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FAA Investigating How Counterfeit Titanium Got Into Boeing and Airbus Jets (yahoo.com) 101

"Titanium that was distributed with fake documentation has been found in commercial Boeing and Airbus jets," reports CNN. America's Federal Aviation Administration is now investigating whether those components pose a safety hazard to the public," along with the manufacturers of the aircraft and supplier Spirit AeroSystems.

"A parts supplier found small holes in the material from corrosion," the New York Times reported Friday: Boeing and Airbus both said their tests of affected materials so far had shown no signs of problems.

Boeing said it directly purchased most of the titanium used in its plane production, so most of its supply was unaffected. "This industrywide 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," Boeing said in a statement. "To ensure compliance, we are removing any affected parts on airplanes prior to delivery. Our analysis shows the in-service fleet can continue to fly safely."

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FAA Investigating How Counterfeit Titanium Got Into Boeing and Airbus Jets

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  • by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Sunday June 16, 2024 @03:33AM (#64552667) Homepage

    .... that people who deliberately deal in counterfeit safety related goods get life imprisonment or do we have to wait until a plane goes down before proper action is taken?

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Black Parrot ( 19622 )

      I'm surprised how many people are so chickenshit that they'll gladly get other people killed in order to make a buck.

      Or injured, sick, or starved.

      I wonder what percentage of the human race that is.

    • Re:Its time... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Sunday June 16, 2024 @04:07AM (#64552705)

      Harsh punishment is not a substitute for thorough enforcement.

      Most counterfeiting occurs overseas, where American law enforcement has no jurisdiction.

      Since the legitimate products also originate overseas, the counterfeits usually enter the supply chains before they arrive in America.

      The counterfeits are often produced in the same facilities, either by running a midnight shift off the books or by putting QA rejects back into the supply chain.

      • And perhaps lack of oversight?
        • And perhaps lack of oversight?

          Often, the overseers are the counterfeiters.

          Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? [wikipedia.org]

          • As they say, who watches the watchers?

            • Re:Its time... (Score:4, Informative)

              by postbigbang ( 761081 ) on Sunday June 16, 2024 @06:58AM (#64552845)

              The QA/QC industrial function has been cat-and-mouse since its inception. Military specs evolved into Mil-104, called inspection by sampling. The theory said, inspect from a random sample, so many pieces by inspection to the spec called out.

              Problem is, along the way, products with thousands of parts made this really expensive, and various exceptions to the standard of sampling inspection made this application favor goals of production over goals of vetted quality.

              The feedback loops for missing quality was to be based on field failures, which would tighten the sampling (more samples, also more expense).

              It's not a mystery that profits were the underlying motive to use whatever industrial rationalisms were used to subvert quality processes. The submission of fake parts is criminal, it's fraud. Now the lawyers will get rich, and further doubts about Boeing will taint what was once a stellar reputation for quality and the safety imbued in flyer minds.

              • Field failures driving future testing? Seriously? Damn.

                So only test after planes fall apart mid air? Fucking nuts.

                • Re:Its time... (Score:4, Informative)

                  by postbigbang ( 761081 ) on Sunday June 16, 2024 @07:59AM (#64552965)

                  Uh, no.

                  Aircraft goes through routine inspection, especially of critical parts as a function of maintenance schedules. Along the way, failures and or concerns become a feedback loop to QA/QC and manufacturing engineering regarding issues found-- and also success (inspection passed through testing).

                  Yes, there are forensic tests done to determine fatal flaws in addition to regular inspection of critical assemblies that determine airworthyness. And yes, it sometimes takes fatalities to warrant thorough re-examinations of designs that were BAD and could not have worked as designed, built, and/or flown.

                  Much work has been towards operational cost-effective lifecycles for aircraft to make airlines more profitable, especially long-haul. While seemingly an efficiency goal for a customer, instead, much has been subverted in terms of Boeing's zeal to dominate air travel. To lose reputation in the skies is a disaster for them-- and us. If they can ever regain their reputation, it will cost them billions and billions.

                  Many an aircraft vendor, through bad designs and poor quality, killed people. Survivors don't like that. Boeing lost that ideal. They once led the industry in safety and dogged quality. The MBAs took over.

                  • Ok, if that feedback system loop was working then why is Boeing having such problems?

                    • I wasn't there.

                      Looks from the surface as though it failed, and spectacularly.

                      Will they reform? This is where corporate culture meets the call of urgency or slides the long slide into the abyss.

      • In other words, you believe that no foreigners can be trusted.

      • ...and deliberately under-funding Q&A & safety inspectors.

        I'm sure they have plenty of well-worn excuses.
    • There's a 1949 film called "The Third Man" with a moral along these lines. Powerful stuff.
      • It is actually a book by Graham Greene, but the movie is not bad either.
        I do not remember what happened to the bad guy.

        But I remember to have learned that "give a lift" has nothing to do with an elevator. Strange that one can remember that he has learned a specific phrase in a certain book.

    • If these parts weren't titanium, then what was this stuff? Oatmeal?

      • Right? So these parts required an expensive metal that's hard to work with.
        But you know the fake one is fine too. Trust us, we're Boeing.

      • I suspect that it was titanium. Just not alloyed properly or refined to the specified purity.

      • by jbengt ( 874751 )

        If these parts weren't titanium, then what was this stuff?

        Apparently it was titanium, just not the properly tested grade/alloy that the certification claimed.

    • China is not going to turn them over. Besides, it is airbus/boeing fault for not bringing this in-house.
  • EA Nasir (Score:4, Informative)

    by weirdow ( 9298 ) on Sunday June 16, 2024 @03:43AM (#64552673) Homepage
    seems to have stepped up his game.
  • Our analysis shows the in-service fleet can continue to fly safely.

    Except for, you know, the bits blowing out or falling off or the unexpected flight behaviors during take-off and landing...

    I mean... technically the fleet CAN continue to fly safely if it none of that stuff ever happens.... Oh. Wait.

    • It doesn't matter how well your parts are made if you forget to put them on or don't torque them down properly.

      I wonder hiw much work Boeing put into their analysis* before making that statement. Theoretically, they would have to re-run every structural analysis for each critical part with revised material strengths and shorter lifetimes. Airlines are going to be pissed if Boeing revises its maintenance intervals downwards. "Take the whole thing apart and inspect for corrosion every X months."

      *Probably m

    • Boeing's problems seem to be caused more by sloppy design and manufacturing defects slipping through due to cost cutting so the suits can receive bigger bonuses, rather than by sub standard raw materials.
  • by Kunedog ( 1033226 ) on Sunday June 16, 2024 @04:43AM (#64552737)

    "A parts supplier found small holes in the material from corrosion," the New York Times reported Friday: Boeing and Airbus both said their tests of affected materials so far had shown no signs of problems.

    Are they testing with a Dremel?
    https://science.slashdot.org/s... [slashdot.org]

  • "Our analysis shows the in-service fleet can continue to fly safely."

    Yeah, just like those other times when their "analysis" showed Boeing makes safe aircraft, but reality had other ideas.

  • by Eunomion ( 8640039 ) on Sunday June 16, 2024 @04:55AM (#64552749)
    if they discover the counterfeit titanium with forged documentation came from a certain part of the world.
    • It doesn't matter where it came from. Why don't they test it locally before building a plane with it?

      • There was forged documentation that it had been tested. Is every single individual up the chain supposed to personally conduct their own tests? That would do wonders for the cost.

        That said, obviously they were skipping basic measures like spot checks and random QA tests if significant quantities got into production.
        • I'm talking about the final end point manufacturer. Lives, reputations and billions of dollars are on the line. Inspect and test is cheaper than planes falling apart in the air.

        • by rgmoore ( 133276 )

          Is every single individual up the chain supposed to personally conduct their own tests? That would do wonders for the cost.

          Yes, every stage of the chain is supposed to be doing their own tests. The company that bought the titanium should have been testing to make sure it was actually of the grade the supplier promised. The end purchaser of parts made from that material should have been testing them to ensure they met specifications. That might have included testing the alloy themselves. That kind of di

          • The absolute highest standard is far more than that: It would be for every individual person in the production management chain to conduct independent tests. Since no one's going to do that and stay in business, there's a slippery slope of relying increasingly on outside authority, since individuals, groups, and companies that do so are rewarded for externalizing the QA cost. Boeing has done this to an extreme, and should frankly just be shut down and broken up.
        • Back when it was very difficult and expensive to do the testing, probably not.

          Now that you can have your own instrument cheaper than a good used car that will do the testing for you, the final user making lots of expensive parts should definitely do testing.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Sunday June 16, 2024 @08:21AM (#64553005) Homepage Journal

      It appears to be a Turkish company that is to blame here. They bought some titanium from a Chinese supplier, who they will doubtless blame, and then sold it on as a certain grade. Later it came to light that it wasn't that grade at all, but it wasn't the Turkish supplier that noticed or reported it, it was an Italian customer.

      It's always the responsibility of the supplier to the customer to ensure that what they sell is what they say it is. We had the same thing with the horse meat scandal some years back - horse meat being sold as beef. Some journalist tracked down the factory it came from, and the owner was like "yeah, we are a horse meat factory, that's what we supply." Somewhere along the supply chain it was mislabelled.

      • You're info is out of date. Horse meat is a *current* scandal. ... Again.

  • by penguinoid ( 724646 ) on Sunday June 16, 2024 @05:32AM (#64552769) Homepage Journal

    The official certification process is very costly, and parts of indistinguishable quality can be obtained much cheaper. So every step in the supply chain could profit by faking the certification. The problem though is that some parts can only be verified earlier in the production phase, so a certified supply chain is the only assurance the quality is there. The only solutions are to just hope for the best, or to reduce the incentive to cheat (either by bigger of likelier punishment, or by making compliance cheaper), or to figure out some way to test the final product.

    • by Hodr ( 219920 )

      If your products are small plastic bricks and you sell billions of them a year for only cents a piece and the consequence of a bad item is minimal, it makes sense that you can't fully test/inspect every single item in a cost effective manner.

      If you sell only 500 items a year which average in cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars and the consequence of having a bad unit is potentially hundreds of deaths...then you can check the primary material being used to construct them.

      • then you can check the primary material being used to construct them

        Except you can't always, as the OP already said. In much the same way that the process for checking whether an animal has rabies results in the destruction of the animal, in many cases you can't tell whether a process or methodology was followed without destroying the material in question. For instance, there may not be a way for you to check the grain structure of a finished part without compromising the part by cutting into it, thus rendering it useless for its intended purpose, whereas the company you pa

  • Reality check (Score:5, Informative)

    by Luckyo ( 1726890 ) on Sunday June 16, 2024 @05:40AM (#64552779)

    Basically, this is the transition period from VSMPO-Avisma to mostly Japanese and Chinese suppliers as a result of Ukraine war and sanctions that followed it.

    Suddenly Boeing and Airbus found themselves with massively reduced access to world's largest manufacturer and machining supplier for titanium parts (Boeing getting completely cut off). So they had to urgently look for replacements, and it looks that at least some replacements ingested in a rush to replace the original supplier ended up being of insufficient quality.

    The problem is mostly behind us, as Boeing and Airbus have mostly finished transition to the like of Osaka Titanium and some Chinese suppliers that now understand necessary quality requirements and have experience in producing the relevant parts.

    • https://www.supplychainbrain.c... [slashdot.org]â> The original problem was from China, . and it remains. BoeingAirbus need to bring this in-house, but have instead added another company in between who no doubt will do the same.
      • Hmm . Putting in quotes with iPhones cause issues.
        https://www.supplychainbrain.c... [supplychainbrain.com]
        • nothing specific to the iphone. any character outside "standard ascii" (bytes 32-127) will "cause issues" with slashdot.

          iphone uses "smart quotes" by default, which replaces ascii quotation mark and apostrophe with left- and right-sided double and single quotation marks automatically. you can disable this feature if you want, for compatibility with ancient websites like slashdot and... well, tbh, it's mostly just slashdot... :-/

          • oh, if you mostly use modern websites, you can just long-press the quotation mark on the iphone keyboard when using slashdot, and it will offer the standard ascii ' and " as options.

      • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

        The original problem is replacing Russian machined parts. This caused the likes of Osaka Titanium to get overwhelmed, so some titanium had to be ingested from novel sources temporarily.

        They mostly solved this problem at this point. Relevant manufacturing capability has been built up, and Chinese suppliers have gained enough experience in delivering what their Western clients need to no longer put out lemons.

  • by Press2ToContinue ( 2424598 ) on Sunday June 16, 2024 @08:59AM (#64553083)
    but they actually bought Chinesium
  • by dicobalt ( 1536225 ) on Sunday June 16, 2024 @09:48AM (#64553177)
    Thats all you need to know.
  • Boeing said in a statement. "To ensure compliance, we are removing any affected parts on airplanes prior to delivery. Our analysis shows the in-service fleet can continue to fly safely."

    Great, if they hadn't already been caught raiding the scrap bin for parts to fit onto new aircraft...

  • From used parts being sold as new to counterfeit parts, there are supposed to be checks being being done to weed them out, but it seems the industry is rife with them now.

  • "Our analysis shows the in-service fleet can continue to fly safely" ... You can totally trust us this time!!! Wink wink, we promise!
  • No investigation needed.

  • by tiqui ( 1024021 ) on Sunday June 16, 2024 @01:02PM (#64553557)

    Actual Titanium deposits are extremely rare; it's generally found in low concentrations in deposits of other rare minerals. During the cold war, the primary known sources of it in reasonable concentrations were in Africa and in the Soviet Union. As a result, the Soviets were able to manufacture Alpha class submarines from Titanium, but the US government had to setup phony front companies to buy Titanium from the Soviets and unsavory African countries for use in small quantities in exotic critical aerospace projects like the SR-71.

    As a result, Titanium fell into an oddball category in the US aerospace industry - it nearly always came from "shady" sources and that was just accepted within the supply chain. Other metals, like steel and aluminum and magnesium had strict documentation/traceability rules, but titanium paperwork was less-scrutinized. Now, many years later and with deposits of minerals containing usable amounts of titanium having been found in places like Canada, the industry needs to get serious about holding titanium to the same standards as the other materials used in these critical applications.

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