To belabor the point and repeat a bit from Wikipedia, this was bar-none the absolute perfect flight crew possible. A flight crew with over 65000 hours experience and, riding as a passenger, a training pilot with a further 23000 who had specifically practiced this exact failure (total loss of hydraulics) after a lost craft four years prior.
Sioux City Approach: "United Two Thirty-Two Heavy, the wind's currently three six zero at one one; three sixty at eleven. You're cleared to land on any runway."
Haynes: "[laughter] Roger. [laughter] You want to be particular and make it a runway, huh?"
Critically the material is still titanium. Some of the paperwork is counterfeit so there’s concerns around quality control etc not what it is.
> Spirit is trying to determine where the titanium came from, whether it meets proper standards despite its phony documentation, and whether the parts made from the material are structurally sound enough to hold up through the projected life spans of the jets, company officials said. Spirit said it was trying to determine the most efficient way to remove and replace the affected parts if that ended up being necessary.
Unfortunately it's not enough for it to just be titanium. A hard alpha inclusion in an ingot used to make turbine blades was the root cause of the deaths of 112 people aboard United Airlines 232.
> Spirit is trying to determine where the titanium came from, whether it meets proper standards despite its phony documentation, and whether the parts made from the material are structurally sound enough to hold up through the projected life spans of the jets, company officials said. Spirit said it was trying to determine the most efficient way to remove and replace the affected parts if that ended up being necessary.
Why are they even considering keeping the counterfeit parts in?
Is the situation that Spirit AeroSystems believes the eventual answer will be that the aircraft can't be used with known-counterfeit parts, but they're dancing around liability or PR, or they don't want to grandstand upon their customers' toes?
It's not exactly counterfeit parts. It's that the paperwork for the titanium supplied wasn't right. So I guess it could be ok titanium with just bad paperwork rather than bad titanium. Also I guess it costs a lot to change.
I talked with a business man who said that the Chinese would absolutely perform to contract but no more. Early samples would be excellent, full production would be exactly and only what you asked for. Almost malicious compliance.
I talked with a Chinese salesperson who said they always signed contracts with foreigners using their English name. Such contracts are unenforceable. Almost malicious compliance.
It's hard for me to have sympathy for complaining about people doing the least they can when you're trying to pay the least you can.
It's difficult to enforce any international contract, particularly in a country like the People's Republic of China. That said, I don't think signing a contract with a different name gets you anywhere; if your counter-party can show that you signed the contract, or in a corporate context that someone who can reasonably have been presumed to have signing authority did so, you (or the company) is on the hook.
For anyone immediately going to UAF 232 as an example please realize that this is titanium used in the air frame not the engine. The engine is under dramatically higher loads and is far more material fault intolerant. I'm not saying this isn't serious issue but this is not as severe a concern, otherwise the planes would be grounded already.
Could just be Russian titanium. They're the #3 producer and probably aren't selling much to the West, these days. Looks like some predates the war, though.
Ive often wondered whether poor quality counterfeit parts are being inserted into the supply chain as a form of industrial sabotage by competitors (including nation-states).
This is a well known exploit, and is proven effective in times of conflict. I think it is safe to assume that such efforts are ongoing in many corners of the world at any given time.
The FAA has their hands full investigating problems _after_ they become problems. Are airplanes in a race to the bottom or is there an opportunity to inject quality and reliability into this industry?
> FAA has their hands full investigating problems _after_ they become problems
The FAA is constantly auditing, certifying and testing airmen, airplanes and plants. They have their hands full. But it's totally incorrect to say they're an ex post facto investigations agency.
The headline is spun. The text of the article doesn't allege "counterfeit titanium", only that the paperwork chain contains (according I guess to an audit done internally at Spirit) counterfeit documents. What that says about the metal itself is unknown. It seems more likely to me to be legitimate but stolen titanium than it does to be fake material.
It's not really feasible to fake something like a raw metal. Nothing else looks like titanium, nothing has the weight properties, even things like smells are different between metals that come out of different processes and tarnish in different ways. Basically by the time you got something that wouldn't be noticed by the assembly crews you'd have spent so much you might as well just have bought stolen titanium on the black market.
>It's not really feasible to fake something like a raw metal.
No one is trying to pass aluminum or steel as titanium.
It's pretty straightforward to pass one titanium alloy as another, or claim provenance or material properties it doesn't have. I have two indistinguishable scrap pieces on my desk right now, one Grade 5 and one Grade 2. It's also possible to pass a billet or sheet of alloy with defects or poor quality control, voids, or inclusions. "Titanium" is a broad class of materials that are indistinguishable without exotic tools like XRF guns, or, in this case, a well documented and trusted supply chain.
Alloy substitutions and similar fraud happen all the time. It can even be the same alloy but have issues in post treatment and not meet spec. Here's a case where a NASA supplier was committing this fraud for over 20 years. It included fraudulent documentation, but the material itself was not up to spec:
Yes, this is clearly the case. The phrase "counterfeit titanium" doesn't even make sense, because something counterfeit has the wrong provenance, and the provenance of an alloy or element isn't a meaningful property. You could say "counterfeit Krugerrands", but "counterfeit gold" doesn't make sense.
Now, it could be ersatz titanium, except that the article specifically says that it isn't:
> Spirit added that “more than 1,000 tests have been completed to confirm the mechanical and metallurgical properties of the affected material to ensure continued airworthiness.”
and
> Boeing said in an emailed statement: "This industry-wide issue affects some shipments of titanium received by a limited set of suppliers, and tests performed to date have indicated that the correct titanium alloy was used."
I agree with a sibling comment that this is probably about evading sanctions on Russian titanium, which is produced in such quantity that the US obtained it through intermediaries to build the SR-71 Blackbird.
It's also possible that these are counterfeit titanium parts, as in, real titanium, but not from the source that the documents claim. The article doesn't make that clear one way or the other.
It's not spun, you're just being overly literal. They're not talking about pure elemental titanium, alloy is implicit here. And even if it were a matter of pure titanium, passing off an alloy as that would also make it counterfeit.
> not really feasible to fake something like a raw metal
Metals come in various grades. That comes down to chemical purity, in case of commercially pure, and consistency, in case of alloys. But also crystal structure of the metal.
It's also possible that they're using an alloy which is not easily detected, or that the titanium is in a part which was painted or otherwise coated before receipt by Spirit
LoL, I think aviation traceability goes down to which licensed individual installed each screw down to the date, time, hour, and minute.
Further traceability goes back into the parts inventory, where I'm not sure of the commingling requirements on something like screws, but (eg) brake pads would almost certainly be traceable to the supplier and then manufacturer.
When you hear 'Titanium' mentioned in an engineering sense, rarely is this a reference to elemental titanium alone; structures use alloys of titanium which means small percentages of other metals are added (aluminum and vanadium for example are the two principle alloying metals in Grade 5 titanium, 6AL4V, probably the most common in aerosapce applications), and then the wrought products are even further processed through solution heat treating, etc. The same goes for aluminum, steels, etc. This is the purpose of the entire field of metallurgy....
Your comment would be like the equivalent in computer science of saying "Why do you need to write a computer program; the computer either works or it doesn't..."
Trying to back out what you actually have (if you don't trust the supply chain) can be expensive metallurgical analysis involving destructive testing, spectrometers, and electron microscopes.
The real way industry solves this problem is mill test reports produced by the suppliers and careful documentation of chain-of-custody.
Unless you don't care, then you just buy whatever from China and pretend you trust the counterfeit documentation that comes with it.
Answer I: Real-world materials are vastly more complex than "it's titanium, or it's not". Not that our craptastic modern educational system teaches such things, unless you're taking specialized engineering courses or technical training. For a skim, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy
Answer II: In theory, the headline should have said something like "Components which had falsified documentation to assert that they fully complied with Aerospace Engineering Specifications [long list of cryptic technical specification codes here] for Titanium...". But, outside of Ph.D.-authored articles in the (fake name) Journal of Aerospace Engineering Research, that's not how mass-market modern journalism works.
Most titanium has a small amount of ruthenium alloyed with it, which greatly increases corrosion resistance. So there should be chemical ways to test for it.
Treatment, alloyed metals along with it, grain structure, manufacturing process.
If you want an easily accessible intro to how metal treatment affects it's material properties go watch Forged in Fire. It is a blacksmithing game show where they make knives/swords but they go in to some of the reasons on why heating/cooling/forging metal in different ways can affect the structure of the metal and the strength of it with the exact same materials.
What is it with SWE's and binary thinking? No, titanium and any metal alloy is a huge spectrum of materials. There are thousands of steels, aluminums and so on.
What was the problematic outsourcing decision here? Buying your titanium from a titanium supplier? Is Spirit supposed to be refine and foundry all their own metal alloys?
I agree that it's a little bonkers that Boeing spun off it's own aerostructures, but since it seems like Boeing has it's own problems with internal fraudulent inspection reports, this sure doesn't seem like an out sourcing problem per-se.
I feel like this goes for personal life too. My particular problem du jour: some parts internal to my lawn mower engine crankcase self destructed and the engine needs a total rebuild or replacement. I replaced the camshaft 2 years ago with a cheapo Amazon part and I'll forever be kicking myself wondering if saving $20 on that destroyed a $1k (new price) engine.
It’s one of the things that’s fundamentally broken in our economic algorithm. There is genuine innovation, and then there is simply borrowing against the future. It’s really hard to tell the difference, and even if you can, the market can still behave irrationally.
Even ignoring the political question of how things could be changed in practice, I am struggling to imagine ways to align incentives better.
For the company as a whole, no, it's not worth it long term.
For the division chief who smashed their targets, got a big bonus and a promotion, and used it to jump to a higher-paying role at another company? You better believe it was worth it!
Titanium needs to be processed carefully, to conform all specifications. Tiny impurities from atmospheric nitrogen can be fatal for a plane made from this titanium. So the supply chain must be known, certified or whatever.
Russia is the 3rd largest producer of titanium sponge. But titanium sponge does not come from a mine. Ilmenite and rutile come from mines, and then is industrially processed to isolate the titanium.
This has nothing to do with anything in the article, or related material, it was China. and even if it did, is oddly flippant and fallacious, it's not sourcing that's the issue, it's the fake titanium.
> Spirit added that “more than 1,000 tests have been completed to confirm the mechanical and metallurgical properties of the affected material to ensure continued airworthiness.”
So basically, has nothing to do with safety? Is this simply Uncle Sam is mad he couldn't take a dip of the proceeds?
This is such a dull, reflexively anti-government take that has absolutely nothing to do with the situation, the government isn't involved in certifying the authenticity of materials. In any case, Boeing is massively _subsidized_ by the federal government and not the other way around.
The false provenance was discovered by an Italian company, and then Spirit did their own investigation and found they had titanium from the same supplier with the same issue of false provenance. Spirit notified both Boeing and Airbus. Spirit produces parts for both Boeing and Airbus. This isn't about the FAA helping Boeing cover their asses, this is a real issue that impacts both Boeing and Airbus since the titanium ended up in planes from both companies.
draven|1 year ago
pfdietz|1 year ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232
The accident wasn't total only because of magnificent actions of the flight crew.
TomatoCo|1 year ago
For further reading, https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/fields-of-fortune-the-cr...
ckw|1 year ago
tim333|1 year ago
vitiral|1 year ago
Sioux City Approach: "United Two Thirty-Two Heavy, the wind's currently three six zero at one one; three sixty at eleven. You're cleared to land on any runway."
Haynes: "[laughter] Roger. [laughter] You want to be particular and make it a runway, huh?"
instagib|1 year ago
https://youtu.be/pT7CgWvD-x4
magicalhippo|1 year ago
Though buying from a relatively little known Chinese vendor without thorough testing on your own seems a bit reckless.
[1]: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/aluminum-extrusion-manufactur...
[2]: https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-nasa-metals-fraud-201...
hulitu|1 year ago
Retric|1 year ago
> Spirit is trying to determine where the titanium came from, whether it meets proper standards despite its phony documentation, and whether the parts made from the material are structurally sound enough to hold up through the projected life spans of the jets, company officials said. Spirit said it was trying to determine the most efficient way to remove and replace the affected parts if that ended up being necessary.
_moof|1 year ago
ThePowerOfFuet|1 year ago
neilv|1 year ago
Why are they even considering keeping the counterfeit parts in?
Is the situation that Spirit AeroSystems believes the eventual answer will be that the aircraft can't be used with known-counterfeit parts, but they're dancing around liability or PR, or they don't want to grandstand upon their customers' toes?
tim333|1 year ago
readthenotes1|1 year ago
I talked with a business man who said that the Chinese would absolutely perform to contract but no more. Early samples would be excellent, full production would be exactly and only what you asked for. Almost malicious compliance.
I talked with a Chinese salesperson who said they always signed contracts with foreigners using their English name. Such contracts are unenforceable. Almost malicious compliance.
It's hard for me to have sympathy for complaining about people doing the least they can when you're trying to pay the least you can.
abakker|1 year ago
nickff|1 year ago
lupusreal|1 year ago
Heh, they're the good guys in this story apparently.
silisili|1 year ago
class3shock|1 year ago
crazygringo|1 year ago
-- is it most likely lower-quality or wrong-quality titanium being passed off in an effort to fraudulently save money?
-- or is it probably the real deal, but stolen from a warehouse somewhere and the certificate is fraudulent merely to conceal that it was stolen?
dehrmann|1 year ago
lazyeye|1 year ago
K0balt|1 year ago
richardatlarge|1 year ago
BooneJS|1 year ago
JumpCrisscross|1 year ago
The FAA is constantly auditing, certifying and testing airmen, airplanes and plants. They have their hands full. But it's totally incorrect to say they're an ex post facto investigations agency.
chaostheory|1 year ago
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/11/airplane-maintenance...
ajross|1 year ago
It's not really feasible to fake something like a raw metal. Nothing else looks like titanium, nothing has the weight properties, even things like smells are different between metals that come out of different processes and tarnish in different ways. Basically by the time you got something that wouldn't be noticed by the assembly crews you'd have spent so much you might as well just have bought stolen titanium on the black market.
daniel_reetz|1 year ago
No one is trying to pass aluminum or steel as titanium.
It's pretty straightforward to pass one titanium alloy as another, or claim provenance or material properties it doesn't have. I have two indistinguishable scrap pieces on my desk right now, one Grade 5 and one Grade 2. It's also possible to pass a billet or sheet of alloy with defects or poor quality control, voids, or inclusions. "Titanium" is a broad class of materials that are indistinguishable without exotic tools like XRF guns, or, in this case, a well documented and trusted supply chain.
Alloy substitutions and similar fraud happen all the time. It can even be the same alloy but have issues in post treatment and not meet spec. Here's a case where a NASA supplier was committing this fraud for over 20 years. It included fraudulent documentation, but the material itself was not up to spec:
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-supplier-was-delivering-fault...
samatman|1 year ago
Now, it could be ersatz titanium, except that the article specifically says that it isn't:
> Spirit added that “more than 1,000 tests have been completed to confirm the mechanical and metallurgical properties of the affected material to ensure continued airworthiness.”
and
> Boeing said in an emailed statement: "This industry-wide issue affects some shipments of titanium received by a limited set of suppliers, and tests performed to date have indicated that the correct titanium alloy was used."
I agree with a sibling comment that this is probably about evading sanctions on Russian titanium, which is produced in such quantity that the US obtained it through intermediaries to build the SR-71 Blackbird.
It's also possible that these are counterfeit titanium parts, as in, real titanium, but not from the source that the documents claim. The article doesn't make that clear one way or the other.
lupusreal|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
CPLX|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
JumpCrisscross|1 year ago
Metals come in various grades. That comes down to chemical purity, in case of commercially pure, and consistency, in case of alloys. But also crystal structure of the metal.
bpodgursky|1 year ago
nickff|1 year ago
DannyBee|1 year ago
Clearly they are ordering this stuff on aliexpress!
nxobject|1 year ago
therealpygon|1 year ago
thriftwy|1 year ago
I've glanced the article but didn't figure out the source.
wannacboatmovie|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
Simulacra|1 year ago
ramses0|1 year ago
Further traceability goes back into the parts inventory, where I'm not sure of the commingling requirements on something like screws, but (eg) brake pads would almost certainly be traceable to the supplier and then manufacturer.
https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fdisciples...
constantcrying|1 year ago
Are you kidding? I doubt there is a single industry which empathizes traceability more than aerospace.
JSDevOps|1 year ago
mk_stjames|1 year ago
Your comment would be like the equivalent in computer science of saying "Why do you need to write a computer program; the computer either works or it doesn't..."
jordanb|1 year ago
Trying to back out what you actually have (if you don't trust the supply chain) can be expensive metallurgical analysis involving destructive testing, spectrometers, and electron microscopes.
The real way industry solves this problem is mill test reports produced by the suppliers and careful documentation of chain-of-custody.
Unless you don't care, then you just buy whatever from China and pretend you trust the counterfeit documentation that comes with it.
bell-cot|1 year ago
Answer II: In theory, the headline should have said something like "Components which had falsified documentation to assert that they fully complied with Aerospace Engineering Specifications [long list of cryptic technical specification codes here] for Titanium...". But, outside of Ph.D.-authored articles in the (fake name) Journal of Aerospace Engineering Research, that's not how mass-market modern journalism works.
patmorgan23|1 year ago
Side note: some things never change. Here's an ancient tablet, From someone complaining about the quality of copper they were sold.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%...
shrubble|1 year ago
dr_orpheus|1 year ago
If you want an easily accessible intro to how metal treatment affects it's material properties go watch Forged in Fire. It is a blacksmithing game show where they make knives/swords but they go in to some of the reasons on why heating/cooling/forging metal in different ways can affect the structure of the metal and the strength of it with the exact same materials.
carabiner|1 year ago
qwerpy|1 year ago
smcin|1 year ago
Marazan|1 year ago
Bad_CRC|1 year ago
rjsw|1 year ago
bell-cot|1 year ago
Conveniently, modern businesses and their leaders are judged and rewarded purely on short-term metrics.
icegreentea2|1 year ago
I agree that it's a little bonkers that Boeing spun off it's own aerostructures, but since it seems like Boeing has it's own problems with internal fraudulent inspection reports, this sure doesn't seem like an out sourcing problem per-se.
constantcrying|1 year ago
Outsourcing is mandatory if you are a company in aerospace. How would you even start making an airplane without outsourcing?
stn8188|1 year ago
janalsncm|1 year ago
Even ignoring the political question of how things could be changed in practice, I am struggling to imagine ways to align incentives better.
pimlottc|1 year ago
For the division chief who smashed their targets, got a big bonus and a promotion, and used it to jump to a higher-paying role at another company? You better believe it was worth it!
Lisdexamfeta|1 year ago
sampa|1 year ago
[deleted]
snakeyjake|1 year ago
zukzuk|1 year ago
standardly|1 year ago
[deleted]
kylehotchkiss|1 year ago
[deleted]
ordu|1 year ago
Titanium needs to be processed carefully, to conform all specifications. Tiny impurities from atmospheric nitrogen can be fatal for a plane made from this titanium. So the supply chain must be known, certified or whatever.
jjulius|1 year ago
Counterfeit titanium may cause problems up to, and including, the plane crashing and killing everyone onboard.
kube-system|1 year ago
The mining of these ores isn't primarily in Russia: https://www.statista.com/statistics/759972/mine-production-t...
refulgentis|1 year ago
agomez314|1 year ago
baud147258|1 year ago
rootusrootus|1 year ago
nimbius|1 year ago
ChrisArchitect|1 year ago
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40679599
exabrial|1 year ago
So basically, has nothing to do with safety? Is this simply Uncle Sam is mad he couldn't take a dip of the proceeds?
empath75|1 year ago
kube-system|1 year ago
trylfthsk|1 year ago
throwaway9143|1 year ago
Gives you Haggis.
"Well it's all food so what's the big deal, stop regulating me."
hehdhdjehehegwv|1 year ago
FAA should just be rehoused under department of commerce where the job is actually to promote and protect American business interests.
At least then we can admit we have no regulatory oversight of aviation safety. Let’s be honest as a country for once.
Jtsummers|1 year ago