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Repairing Damaged Aircraft
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Repairing Damaged Aircraft Is a Difficult and Expensive Business
Aircraft damage is becoming more difficult to detect and repair, as well as becoming more than ever critical to aircraft safety, and the world’s airworthiness authorities are increasingly concerned at the diminishing resources available to monitor properly the maintenance practices of the airlines.
These are problems which are concerning airworthiness authorities and both civil and military operators worldwide, given that, for example, a third of the US civil aircraft fleet is now beyond its original design life of 20 years. The Aloha 737 accident in April 1988, where the top of the fuselage “unzipped”, indicated that a close hard look at damage mechanisms was needed. Matters being examined are the regulation of airworthiness, structural integrity, damage tolerance versus fail safe versus safe life philosophies, detection and repair techniques, use of composite materials and maintenance practices – topics of great concern to safety and economics for all operators. As well, there seem to be some political pressures emerging, seeking to reduce the costs of ensuring airworthiness.
The US Federal Aviation Administration has its “Initiatives in Aging Aircraft Research for Assurance of Continuing Airworthiness”, a program mandated by the US Aviation Safety Research Act of 1988. The intent is to develop technologies needed to ensure continued airworthiness of older US civil aircraft. The program investigates the implications of: the increasing frequency of small simultaneous structural cracks linking to “unzip” into a catastrophic break (Multiple Site Damage, MSD, as in the Aloha 737 incident): the increasing frequency of cracks in inaccessible places and the decreasing chances of detection; interaction of fatigue and corrosion; and the stress problems induced by improperly designed or applied repairs. The program covers both metallic and composite structures and examines past and present structural design practices, maintenance and inspection, corrosion control, human factors and a concept of using intelligent networks to search and correlate maintenance data from diverse sources to increase the maintenance database.
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