777 went from 1995 to 2013 without a crash where anyone died. The first death was the SF crash where 3 people died. Prior to that 2 planes were lost on land but there were no deaths in those 2 incidents.
update: US very confident it’s a 777 part
http://www.wral.com/us-official-debris-in-photo-belongs-to-boeing-777/14801353/
“Flaperon”. Sounds like a Steam-Punk robot hooker from the Prohibition Era.
Yes - what is a flaperon?
A flaperon is a control surface that can act as both an aileron, controlling roll, and a flap, adding lift, depending on which is required.
That seems like a huge chunk of an aircraft and it looks quite heavy. Does a part that size just float or get moved with the tide?
I understand that aircraft parts are made to save as much weight as possible, but I’d struggle to recall a large part of a modern aircraft being washed up. Certainly other debris, but a wing part?
Maybe Richard Pearse can assist here.
That part is made of composite, ie super fancy fiberglass. And it is essentially hollow; just the thin skin you see with a few stiffeners on the inside.
Made of conventional aluminum something like that might weigh 150-200 lbs. Of composite, more like 75-100 lbs.
Since it’s fairly light, sealed on all sides, and full of air, it floats very nicely. Had it gotten a big gash in it, it would eventually have filled with seawater and sank. Which is most probably the fate of the majority of similar parts on the aircraft.
The first part located from the Air France 447 was a big piece of vertical tail. (http://fvcom.smast.umassd.edu/2014/01/10/2-outreach-af447-search/) The wings & tail are the lightweight hollow structures. the fuselage is much more dense and the engines & landing gear densest of all. If we’re going to find anything floating other than fabric or seat cushions, it’ll be wing or tail parts.
It’s not all that heavy. They’ve showed footage of just a couple guys lifting it up with one arm each to look at it’s underside.
In answer to the original question today’s paper had this:
Thanks LSL guy.
Will there be a push for all large parts or components of an aircraft to be individually marked with a serial numbers, so parts like this can be traced to exactly which aircraft they came from?
I think you will find this is already the case. Not just to be traced to an aircraft, but the entire provenance of each part is traceable - so even if a part is replaced, moved from another aircraft, re-manufactured, the entire history of the part is known - right down to the individual history of the metal ingots. I suspect the reason that it took so long for the flaperon is that the finders would be told in no uncertain terms not to do anything to it other than inspect it visually. Scrapping off accretions, opening it up to look for numbers inside would be right out. So all they had to go on was an indistinct marking on the outside that was the part number. But once in the hands of forensic engineers, it will be very carefully cleaned, inspected and tested for any clue as to the fate of the flight. During this process they will have access to all the individual part markings.
Thanks for the comprehensive answer. I would have thought that in reality, such a step would be overkill (sorry about the phrasing) in that overall very few actually go missing. Why impress numbers on millions of aircraft parts when one aircraft may go missing every few years.
However, if it is already done, my observations are otiose.
Yeah, BBC reports all aircraft parts have individual serial numbers already. That’s why they expect to have a definitive answer by about Sunday as to where this wing part came from.
I can see reasons for having serial numbers on each part for reasons other than identifying in case of a crash. Routine maintenance, for instance: the serial number can be used to keep track of the maintenance for individual parts, and determine if it’s time to be replaced as part of regular upkeep. Could also be handy if a flaw is detected in a particular part which is then recalled; could use the serial numbers to determine if a particular part is covered by the recall.
On an F1 car every part, right down to individual screws and washers is itemised and recorded in the computer control system. Each part has a predicted service life and gets replaced when it is time. If any part fails there is an exhaustive enquiry to find out precisely why and as a precaution any similar parts would be taken out of service and replaced. I was shown this system bach in the 90s and you can bet it is more sophisticated now.
If they will go to all that trouble with a racing car, I should hope that Boeing or Airbus would be doing the same.
Space shuttles had unique part numbers for every single thermal tile , over 20,000 per shuttle.
This is the reason everything has serial numbers. It has squat to do with identifying mystery missing jets.
Darn near every part bigger than a small screw has traceablilty back to the mine where the ore was dug from the ground. That way if a part fails they can see if others in the same batch are defective and determine whether the manufacturing process was defective, or maybe even the underlying metal was made defectively.
There’s a paper trail on damn near every part from birth to death.
The joke used is that a plane isn’t ready to fly until the weight of the paperwork exceeds the weight of the plane.
These days, there’s no reason not to do that for the screws themselves. Any item with an open area a couple tenths of a millimeter on a side can be laser-marked with a 2D barcode containing a hundred or so bits of information. I dunno if it’s done yet with aircraft fasteners, but it’s absolutely possible.