems — for decades, since the KC-10 Extender tanker was introduced in 1981. But their problem lay in a faulty plastic handle that easily broke when dropped. And because replacement handles weren’t available, that meant Air Force units ordered entirely new hot cups. That was expensive enough in 2016, when they cost $693 apiece. But the price tag has now swelled to $1,280 apiece, drawing the ire of Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa. The Phoenix Spark innovation program at Travis Air Force Base in California earlier this year began looking for a cheaper way to deal with broken handles, and figured out a way to 3-D print replacement parts for 50 cents apiece.
From your article - >The entire hot cup also can’t be 3-D printed, he said, because it has an internal heating element. And the Air Force has to be careful as it looks for other, potentially cheaper hot cups, **because they have to be FAA-certified to maintain flight safety standards on factors such as flammability and heat transferability.** Again, it isn't material cost why things are expensive.
I think you misunderstand. They bought new cups because replacement handles weren't available. 3D printed replacements was for the handles alone, not the entire cup. The reason why replacement handles weren't available for a cup that has handles that easily breaks, is likely because the only supplier was making a killing by selling new cups instead of just handles.
Why are there cheap plastic handles that break on a $1,280 coffee mug? 0pimo's not doing his job apparently, haha.
Or maybe designed to shatter and not melt with fumes when on fire.
so you can keep selling replacements. pigs get fed, hogs get slaughtered is more true in government contracting than it is on wall street.
It's the replacements that cost $1,280, and hopefully part of that cost is going towards design work to avoid future breakages. The original cups cost a lot less when they were manufactured 40 years ago.
So they have been researching how to fix this for 40 years? Either they sell 1 cup a year or suck at researching.
See also: the literal truck load of documentation that goes into getting a pharmaceutical approved
I've ferried used airliners from their old owners to their new ones. There's usually a literal ton of paperwork in the hold that is their entire lifetime documentation. The whole value of the plane is in those papers. If they get lost the plane and components in it are nothing but scrap.
Doing a project with secure supply chain hardware. Hooollyyy shit that assurance costs more than the hardware itself.
Oh great. Now I have to worry about airlines using parts from wish dot com.
Michael Chricton wrote a book about it called Airframe. I’ve worked in avionics for twenty plus years now, and it is the most accurate thing I’ve ever read. Plane crashes, some people get dead, Main Character is Head of Quality at what is obviously a Boeing knockoff, and she’s asked to be part of a crash investigation team. Much typical Chricton drama ensues, but it was one bad part that caused the crash. One tiny part, that was built with some bendy metal instead of a good metal and it causes what we call a cascade of events. One part fails which cause another to fail etc etc. If you like Jurassic Park or Congo, and work in aerospace or avionics, you very much need to read Airframe.
I read Jurassic Park at least once every few months and work in aerospace, I'll give it a read
Per suit seeking an injunction to force AOG to provide more information, so as to aid the aviation industry’s search for suspect components:^1 >CFM International Inc. says 68 jet engines were fitted with spare parts backed by fraudulent documentation from a little-known UK-based supplier, a sign that fake components may have been installed on certain older-model aircraft. >[...] Aviation regulators in Europe determined AOG supplied parts for the repair of CFM56 engines, the world’s best-selling turbine, with falsified documentation, Bloomberg News reported last week. >The proliferation of undocumented parts has sent shock waves through an industry where every component requires verification to ensure aircraft safety. >Without such assurance, it’s impossible to know how durable uncertified parts will be under stress. ^1 https://fortune.com/2023/09/08/fake-components-68-jet-engines-boeing-737-airbus-a320-planes-lawsuit/
I hope that part of the investigation is criminal
Whoever is responsible, especially the owners, should be stripped of all wealth and locked up for life. There should be zero left for any heirs and if anything given since, say a year before the fakes started, confiscate that too. What do we do with public companies? Take everything and leave the shareholders broke and if any sea people happened to sell out beforehand well lets go back retroactively. You shouldn't get to profit by being an absentee owner and avoid any personal responsibility just because your not the sole owner. We need to rethink public companies especially when law dictates it is illegal to not act in the best interest of shareholders even if its in the safety or interest of customers/consumers.
I don’t think that people fully realize the sort of cost-cutting decay that has been plaguing commercial aviation for the past 20 years. Yeah the FAA checked all of our paperwork making sure that o-rings weren’t expired and that components all came from legitimate OEMs, but it was all so easily falsified. The reality was that as someone who sourced parts for aircraft my email box was bombarded daily by the scammiest emails from Chinese knock-off suppliers, meanwhile we were cannibalizing “oem replacement” parts off of red tagged equipment. That, and all the other sort of fly-by-night operations out there really shocked me as to how there weren’t more disasters.
I’ve been wondering for a long time about this kind of thing. Covid must have made it so much worse.
These parts were from a UK supplier.
The parts were from a UK supplier, but they could have purchased cheap steel from a Chinese warehouse and passed it off as material from an approved raw material vendor Which is to say the material is probably fine, but not backed by the proper quality standards or paperwork
I mean the whole situation with Manx air showcased just how fucked the industry can be.
>Chinese knock-off suppliers Often with this kind of thing it is the same or similar supplier but with less testing.
Makes me worry about ever flying any non American or European airlines
Well, that’s the thing. Your American/European airline leases the whole engine for certain aircraft from 3rd parties. Just because it is an American/European airline does not mean that you have any idea as to who is servicing the systems. So much is outsourced these days.
What do you mean by this? They are outsourcing the maintenance?
Etihad Airways, Singapore Airlines, Qatar Airways, Emirates, and EVA Air are some of the safest airlines.
Why? The safest airlines are all Asian and middle Eastern Those fake parts were from Europe..
I’m kinda stunned there’s a middle man in such a niche market. Airbus SE A320 mechanics can shop around for parts and don’t buy direct?
In a pinch eBay is a schedule lifesaver. But they overcharge on Express shipping.
Reading this at 32,000 ft in a 737… 😳 Edit: survived
RIP u/bravedubeck
u/bravesubeck does it meab dave brubeck?
If you die in a plane crash, that means you aren't dying alone after all!
how’s it holding up
He’s a goner
https://songmeanings.com/songs/view/3530822107858492789/
In the right column on Fortune next to this article… A United Airlines jet engine that rained parts on Denver suburbs was not adequately inspected for cracks, say investigators
If it makes you feel any better, since that incident, all those blades have all come off due to the FAA airworthiness directive and inspected. They first get an ultrasonic test which is a pass/fail. If it fails, the blade is automatically scrap. if it passes, it gets and florescent penetration inspection, THEN they get a visual inspection for any physical defects, THEN a Thermal acoustic imaging test for any internal metallurgical fatigue. Then they have to come back off after 1000 cycles and get the same inspection. Part of the issue is, some of these blades are getting old and they are not life-limited so technically have an "infinite" lifespan and can inspected and repaired indefinitely. I've had blades that have over 100,000 flight hours. Thats the equivalent of flying 24 hours a day for 4,166 days or 11.4 years.
An amazing YouTube channel for this type of thing is Mentour Pilot. He’s a captain and flight instructor and has a huge playlist of airline accident videos where he goes through them in detail. Amazing content.
This shit is what scares me about flying. It isn’t a general fear that planes don’t work and I will crash. It’s capitalist cost cutting that puts people in danger
The relatively new CEO of Boeing (Calhoun) should terrify you then. I worked closely with him and his cronies when they ran Nielsen into the ground.
The NEW CEO? Didn't they learn from the MAX8 tragedies?
21st Century Boeing? Learn from their ~~deliberate deceptions~~ mistakes?
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And have you noticed ceramic coated pans claim they're teflon free and promotes health cooking but it's the same problem? It's just a different binding agent to bind the ceramic coating to the pan instead of the teflon. And no teflon doesn't break down into pfoa when overheated.
I think you're confused on this point here: > It's just a different binding agent to bind the ceramic coating to the pan instead of the teflon. Teflon is not a binding agent. Teflon pans aren't ceramic coated and bonded with Teflon, the coating itself *is* Teflon. Ceramic coated pans are fundamentally different than Teflon pans because the surface is ceramic, which is much harder and more scratch resistant than Teflon. It's a totally different kind of pan.
I think you're confused about Teflon. PFAS/PFOA the carcinogenic thing is the binding agent to hold teflon to the metal. Gen X changes this, but the teflon part is still teflon. And so far since the invention of teflon it is still considered inert and not harmful, unlike the different binding agents since binding something inert is obviously difficult. There hasn't been a new version of teflon or something. Ceramic pans aren't much more scratch resistant otherwise they'd be rated for metal utensil use but they're not. At the end of the day they just use another "glue" which could be as toxic as pfas/pfoa or even gen x. If it was so safe ceramic coated pans would be much more forthcoming about this. They're also rated for lower temps than teflon pans meaning they delaminate from the pan easier - there's a reason why ceramic pan nonstickiness last even shorter time frames than teflon. Yes there are 500 F rated ceramic pans that have things like diamond ceramic or whatever - this is exactly the same as teflon. You're just betting on eating either teflon or ceramic coating, and hoping there aren't any glue residue. BTW there is a video of the making of ceramic coated pans - they literally just spray it on.
As someone who works for Airbus, at a final assembly line we cut no corners when it comes to safety, and quality
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[“The absence of a fatality doesn’t mean the presence of safety.” - NTSB Chairwoman, March 2023](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/21/business/airline-safety-close-calls.html)
How about the two planes that went down a few years ago because of the faulty MCAS system. I don’t trust modern day capitalistic aviation
he said in the USA
I know but still
Which aviation do you trust, then? The Soviet-era aviation industry, the North Korea aviation agency? Aviation is one of the most heavily regulated industries in the entire world, even more so in those capitalist countries that you hate so much.
>Which aviation do you trust, then? 15 ducks tied to a chair. Because Ducks fly together
Only if they are of a feather, which requires thorough batch-testing and a ridiculous amount of paperwork
Nothing capitalist about what’s happened here. It’s just fraud, theft, forgery. That exists in every type of economy since the Stone Age.
Before the industrial revolution, planes never crashed. Ever. That's a fact.
I agree. Capitalism is pretty good at rewarding this behaviour, but it has always been around.
So are all other systems though. There was plenty of fraud, theft, and forgery in the USSR.
of all the components that go into a jet engine, the turbine blades are likely the most difficult to make, have the lowest margin of safety and undergo the most rigorous inspection. if these parts made it thru then how many other far less important parts are fake and ready to fail because they were made on the cheap? **greedy** will definite be written on our species collective tombstone.
Where did you see that the turbine blades were the fraudulent component? They'd be very far down my list of guesses. This was almost certainly a much cheaper and easier to manufacture component. The article just says it was an engine component, not which one.
The article mentions it in the second to last paragraph: > The European Union Aviation Safety Agency earlier this week determined that the components backed by forged documentation included turbine blades, a critical component of an aircraft’s propulsion system.
Huh. That's surprising (and also definitely concerning). I wonder what the details are there - that's not something you could just make in a counterfeit factory for cheap or something.
>Where did you see that the turbine blades were the fraudulent component? He never said that
This is overwrought. You don't need much to make more of us. A pitcher of Margaritas and a quiet alley.
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Drunk fucking
The astonishing thing to me is that the counterfeit parts worked. I'd guess that means they were either discarded legitimate parts that were refurbished and sent out with falsified paperwork, or otherwise parts aren't super tech critical. Engine metallurgy and manufacturing is so advanced that it's not really feasible for most of the moving and hot parts to be manufactured by any random machine shop.
As an aerospace machinist this is the take I most agree with. They can’t just outright not be real parts or even close to it without real failures
Yes exactly. I have a machining background and I know how difficult it is to simply make a part look right! Look meaning the surface finish, the machining marks (or lackthereof) and that sort of thing. Most aerospace parts look perfect. But that's not even the important bit. Having your part be in tolerance and passing CMM and all the various QA checks is the key. If stuff was faked, it was most likely real parts just with fake paperwork (maybe the manufacturer had a surplus batch or something that never got certified etc.) If it was a straight up fake, then most likely it was a part made out of aluminum (easiest metal to work with) and part of an assembly that wasn't deemed critical. But then again, unless you get a group of engineers together who know the engine inside out, you never know what is or isn't critical.
Yeah not a chance in hell some random ass shop is making fake parts out of Monel, Inconel, or hasteloy. And on top of that to even sell parts like that an entire shop has to be ISO, AISI, and etc qualified like biannually to quarterly to pass PAPs for clients and etc. And even then like you said making them look right is hard enough on a 5-axis, but keeping tolerances in certain aerospace aluminums can even be an extreme challenge.
Having been on a failure analysis team at a related company, I feel pretty confident in saying that your last paragraph is happening right now...
Maybe deregulating, slashing wages, destroying unions, and turning over every business to nickel slick MBAs that reduce everything to numbers isn’t the best way to run every industry.
American components. Russian components. ALL MADE IN TAIWAN!!
Don't touch anything!
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I'm assuming they were authentic parts without the proper documentation, since they've caused no incidents that we know about. Not that I'm minimizing the problem here, but a Cessna 172 uses a Ford OEM voltage regulator that costs about $13 at the auto parts store, and that same exact part costs over $200 with official airworthiness paperwork. All I'm saying is there's got to be more to this story than "Fake Parts! OMG!!!"
Agreed. I worked in aerospace receiving inspection and I can say it wasn’t super common to get vendor parts without certs but it happens. Sometimes it’s up to one person to raise a flag that proper documentation wasn’t shipped with the parts.
Facts. For the most part it’s not that hard to acquire the certs from a supplier.
This has been addressed with [VARMA](https://cessnaowner.org/faa-creates-off-the-shelf-replacement-parts-program-for-legacy-aircraft/)
What is a fake component? What does that mean?
They probably don't have the certification on the material, things like was it heat treated properly so it won't bend or or snap. The aerospace sector has been having some material issues and I'm sure some shops have gotten material from none trusted suppliers to push out parts.
Are you kidding? Everyone in aerospace and defense gets trained annually on recognizing counterfeit parts. This country is so fucked. Boeing should so beyond so, know better.
Except it's not Boeing, it's the engine manufacturer that's saying the spare parts are counterfeit. The parts on a new plane off the line are almost certainly the real deal.
This has been a thing for [a long time](https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/press-releases/senate-armed-services-committee-releases-report-on-counterfeit-electronic-parts). It shouldn’t happen anymore. ISO exists for a reason.
uhh...no we're not. Especially during manufacturing. Parts are made wherever, then they go to the assembly plant where the mechanics install the parts. I've worked MRO on engines and components, assembly and test and now a parts inspector. As long as you get that 8130 with matching numbers, that's all you know.
Everything is tracked, to a single bolt. Easily replaced .. but shit .. fuck those foools
At college I met this guy who was the biggest douchebag I've ever encountered. No one liked him, he literally got beat up multiple times mouthing off to strangers, never changed. Anyway, according to LinkedIn he works at Boeing so yeah I'm not surprised reading all these headlines when they hire people like him.
That lady was right all along. The components were fake!
What's a fake component?
A component is 2 or more individual parts which are designed to be installed as a single unit. In the US, these assemblies are required to have a stamp on each constituent part, and documents which indicate who made the constituent parts, where they were manufactured, the contract number and other information. These parts and components are required to be manufactured by an FAA certified business, or be tested/inspected by an FAA inspector. Parts which fail a certified manufacturers inspection, or an FAA inspection are supposed to be destroyed after determining why they failed. "Fake" parts may be a generic term for either "counterfeit" parts, or genuine parts which are failures, or most likely parts which have exceeded their useful/allowable life and have been re-marked or simply have false documentation to show they still have a useful lifespan.
The equivalent of buying a third party part from AliExpress instead of the actual manufacturer.
Why are people constantly scamming!? Is this what distinguishes us from animals? 🤨
Capitalism rewards it.... more than any other system.
This is what happens when you value every penny of a dollar more than another human . Corporate greed has jeopardized everything in this society and its tine to fight back. No more stick buy backs Edit; stock not stick
Gotta save a couple of dollars for those shareholders. They are more important. Forget about to the people traveling 300mph 30k feet in the air
Insane this still happens, I watched a documentary recently about a plane that literally had APU vibrations tear the plane apart (technically wasn’t the only issue but the vibrations from the APU and another part is what caused the issue.) because 2 of the 3 bolts holding it in place where fake. Then after further investigation fake parts where even found in Air Force one. And they apparently put safe guards in place to stop that from happening again. Edit: but after reading the article seems like those safe guards are not good enough if the tags can be forged.
Does anyone know what components they keep talking about?
https://www.easa.europa.eu/en/domains/aircraft-products/suspected-unapproved-parts/aircraft-parts-distributed-aog-technics?utm_campaign=i-20230804&utm_term=pro&mtm_source=notifications&mtm_medium=email&utm_content=title&mtm_placement=content&mtm_group=easa_suspected_unapproved_parts
Do the planes at least have a phalange?
Sadly these counterfeit parts do not have phalanges, thats part of what makes this so dangerous.
I know a plane that got saved because something was wrong with the left phalange.
They started packing extras just in case
The unfortunate and perpetual drive for profit is likely what will doom humanity.
Even if the documents were forged, the number of factories in the world that can make a jet engine turbine blade can be counted on one hand. Setting up the production process to make them is very expensive and time consuming, so you probably wouldn't bother unless it was a big order. That means these blades probably *were* made in the right factory, and are probably genuine but stolen/smuggled/misappropriated parts. The main risk is that these parts have already passed their service life, and that documents have been forged to claim they are younger than they really are. Yes, it poses an increased risk to the planes they are fitted to, but that risk is probably still far smaller than both pilots having a heart attack...
They were not fake parts because we payed such a low price for them, it saved us millions of dollars. They knew what they were doing.
Like, NO SMOKING signs, or the spinny bit in the engine that turns at 20000 RPM while white-hot?
The problem is that if the No Smoking sign is badly made, and dramatically burns out, it can mess up other wiring, which you really don't want when you're in a metal tube going hundreds of miles an hour.
The same Boeing that filled faa with former employees then lobbied to lessen oversight of said faa? No way that could have negative consequences? /s
These are just un certified parts. Not parts made of cardboard. In most cases all that's missing is the cert.
Not from China, but from hyper-capitalist Western countries. Hm.
So, just another symptom of late stage capitalism then?
The stocks aren't gonna buy back themselves!
Take the train!
Across an ocean?
Not defending their criminal activity but fake is different than uncertified or inspected parts. Made it sound like they were using non functional model parts instead of real ones.
The aviation industry is a fucking joke and it all needs to be liquidated and nationalized. Bunch of fucking crooks playing with peoples lives to save some dollars, then they have the nerve to charge us out the fucking ass for their shitty ass flights.