Conveniently, modern businesses and their leaders are judged and rewarded purely on short-term metrics.

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.

Buying from an untrusted source without any verification of your own in place.

> Buying your titanium from a titanium supplier?

For all we know they bought it on wish.com.

> Is Spirit supposed to be refine and foundry all their own metal alloys?

Random sampling of materials to determine if the delivery is fit for purpose should be the absolute minimum.

The parent is blaming quality control steps of outsourced materials at Boeing (not third party).

"Outsourcing = bad" is missing the point.

How is your question relevant?

It sort of makes sense to me with SpaceX. They’re presumably buying fairly boutique parts that likely already require custom manufacturing, so someone is spending capital either way. I can see how it might make sense for them to build a custom manufacturing line instead of paying someone else.

That seems odd for commodities like titanium, though. Even if Boeing were to do it themselves, that oversight process is already a subset of the mining and refining process. They’re going to have to build out their QA lab either way.

1. That doesn't make outsourcing "bad" before the cost benefit analysis. Commenters above are broadly blaming outsourcing.

2. As a thought experiment, specialized suppliers could be able to manage risks and costs cheaper due to absolute advantages. That's the whole point of outsourcing.

3. Mitigating the consequential and indirect damages to Boeing from this identity crisis could easily (my SWAG) justify hundreds of millions of dollars (another SWAG) in spend on better quality control audits.

The parent said that the quality control should be on the supplier, not Boeing. This is instead of a joint problem with Boeing validating.

Look at the repercussions.

Boeing gambled on shaving procurement oversight and lost.

Source?

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/11/airplane-maintenance...

This is just hillbilly mom-and-pop bullshit.

Outsourcing is mandatory if you are a company in aerospace. How would you even start making an airplane without outsourcing?

But, just like that fraud-plagued business environment, scale is what really matters. If you had 10X fewer suppliers, each with 10X fewer second-tiers, and so on down the chain...then how much easier would it be for Purchasing's QC people to stop sub-spec crap from reaching your factory floor?

The retailers job used to be offering the best value to their customers by filtering out the crap that was too cheap or overpriced.

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!

Even ignoring the political question of how things could be changed in practice, I am struggling to imagine ways to align incentives better.

Clearly they are ordering this stuff on aliexpress!

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..."

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09215...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal-induced_embrittlement

The carbon is an important part of the final material but it’s not really comparable.

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.

This seems to be about this titan: «Boeing and Airbus both said their tests of affected materials so far had shown no signs of problems.» I read this as implying that Airbus has been buying other things from the same source and done its own tests on samples: «“Numerous tests have been performed on parts coming from the same source of supply,” an Airbus spokeswoman said…»

Is the documentation process expensive enough that it's worth faking it even when the tested material is OK? Weird if so.

You can't prove the material is good, you can only trust that the material is good, and 50 years later observe how it held up.

You can't find out the distribution of the alloy ingredients, or detect voids, or crystal structures, or traces of other elements, except by sawing the part in half and looking at the cut surface.

You can't find out the critical properties by looking at it. All you can do is be sure you know the full truth of the history of the material and the part. You only know that if a certain recipe is followed, then the material will be good. You have to trust that the supplier did do the recipe exactly as specified. You can't look at the part after the fact and tell that. Even stress testing to failure doesn't tell you that because the material may pass the test today but fail from fatigue over time.

The only empirical test is actual use in actual conditions for the full actual time.

You can accelerate some tests, and failing an accelerated test obviously proves the material was bad, but it doesn't go the other way. Passing an accelerated test does not prove that the material is good for actual use in actual conditions for the full normal time.

The end of the article has it right, if the parts seem ok from what testing is possible, then they are probably ok for this minute, and it's probably good enough to just replace them at the first opportunity during routine maintenance.

I assume that the documentation asserts something acceptable about the manufacturer testing (accelerated, destructive, what have you). In theory it could assert that the production process was such and such without any information about resulting quality assurance, but that seems improbable.

Why can't those tests be repeated (on samples, obviously)?

Even if there was a destructive test that actually predicted lifetime performance, the total sample sizes are probably too small for statistics to be valid unless you destroy something like 10% or more. If you only have say 100 of something, a random samling of 1% is too few. 2 or 3 is no better. Maybe 10, IF all 10 gave perfectly consistent results. But there is no such test anyway.

I find it difficult to believe that aircraft metal production has less testing. And if not less, then surely that which the manufacturer does can be repeated on a sample by the aircraft company?

All the xrays and ultrasound and strain guages and spark chromatography in the world don't tell you how a part will perform and develop over time. But prior observation of a parts full lifetime and knowledge of it's production does.

Even destructive examination of random samples aren't sufficient for high stakes items when the total quantity is small.

Find it difficult to believe all you want. Or look into it and then not rely on uneducated lack of credulity to decide if something is bs or not.

When it comes to a chunk of alloy, the only way to trust the end product is to know that you created it according to a known protocol that previously has been shown to produce a certain performance result.

That protocol starts right with where the raw materials were sourced from, and every process they've been subject to along the way.

The only way to really know is if you did it all yourself.

Next best is to have documentation that you have reason to trust, ie, the supplier has a valuable reputation that they wouldn't dare risk all future jobs for the small short term gain from lying about any one job.

In this case, the supplier was a nameless supplier several subcontractor levels deep away from Boeing, and had no such reputation to worry about. The small immediate gain from a single sale was all they were ever after and they got it. Tomorrow they can do the same thing again just fine under a new random name to a new customer. And most customers won't even care because they are making bike parts and camping equipment and gimmik wallets and phone bodies not jet parts.

The manufacturer had to produce the material in a certain way, right? Mix specific amounts of other things into the titanium, use specific heat, specific cooling. (I don't know anything about metal, really, just assuming that these things are like how high-performance concrete is made.) Now, the choice of additives, amounts, temperatures, pressure etc. is based on testing, right? Someone chose a particular pressure after doing many tests using a range of pressures. The manufacturer isn't allowed to just set up a production process that matches that spec and just assume that the result will match the results elsewhere. But the manufacturer can't take decades to check the product at the normal passage of time either. So the manufacturer has to do some sort of accelerated test to check that the production process works as intended.

That testing is naturally not perfect. I understand that. And whatever testing Airbus/Boeing can do after taking delivery is also not perfect.

My question was rather: Why can't Airbus/Boeing reach the same standard of testing as the manufacturer? If the manufacturer can do some tests and document them (or just fake the documentation) and assert that its production process matches the spec, then I don't see why Airbus/Boeing can't. I do realise that it isn't sure to match reality, the thing I don't see is why Airbus/Boeing can't get as close to testing the spec as a (proper) manufacturer can. I'd like to understand that.

If the answer is that some significant aspect is unobservable afterwards, then my next question is how that was chosen to begin with.

Does this make more sense?

By interior composition and distribution I'm not talking about anything as comically stupid as plating like the inside is aluminum.

The surface of a finished part is routinely intentionally quite different from the interior, ie spin casting and case hardening etc. Frequently the performance of the part actually requires that the interior be different from the surface, ie hard shell resilient interior.

You can observe a lot about a finished part in various ways, like just tapping it and observing the sound can be more useful than an xray. But there's a lot you can not know after the fact through observation, except by observation of the eventual failure or not.

For one example, dissimilar materials, either within a casting or even just 2 parts in contact with each other, or a part and a brazing material, can migrate and diffuse into each other over time. Small differences in the initial conditions change how that develops over time, and can result in big changes in the performance of a part later.

You can't examine a finished part to determine that it was fabricated according to the recipe. You can only detect gross problems. You must trust that the supplier and their suppliers all followed the various recipes.

Here's another angle:

They first detected the forged paperwork because the guys on the factory floor observed that the material looked wrong.

So, it's the opposite of "you can't detect the difference". They detected a difference just plain visually.

The counterfeit parts might actually be perfectly sound. We don't know they will fail early, we only know that we can't trust the paperworks claims about how they were produced, where the materials were sourced from, how they were processed etc. Whatever the source and processes actually were, the end result might be inferior, or might be equivalent or even superior. (although detecting pitting they didn't expect does not lean towards the parts being superior)

They are able to observe that there is something different about these parts. They visually looked different enough to raise the question. Yet so far, they haven't been able to say that the parts are actually unsound through any testing or that initial visual observation.

It's not only that a part that looks perfect might not be, it's also true that even when you do detect a difference, it doesn't mean the part is bad.

You can observe a lot, but there is no amount of after-the-fact observation or testing that can replace knowledge of how a thing was produced.

I used to work in a pressure vessel fabrication shop (for customers like Shell and Exxon). We had a few handheld mass spectrometers for exactly this purpose. Destructive testing was achieved with what we called a "coupon", a piece of metal that ostensibly went through every treatment the base part did. The coupon was destructively tested, then etched and examined with a metallurgical microscope. This level of inspection is achieved by every ASME BPVC VIII compliant fab shop in the US and Canada; many of which are very, very small.

Boeing is outright negligent here if they didn't qualify their parts.

I cannot imagine (I say hopefully) that there is not some level of testing here, but I wonder if they were relying on supplier testing and the authenticity of that. But in that case I would also assume that there would be some source inspection of the supplier. These might all be bad assumptions, unfortunately, but this is coming from my experience working in aerospace on the space side of things.

That’s how you make sure Honeywell actually made this particular part, that your QA signed off on it, and that this particular one was used for stress tests and thus must never, ever end up in the spare parts bin.

This is accomplished by specifying a separate testing house that you trust for this, if you don't have your own equipment. Many manufacturers don't have a tensile test specimen puller, Charpy impact test machine, fatigue test machine, mass spectrometer, x-ray machine, ultrasound technician, or metallurgical lab technician on staff to verify all this. But what you don't do is blindly trust documentation supplied by the vendor.

Not to say you verify every little aspect of everything documented- at some point it's not economically viable. But everything I've mentioned above is pretty reasonable to do, especially as reliability in the end application becomes more critical.

2. Easiest, most accessible testing method is scratching it on tile or glass. When scratched against glass (or ceramic tile), steel will probably leave a real scratch, aluminum will do nothing, titanium will leave a pencil-like line.

You are correct that this is what the article says - testing suggests it is in fact titanium, just maybe not the right treatment.

That would be harder, but one would think that a company making airframes for aviation, in a highly regulated environment/etc, would occasionally send off samples to double check them.

Getting titanium analyzed to a degree you could tell whether it is the right grade/alloy is cheap and fast - I can get it done for <$100 per sample.

Given the cost of what they are producing, how few they produce, and how much they sell them for, and how quickly you can get this kind of thing done, they could test every single lot of titanium they get and neither increase cost, nor slow down production.

This also isn't a case where there are lots of people in the middle - this supplier is the ones machining and producing the final product from titanium alloys.

Also, if you change suppliers, wouldn't you at least test the stuff they give you the first time?

So it doesn't appear Spirit has sufficient testing, or that the titanium passes all the tests.

[0] - https://youtu.be/GnSBSKTC834?t=504 - not super happy with this video for a quick overview to provide to people, but this timestamp does cover this specific discussion; if I find a different video that covers the differences more broadly, I'll link it here.

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.

That looks like a binary split (All SWEs think in binary) therefore you are a SWE and should answer your own question.

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.

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%...

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...

Are you kidding? I doubt there is a single industry which empathizes traceability more than aerospace.

He’s not kidding - just ignorant. Another long running comment on HN where folks think every other industry is as fucked as tech.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232

The accident wasn't total only because of magnificent actions of the flight crew.

For further reading, https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/fields-of-fortune-the-cr...

  Despite the fatalities, the accident is considered a good example of successful crew resource management. A majority of those aboard survived; experienced test pilots in simulators were unable to reproduce a survivable landing. It has been termed "The Impossible Landing" as it is considered one of the most impressive landings ever performed in the history of aviation.

That doesn't mean what I'd assumed it would by mean just looking at the term.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management

In other industries, we say "that didn't work, VCs, can I have another $2M" and are just told "yup, of course!" As a result, we learn slow.

Personally, I stole checklists from aviation and love it. I remember one week I was on vacation and we needed to do a complicated migration. I prepared a checklist for the migration, and someone other than me did it. There was no downtime. We used the same checklists for future migrations, and again, nothing forgotten, nothing missed. It may be obvious to say "landing checklist: gear down" but it's effective.

Thousands of planes in the air every day, that one with engine failure has a pilot who practices without engines isn't surprising. I'd be more surprised if he was a skilled mechanic who repaired the engine in situ.

But it's also amazing just how few fatal air crashes there are! I know that the FAA is pretty incredible at their job, but there just aren't that many incidents of planes going down and killing everyone on board - and out of those few bad incidents, having two where everything lined up perfectly feelsl weird!

There were some "lap children" on the flight, some of whom died in the crash. So it was proposed that all children be in their own seats on commercial flights. This regulation was in place for less than a decade before being revoked. The reason? Economists estimated that because this would raise the cost of a family flying, it would encourage some to drive instead of flying -- and for every 1 life saved by the regulation, it would cost 60 lives due to the much more dangerous driving.

This was a very Canadian accident, in that they ran out of fuel halfway through their cross-country flight because of (in the end) conversion errors in calculating the required fuel amount for the then-new metric 767. Canada was still in the conversion process from imperial to metric, and the airline industry was a relative latecomer to that change.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider

But absolute respect to the pilot for getting it down in one piece. I mean on one level he was just doing his job. but sometimes that is all it takes to be a hero, to do your job in the face of adversary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=686xoeQAVA4

https://youtu.be/pT7CgWvD-x4

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?"

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?

Can anyone in the know comment if there's truth to the hypothesis?

That's part of why they're investigating how to replace parts made from it, the quality is unknown since there's no way to verify the certifications passed on through the suppliers since it's already known that the certificates are lies.

For all we know, this is Russian in source but given false documents to get it sold on the open market bypassing some sanctions or getting some oligarch sitting on a supply some extra money.

What is the source of this claim? I don't see it in NYT paper.

> but given false documents to get it sold on the open market bypassing some sanctions

It was sold in 2019, long before sanctions on titanium exports.

The claim is "we don't know", with Russia only being mentioned as a direct counterpoint to someone assuming it isn't Russian titanium.

Who is "we"? Besides, Putin and the Russian government chose this war, they were not pressured into it.

Edit: This isn’t Reddit, I thought downvotes were given for intellectual dishonesty or attacks, not simply voicing unpopular opinions

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.

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...

https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/...

e.g.:

> In tempering steel or iron, apply too much heat, so that the resulting bars and ingots are of poor quality.

> Mix good parts with unusable scrap and rejected parts.

> Misfile essential documents.

-- 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?