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Very long article but well worth the read. Scary stuff: "...a former drug trafficker from Colombia told South Florida detectives that she had switched to traff

by cfn 3y ago

Very long article but well worth the read. Scary stuff: "...a former drug trafficker from Colombia told South Florida detectives that she had switched to trafficking aircraft parts instead. After all, the money was almost as good — by some estimates, during the early 1990s, unapproved parts represented a $2 billion industry."

bboygravity 3y ago
So either unapproved parts are of very high quality or airlines have been extremely lucky so far?
- hef19898 3y ago
  A combination of both, aerospace is so safe, the edge cases and tiniest margins matter. Good quality parts of the non-flying variety are often good enough, they just aren't good enough all the time. Nor are they traceable. So luck, that the parts don't fail in cataszrophic fashion. And even bad quality "flying" parts are usually reasonable high quality, after all the folks handling the real parts on a daily basis have to be fooled as well.
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  All of the above. Parts may be real / legit parts that exceeded their official lifespan, or "3rd shift" parts made at the same factory with mostly or entirely the same materials, just not run through QA to save money and given fake testing certifications. Could also just be a knockoff that's good enough most of the time. Large flag carriers like Delta also have real staff and processes, and it looks like they're doing inspections and sometimes catching bogus parts; smaller organizations may not do that.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  The article discusses those possibilities. It seems this particular aircraft was so old and so extensively modified that the failures started adding up and combining in such unfathomable ways that they actually destroyed the plane. The worn out counterfeit bolts failed to destroy the plane. A shoddily made mount for a turbine generator literally broke but failed to destroy the plane. Both of them interacted at some points but failed to destroy the plane because the pilots turned off the generator in time. Only when they left the generator running for a long time did it interact long enough with the failures in the vertical stabilizer bolts to cause catastrophic aircraft destroying vibrations. > the FAA officials who played down the danger were not necessarily wrong either > unapproved parts cause annoying breakdowns and increase maintenance costs, but don’t directly cause crashes, simply because there are very few individual parts on an aircraft which could cause a crash if they fail > Redundancy in aircraft design largely shields us from the consequences, with the primary exception being very old aircraft like LN-PAA which predate many modern airworthiness requirements. > Even then, it took multiple unapproved parts in multiple locations, plus inadequate inspections and poor documentation, to actually bring down the plane. > So much was wrong with LN-PAA that its various faults started to interact in unpredictable ways, creating conditions which no one had foreseen, least of all the pilots, who probably went to their graves without any idea of what had befallen them.

by cfn 3y ago

bboygravity 3y ago

So either unapproved parts are of very high quality or airlines have been extremely lucky so far?

hef19898 3y ago
A combination of both, aerospace is so safe, the edge cases and tiniest margins matter. Good quality parts of the non-flying variety are often good enough, they just aren't good enough all the time. Nor are they traceable. So luck, that the parts don't fail in cataszrophic fashion. And even bad quality "flying" parts are usually reasonable high quality, after all the folks handling the real parts on a daily basis have to be fooled as well.
red-iron-pine 3y ago
All of the above. Parts may be real / legit parts that exceeded their official lifespan, or "3rd shift" parts made at the same factory with mostly or entirely the same materials, just not run through QA to save money and given fake testing certifications. Could also just be a knockoff that's good enough most of the time. Large flag carriers like Delta also have real staff and processes, and it looks like they're doing inspections and sometimes catching bogus parts; smaller organizations may not do that.
matheusmoreira 3y ago
The article discusses those possibilities. It seems this particular aircraft was so old and so extensively modified that the failures started adding up and combining in such unfathomable ways that they actually destroyed the plane. The worn out counterfeit bolts failed to destroy the plane. A shoddily made mount for a turbine generator literally broke but failed to destroy the plane. Both of them interacted at some points but failed to destroy the plane because the pilots turned off the generator in time. Only when they left the generator running for a long time did it interact long enough with the failures in the vertical stabilizer bolts to cause catastrophic aircraft destroying vibrations. > the FAA officials who played down the danger were not necessarily wrong either > unapproved parts cause annoying breakdowns and increase maintenance costs, but don’t directly cause crashes, simply because there are very few individual parts on an aircraft which could cause a crash if they fail > Redundancy in aircraft design largely shields us from the consequences, with the primary exception being very old aircraft like LN-PAA which predate many modern airworthiness requirements. > Even then, it took multiple unapproved parts in multiple locations, plus inadequate inspections and poor documentation, to actually bring down the plane. > So much was wrong with LN-PAA that its various faults started to interact in unpredictable ways, creating conditions which no one had foreseen, least of all the pilots, who probably went to their graves without any idea of what had befallen them.