Sitting in an FAA meeting...

  • Thread starter Thread starter Roger, Roger
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Roger, Roger

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...about maintenance practices and such on aging aircraft.

I'd rather be flying.
 
So a teardown inspection of a 25000 hour Navajo that had been flying in Alaska most of it's life revealed 2 tiny fatigue cracks in the spar splice area. Not too shabby.
 
I have flown that plane.

Or perhaps I haven't, that's why the fatigue cracks are so small.
 
TFaudree_ERAU said:
So if the cracks had gone un-noticed and the wing fallen off, the Navajo would have climbed just the same?
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TFaudree_ERAU said:
So if the cracks had gone un-noticed and the wing fallen off, the Navajo would have climbed just the same?
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Not really sure what you're getting at here, if it's a joke or if you're commenting on legitimate safety concerns on the Navajo fleet.

The long and short of it is, the FAA and to a lesser extent operators are "concerned" about the fatigue life of some of the aging aircraft that make up the air taxi fleet, principally the Navajos and the 402s. As part of this program, they have done extensive tear downs and NDT inspection on a couple high-time examples of each type. The most recent teardown, of a 25k hour Alaska Chieftain, showed a few areas of possible concern. The meeting was held to discuss and address these issues with operators. The biggie was some tiny cracks in bolt holes in the lower spar caps. However, their data is still extremely sketchy, as a similar NDT of a 36k hour aircraft showed no problems in those areas. Some ideas were tossed around about gathering further data and things that might could be done to address the issue, short of spar replacements (which, given the economics of your typical Navajo operation, would essentially kill the fleet). There is a report available somewhere on the FAA website detailing the results of their teardown inspection. Further detail would be better discussed via PM.
 
Roger said:
Not really sure what you're getting at here, if it's a joke or if you're commenting on legitimate safety concerns on the Navajo fleet.

The long and short of it is, the FAA and to a lesser extent operators are "concerned" about the fatigue life of some of the aging aircraft that make up the air taxi fleet, principally the Navajos and the 402s. As part of this program, they have done extensive tear downs and NDT inspection on a couple high-time examples of each type. The most recent teardown, of a 25k hour Alaska Chieftain, showed a few areas of possible concern. The meeting was held to discuss and address these issues with operators. The biggie was some tiny cracks in bolt holes in the lower spar caps. However, their data is still extremely sketchy, as a similar NDT of a 36k hour aircraft showed no problems in those areas. Some ideas were tossed around about gathering further data and things that might could be done to address the issue, short of spar replacements (which, given the economics of your typical Navajo operation, would essentially kill the fleet). There is a report available somewhere on the FAA website detailing the results of their teardown inspection. Further detail would be better discussed via PM.
Click to expand...

Two words:

Speed tape
 
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