Posted on 11/13/2001 7:17:04 AM PST by afraidfortherepublic
For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost, For want of a horse, the war was lost.
My ears perked up as I listened to the NTSB inspector talking this morning on Fox News. He described how the tail of the plane had sheared off in a clean break before it dropped an engine and wing and crashed into a peaceful Rockaway neighborhood.
"What do you think?" I asked my husband.
"Bolts," he replied.
Fifteen years ago, when my husband took the job as VP of Engineering for a large midwestern gear manufacturer, he found himself facing the decision of what to do with $3M worth of "high strength" (Grade 8) industrial bolts. The problem was that they had been found to be counterfeit. As the new man of the staff, it was awkward to have to tell the CEO that he'd have to take a loss on these fasteners. But, without hesitation, my husband ordered them to be thrown into the smelter to be incorporated into new steel, where they would pose no harm.
To understand this problem, you have to go back a little farther to Malcom Baldridge, the so-called guru of quality in American manufacturing. Baldridge accomplished many fine things during the Reagan Administration, but he was responsible for at least one major blunder. Baldridge opened American fastener markets to foreign competiton.
Prior to Baldridge, the world of industrial fasteners was managed and policed by the IFI, an agency that set the standards for high strength fasteners that are used in the aircraft, military, shipping, industrial, and automotive industries. Standards were adhered to religiously.
High strength bolts are marked Grade 12, 10, 8, and 5, depending on the strength of the steel and marked accordingly at manufacture with hash marks. The lowest grade is 2, and they are not marked at all. They also vary widely in price from under a dollar for the cheapest grade to $25 or more for the highest grade.
The average bolt at your hardware store is a grade 2 (unmarked). The average person would probably never encounter a bolt that is stronger than a grade 5 (in your car). If you look hard at Sears, you may find a grade 8, but probably never a grade 10 or 12, which are reserved for aircraft, military, and heavy industrial uses.
After our markets were opened to foreign competition, unethical overseas manufacturers and brokers quickly discovered that they could counterfeit the cheap bolts and sell them for a higher price, reaping enormous profits. In other words, they could make a cheap bolt and mark it as if it were a Grade 8, 10, or 12.
In 1986, my husband discovered a large stock of these counterfeit grade 8 bolts at his new company that his predecessor had ordered and had to deliver the bad news to the head office that they must be scrapped. It was a controversial decision, but one the company easily made.
Five years later, either 60 Minutes or 20/20 broadcast a program devoted to this problem. It seems that a large stock of these counterfeit bolts (grade 10s and 12s) had found their way to Turkey where they were being used in aircraft repair and maintenance. (Some of our airlines contract their repair to places like Turkey to save money on maintenance.)
Because not all companies are as ethical has my husband's former employeer, and not all engineers are as astute and as ethical as my husband, it is likely that there still are stocks of these bolts floating around the world. The problem is that if they are used where a truly high strength bolt is required, they are apt to shear without notice.
Questions for AA should be:
We have been so quick in this country to undercut American manufacturing. We may be reaping some of the results now.
A similar thing happened in the nuclear industry back in the 80s. Fortunately, one of the major manufactures discovered the counterfeits and put out an alert across the industry before any of the counterfeit hardware made it out of stockrooms into the plants.
This could be the problem with that crash, but don’t think that is likely. Industry has been very aware of the counterfeit business for a long time and protect themselves against it.
Agreed. But what about overseas contractors where our airlines send their planes for cheap repairs?
I guess that could be a possibility if the airline doesn't have tight reign on QC.
As to the inventory problem, I do remember the nuclear industry and the NRC going through stockrooms and purging anything that was not to spec. They took it very serious at the time. I don't have any insight on the airline industry.
I had the same thought about the vertical stablizer that the news pix shows being picked up intact from the water. A fault could exist for quite some time in the mounting of the vertical stablizer, UNTIL an engine failure forces a large side load on it to handle the asymetric thrust. THEN it would give way.
As for the conspiracy theorists, sorry, but there are too many wierd things with this crash to point to any kind of bomb or shoot down. Pilots saw flame from the engine during the takeoff roll. The plane doesn't climb well, as would happen in an engine failure. Then the vertical gives way causing instant roll over and crash. I could see some kind of damage someone caused to the engine causing it to fail. But that doesn't explain the vertical stablizer failure. More likly this is a real accident, where an unusual situation (engine failure) exposed a long standing problem with the Vertical Stab mounting.
I wouldn’t feel too warm and fuzzy about the counterfeit bolts being "purged" from the system. The only way to tell the good from the bad is by destructive testing, which needs to be carried out on each and every lot of bolts. While some of the bolts can be classed as "suspect" based on the manufacturer’s head markings, even these markings have been forged. The DOD has done a reasonable job of testing - to my knowledge, the other industries have relied mostly on statistical sampling with very small lot sizes, giving extremely limited knowledge as to the true extent of the problem.
You make a valid point IMHO.
Multiple KC-135's (707s) were flying racetracks with a few miles of separation. Somehow, wing-tip vortices were created that disturbed the air to such a point that the tanker in the story started performing violent snap rolls. The aircraft rolled first 90 degrees left, then 180 degrees right...left and right wing tips alternately pointing at the ground...the aircrew struggled (successfully) to break free of the turbulence.
When they were finally able to land, they discovered that three of their four engine nacelles had been stressed to the point that most of the bolts holding them on the airplane had been sheared. The pilot felt that it was a miracle none of them had fallen off...
In order to improve fatigue resistance, the thread form has a controlled radius at the root. Many bolts were found in inventories which were supposed to have the controlled root radius but did not.
There were some inventories where fully one-third of the bolts were discrepant.
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