Scrapping an airplane is one reason an ID plate is removed. And apparently, from the documentary, those ID plates are secured to the party very well.
They did say that on that flaperon there were several ID numbers, only one of which connects it to MH370. However they did not say if all IDs (or more than one) are supposed to connect it to that flight.
It reminds me of when the Bermuda Triangle was supposed to be some sinister mystery, as opposed to just, you know, the ocean. Lots of ships and planes vanish in the ocean.
Not sure this is quite correct. Although I’m not a professional expert on this narrow point.
The airplane itself as a complete unitary entity has a manufacturer’s data plate on it with a single serial number. IIRC, that one is removed and destroyed or sent back to the manufacturer when the airplane is scrapped or wrecked. The intent being the serial number of the whole airplane can’t be reused. But …
Most of the parts & components of the plane have their own part number and serial number and a data plate to record those numbers. Each hydraulic pump, each aileron, each model ABC-123 electronic gizmo, each landing gear strut, each anything much bigger than a bolt or nut has a serial number and an attached dataplate for lifetime tracking. As those parts are swapped between airplanes during their operating life or when their host airplane is scrapped and most of the parts are recovered for resale / reuse, those numbers, dataplates, and records stay with the part.
It’s not like cars where the single whole-vehicle VIN might be stamped into several different places in the car hoping to foil “chop shops”, while all the other parts have no identifying serial numbers at all.
As applied to the MH370 wreckage, that means the flaperon has its own part number and serial number. And that assuming that info was visible on the wreckage, the paper trail could lead back to which airplane(s) it had ever been installed on since it as new and which airplane it was last installed on.
Old Rose : A deep ocean is a woman’s heart of secrets.
What did I read one time? “The aircraft was a complete wreck, but the data plate continued to fly.”
I also read there are more Bell 47s flying than were ever made, through the miracle of loose record keeping.
All these parts also get new data plates when they are repaired or modified. My sister is a partner in a business which manufactures replacement data plates for the companies which do this type of work. The plates have to meet very stringent controls for manufacturing standards and documentation.
Why stop there? Ok, a dataplate might be a bit much for a bolt, but it’s certainly possible to laser-etch a serial number (or bar code containing such) onto every single fastener.
There are moves afoot to attach mini RFID tags to darn everything in aerospace to enable the paperwork to be more accurate and potentially block-chained. To prevent the scenarios @Just_Asking_Questions was talking about.
If that’s not enough, try this outfit on for size: Dust Identity.
While i concede your basic point, laser etching can induce stress concentrations in a bolt.
But yes, every airplane part larger than about 2 sq inches has a part number, mfg date, mfg CAGE code, inspector’s stamp, and if required (not every part does) serial number. The USG is going to UID, which is a QR code type id tag as well, but not everything has it.
The part can be etched, ink stamped (yes, sometimes they write the part number on with a sharpie!), name plated, decaled, have cast in numbers, whatever works best for the application.
And the part number formats are unique to the model of aircraft, so if something washes up on shore, it doesn’t take long to find out what type of plane it belongs to, and what it is, even if it is mangled or half missing.
That would be handy for the counterfeiting problem, which I’m sure has impacted aerospace as much as it has semiconductors. Probably overkill for basic traceability, though.
“The smallest RFID tags are around 0.2 grams and the largest, rugged hard tags can be over 250 grams.”
So assuming only the smallest tags are used, and if 25,000 parts are tagged (how many parts would be tagged on a B777?), that’s about 5kg or roughly 10 lbs. That’s nothing.
For Florence de Changy, the French journalist in the documentary, to say that since the flaperon’s ID plate was missing then this flaperon must come from a dismantled plane, simply is faulty logic. More accurate is to say that the flaperon may come from a dismantled plane.
However the documentary does raise reasonable doubt that the flaperon might not come from MH370.
And there is not convincing, irrefutable evidence that the debris comes from MH370.
In an industry where lots of planes and parts are leased, the administrative overhead of ensuring the exact ownership and the exact remaining useful life of each and every time-limited part is huge. The hope of a lot of the RFID stuff is to eliminate yard and yards of paperwork and man-years of effort required to simply document the condition of a plane before it changes hands.
While you could etch a micro QR code onto the head of a fastener, the benefit of doing is questionable at best. Standard fasteners are purchased and received in bulk quantities, and while you should get a lot certification code (and for MIL spec parts, a lot acceptance package) it isn’t as if each fastener is individually inspected, tested, and accepted because that would add an extraordinary amount of labor and logistical tracking cost to what are already generally very expensive applications. And in the build paper for an aircraft, launch vehicle, or an expensive tactical rocket, every single serialized component has to be listed, and then if it is ever removed and replaced must be tracked as part of a discrepancy report or change order. If you hear the chorus of aerospace enthusiasts screaming now about the “blizzard of paperwork” that accompanies these systems (and not entirely without merit), imagine the three or more of orders of magnitude of effort that would involve recording and tracking every individual fastener; even if this was all done electronically it would just be an overwhelming amount of data to virtually no benefit.
Now, there are certain types of fasteners that are serialized such as strainserts, frangible/ordnance fasteners, break-away bolts, et cetera, but this is because they have some specific complex function beyond just being a fastener, and there are generally only a handful of these on a vehicle, so tracking them isn’t onerous, and they are also items that are often critical to reliability and functionality. Standard fasteners should be designed for use with safety margins that the loss of any given fastener doesn’t cause the entire system to fail or unzip in some catastrophic manner way. On occasion this isn’t possible and mandates some kind of testing and inspection to verify the the integrity of this critical connection.
While serialized components make it easier to track back when counterfeit or defective components are discovered, hopefully finding the source and/or reducing the scope of sibling item alerts, they really do nothing the prevent counterfeiting. I actually worked an issue with counterfeit fasteners at the beginning of my career and the way we were able to discover the source of counterfeits was through sample testing, purchased lot tracking, and then going back through the vendor to determine their sourcing, which was from an Indonesian ‘manufacturing’ company that was actually a pass-through for a Chinese manufacturing concern in addition to more legitimate source from Korea and Japan. Because the ostensible provider wasn’t making anything themselves and was intermingling production runs of fasteners from different manufacturer into a single ‘lot’, serialization wouldn’t have provided separation between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ fasteners and we had to scrap all of these (and run a very expensive field replacement campaign at our company’s expense) and reestablish a verifiable supply chain. Much later, I saw the same issue with batteries which, just because they were labeled and came with lot certifications didn’t mean that they weren’t a mix of real and counterfeit batteries, and serializing them at the provider level wouldn’t have made any difference whatsoever.
Counterfeiting is really a verification and trust problem that is one of the largely unseen problems of offshoring and globalization. When you can go to a manufacturer’s facility, validate that they are, in fact, doing the appropriate level of sample testing and inspection, do a walkthrough of build and lot acceptance paperwork to perform an eyes-on verification, and be able to hold an actual person accountable for ensuring that the documentation is complete and accurate, you can develop a high level of confidence that defects will be detected at a statistically determinate threshold and that counterfeits can’t be introduced into the system without deliberate fraud on the part of someone who can be held to account. When you get components from overseas by a company you only know from a letterhead and supplier number, ‘assured’ by people you will never meet and who will never be accountable for any loss of oversight or graft, you’re essentially trusting the fates that you won’t get scammed, and adding unit serialization into the process is just doing some kabuki to pretend that you are doing ‘something’ to assure quality control.
Stranger
If the regulations and controls over building an airplane are similar to those for building medical devices, and I’d imagine they are, then Boeing should be conducting supplier audits on manufacturers of critical parts that they use. The manufacturers would be required to certify that their parts meet the applicable standards, and Boeing would audit a sample of those critical parts to check that they do indeed meet the required standards.
While true for medical devices governed by the FDA, I’m not familiar with the FAA regs.
For major components, sure. Not only should a major contractor be auditing but often the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA) will have people in plant independently verifying that all testing and inspection meets contract requirements and required specifications. But for individual components like nuts and bolts? No, and especially when they are manufactured overseas. You basically get paperwork with the procurement that gives the lot acceptance information and whatever certifications are required, and you either accept it as-is or do addition sample inspection and acceptance testing for lot acceptance per contract requirements, internal ‘command media’, and industry best practices.
Stranger
It would be unusual for the inspector’s stamp to be on every part. However, the part’s serial number will be traceable to the inspection records, which must be traceable to the specific person who conducted the inspection.
Fasteners will NOT usually be individually traceable, but batch inspection records absolutely will exist.
ISO 13485 for medical devices and relevant ASTM standards can be a little cagey about when supplier audits are needed; it’s usually a risk-based decision, but you do have to have some documented logic as to how the decision was made. It depends on the medical device level. The aircraft industry is much the same.
This is true of suppliers whether they’re in your country or overseas. “It was too inconvenient a flight, so we just did it by e-mail” is not an excuse in the aerospace industry for not doing appropriate second party audits. No well-standardized industry end customers are going to tolerate that, whether we’re talking aerospace, medical devices, the nuclear power industry, etc.
As to common parts, it’s not by any stretch of the imagination much of a challenge to keep a close eye on such suppliers. I could certainly do it or supervise people to do it. Grifters and fakers always pull the same shit.
That’s a fair statement when it comes to significant components and subsystems (many of which are required to be produced domestically for that reason) but no OEM aerospace manufacturer is going to literally audit down to the common nuts and bolts level because of how expensive and wasteful that oversight is and they don’t have the volume margins of automotive manufacturers to absorb that kind of supply chain management oversight. They are reliant upon a distributor providing MIL spec or aviation-spec hardware to do their due diligence of auditing basic component manufacturers, and when these components were produced domestically it was a reasonable assumption that the distributor would be doing those verifications. With components procured from overseas, often with a blind on where the components are literally manufactured, it becomes virtually impossible to do that, and when suppliers cut corners the seem to do so first in terms of doing any independent sample testing and instead relying upon their ‘supplier’, which is usually a pass-through from numerous manufacturers in the case of basic hardware, to show that lot acceptance was supposedly done.
This is, again, an unforeseen and largely invisible consequence of globalization that you won’t be aware of unless you actually deal with procurement, and short of building your own plant to turn nuts and bolts (or whatever hardware you need), there isn’t really anything for a single OEM to do anything about it other than to spot check components with sample testing and hope that they don’t get a bunch of unscreened defects or counterfeits.
Stranger
The paper (open access):
A Stable Isotope Sclerochronology-Based Forensic Method for Reconstructing Debris Drift Paths With Application to the MH370 Crash
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2023AV000915
Richard Godfrey just released a new WSPR analysis of the possible flight track and have narrowed a search area down to about a 70x40nm box near 29.128S 99.934E or about 970mi WNW of Perth. Apparently part of that area was already searched, we’ll see if they go out there and try again.
As I understand it, WSPR measures radio signal propagation and the belief is that objects like aircraft interfere with the signal. The signal goes out every 2 minutes. By looking at anomalous signal data, like the variance in signal strength or timing between the transmitting station and a receiving station, you can use it as a form of global radar to detect aerial phenomena including aircraft.
It’s a rather interesting idea and fascinating that an airplane 1000’s of miles away from a transmitter could affect a signal, but I guess if we can pick up the Voyagers, finding a variance in a planetary signal might not be that hard if you know what you are looking for.
Two links, one to the post and another to the full report on Dropbox. The full report goes into methods and includes the script used to run the calculations.
That’s quite a narrow search.