Yesterday morning (11/7/01), Paul Harvey said that Pennsylvania State Police were desperately looking for a piece a metal (titanium, I believe)) about the size of a hubcap that was worth $25 Million!!!
This piece of metal was part of an aircraft and somehow became unfasten from a semi-truck. Probably due to Pennsylvania’s infamous potholes on its interstates.
I looked in CNN.COM, ABCNEWS.COM, USATODAY.COM amongst other sites for more information on the story. Haven’t found anything yet.
Did anyone else hear this story? A hubcap (even a wheel) can’t weight more than a couple hundred pounds. The piece of metal must have had some intricate machining or was alloyed with Gold or other precious metal to be worth $25 Million. A link would be much appreciated!
While Paul’s show is amusing to listen to he is not exactly the gold standard in accurate reporting.
“… and that little boy, who nobody like, grew up to be Roy Cohn. And now you know, the rest of the story.”
… Not, even if it was made out of gold it wouldn’t be worth the value quoted just on metal value. In any event Gold is not used in large quantities in aircraft/tech applications anyway. Ultra thin layers of gold on the canopy of an EA-6B Prowler keeps the crew from being microwaved by the antenna on the vertical fin. It’s concevable that such a valuable part could be that small and have been lost but its value wouldn’t be because of raw materials.
Actually, I heard that same story on Headline News and just found it on the AP State and Local Newswire. I know this board gets weird about posting stories though because of copyright infringement, and unfortunately, I used a pay service to get this, so I can’t supply the link.
That said, the story is true. A flatbed truck was carry 6 of the 356 pound half-oval titanium parts on pallets and lost one of them somewhere on either Route 11 or I-80 between Milton and Shickshinny, PA last Friday. The government would not disclose the purpose of the aircraft part, or the type of aircraft it is used on other than to say it was worth ‘roughly $25 million’ was bound for a location in Massachusetts, and that the trucking company will be issuing a finders fee for the part since they have now looked for it for close to a week with no luck. The part is described as looking like ‘half a hubcap’.
Okay, so was the PLANE worth $25M or was the PART worth $25M?
Figuring a rough guesstimate of $15/lb for Titanium, just in metal alone it’d be worth well over $5,000.
However, Ti is somewhat difficult to machine, and if the part is somewhat intricate, and/or has to be made to very close tolerances, then simple machine time, tooling costs, and esoterics like chain-of-custody, metallurgical assay, X-ray inspection and heat-treating, could easily make that a million-dollar part.
But I don’t believe $25 million… didn’t the F-14 when it first came out, go for a “mere” $17.7 million a copy?
It depends on the process, not only what Doc Nickel said, but also any specialty heat treating, chemical treatment, and what the failure rate on QA might be.
To give you an example, there was a specific Nuclear Instrumentation circuit card that only had a dozen chips on it, but the failure rate on Nuclear QA was so high that the manufacturer had to make close to a hundred of them to get one to pass standards. As a result, this one simple card cost US$1255.00. If this mysterious part is so intricate and demanding to make that it has a high QA failure rate, then I can fairly easily see US$25m for some crucial parts. Like maybe certain parts for the SR-71, perhaps?
Even if the part was single crystal titanium I would still have a difficult time accepting that price tag. Something’s fishy with this story. Most of all, a “356 pound half-oval titanium part” may have the shape of “half a hubcap”, but there’s no frickin’ way that heavy of a piece of a relatively light weight metal is the size of half a hubcap.
Someone please do the math and tell us what the cubic size of a 365 pound titanium slug is. It ain’t gonna fit on the wheel of a car.
As I said, if it is a 365 pound piece of single crystal titanium, then we are beginning to make sense. Everything else is way off the credibility scale.
Thanks, Una. I’m really beginning to suspect that it is a single crystal ingot of some sort. This is what they might carve off rotor blades from for a transonic attack fighter’s jet engines.
Single-crystal processing is only worthwhile for parts subjected to such high temperatures as well as stresses that creep is a significant issue as well as fatigue - that means early-stage turbine blades. Ti alloys lose their useful strength and fatigue capability well before that. Also, single-crystal or directionally-solidified blades are made to shape by a casting process.
Ti alloys’ dimensional stability makes precision machining difficult even before addressing the flammability issue. Ever seen a piece of magnesium get hot enough to burn? Ti’s the same, only worse). If dimensional control was all that critical, the part would have been designed some other way. So there’s no way to put that much value into such a piece, and all that precision would be lost after dropping off a truck anyway.
This story sounds like somebody got their message mixed up, or just yanked an impressive-sounding number out of the air.
Here’s a portion of the AP story I metioned which I assume is kosher to post:
Headline: Trucker loses airplane part worth $25 million
…A titanium aircraft part worth $25 million that fell off the back of a flatbed truck in Luzerne County has gone missing for three days, police said.
The part is believed to have fallen off the truck Friday night when one of the metal straps holding the part snapped, Shickshinny Police Chief Fred Nichols said. The part fell off the truck, which was bound for Massachusetts…
…The truck was carrying six of the 356-pound jet engine parts, each strapped to pallets on the back of the truck, Nichols said.
The part was owned by the federal government, although the part’s exact function is unclear, as is the model of the jet that uses the part.
…Each part is shaped like a half of an oval about half the size of a hubcap, Nichols said.
So in short, YES it is a part, not the whole plane, and while I don’t profess to know anything about machining Titanium or how much it should cost for a half hubcap sized part, that is the way the news reported it…
But, I can’t think of a single part in a turbojet/turbofan engine that would meet this description. (half oval, about half the size of a hub cap?)
How 'bout parts from developmental stuff, say a ramjet or scramjet maybe. This might explain the unusual shape, cost, and not specifying what plane it is from.
as a taxpayer, this pisses me off! yeah, lets just toss these 25 MILLION dollar parts on the ole’ flatbed and let Festus tool around the hillsides!
if its worth 25 MILLION, isn’t it at least worth putting IN a damn truck, by ITSELF? lets say that truck crashs! lets see, 6 of em at 25 MILLION a pop…holy hooters! that one truckload is worth more than the GNP of a lot of countrys!
I’m an aerospace engineer in the civil aircraft field. In fact, I happen to be working on titanium parts right now. I don’t know much about prices, but I won’t let that stop me from speculating.
I’m guessing that the quoted price must include the cost of the part’s engineering development (which may have taken years), not just the cost of reproducing that one part.
Let’s WAG:
The truck was carrying six of them. That’s $150 million. (I hope the driver had lots of insurance!)
Let’s guess non-recurring costs were 95%, meaning that the cost to actually machine a replacement part was $1.25 million (still a lot, but I’m willing to believe it).
If half of the non-recurring costs ($71 million) were engineering, at a WAG of $250 per engineering man-hour (includes salary, benefits, overhead, etc), that’s 284,000 engineering hours, or three year’s work for 47 engineers. Not unusual for a complicated engine component.
The other half of non-recurring costs ($71 million) would be tooling, facilities, testing, pre-production lots, etc, etc. As others have said, working with titanium is notoriously expensive. Computer-controlled milling machines could easily cost tens of millions.
Does all that sound reasonable? I dunno. I could be talking out my engineering ass.
My best guess is that the news reporter moved the decimal point two places to the right.
Why do I get a picture of Cletus picking this thing up off the side of the road, then taking it down to the local “Caps -R- Us” second hand dealer:
Cletus: Hey Joe-Bob, looky here wut I founded!
Joe-Bob: Damnation, boy, that thing’s already broke. I kint tell what model tis anyway.
Cletus: S’it worth anythang?
Joe-Bob: I’ll give ya a dollar. Hell, it’s something to look at anyways.
Cletus: Can I have a pop?
Joe-Bob: Sure, help yourself. How’s your Mama doin’ these days…
