COLUMN ONE : Jet Parts: Cracks in the System : Suppliers are free to inspect their own parts. Such quality control leeway leaves the testing industry open to fraud, and air travelers vulnerable to tragedy.
The crash of a DC-10 jetliner last summer in Sioux City, Iowa, which killed 112 people and miraculously spared 184, was ordained 18 years earlier.
In 1971, a titanium disk was installed in a General Electric jet engine, which was later mounted onto the DC-10. But the disk had a flaw, one that would go undetected in one inspection test after another.
On July 19, 1989, the disk disintegrated, knocked out most of the jet’s control system and sent the plane cartwheeling down the runway--earning the accident a grim distinction as one of the most deadly failures of quality control testing in U.S. aircraft history.
Although there is no evidence of wrongdoing, a federal investigation has revealed that GE and its subcontractors had concerns from the beginning about whether its quality control tests were adequate.
The disclosure comes amid growing concerns that the system for testing commercial and military aircraft components is deeply flawed and can have tragic consequences.
Industry experts point to basic deficiencies. There are no mandatory standards for individuals or companies that conduct tests. And the testing process turns on an honor system, leaving manufacturers free to pass judgment on the quality of their own parts.
“The need for improvement is . . . obvious,” said Desmond D. Dewey, executive director of the American Society for Nondestructive Testing, the leading technical organization for U.S. testing standards.
At its worst, the system appears wide open to fraud. In dozens of felony cases, aerospace contractors have been convicted of falsifying tests on such products as aircraft castings, missile welds, cockpit instruments, engine bolts and missile guidance systems--parts that can cost anywhere from 50 cents to $10,000 apiece. In some cases, federal officials don’t know where the defective parts have ended up.
Owners of aerospace subcontractors describe a system where financial pressures have had a corrosive effect. If parts are rejected as substandard, suppliers can lose bonuses for prompt deliveries; so suppliers cover up their quality problems.
Suppliers often threaten to take business away from independent labs if they don’t certify their parts. Although most labs resist the pressure to certify bad parts, some in Southern California are known as “Certs R Us” shops, as one machine shop owner describes them. Inspectors who stand their ground are often fired.
“I suppose government authorities will address this subject when we slam a 747 into an office building and it is attributed to falsified tests and certification on a component of the airplane,” said Ron Cedillos, owner of Cedillos Testing Co., a Long Beach lab.
There is some movement toward reform. The testing society is seeking to establish national standards for inspectors. And Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Lomita) instructed the Federal Aviation Administration in a House report this year to look into a system that would require independent lab testing of aircraft parts.
Future legislation is likely to require not only that independent labs conduct tests, but also that tests be paid for by prime contractors rather than their suppliers. Prime contractors presumably would insist that parts be top-quality and suppliers wouldn’t be able to shop for accommodating labs. Very few aerospace contractors have such a system today. One exception in Southern California is General Dynamics’ Pomona Division.
Although aircraft are made of several hundred tons of aluminum, as a general rule their structures are supposed to have no defect larger than the head of a pin--more precisely, 3/64ths of an inch.
Testing Expensive
Much of a plane’s critical primary structure--the ribs, spars and frames whose loss could cause an accident--must be free of any detectable defect. That means no voids, cracks or contamination of the metal or composite plastics.
Assuring those standards depends on non-destructive testing, a procedure in which a part is not cut apart or otherwise destroyed to determine quality. By some estimates, 5% or more of an aircraft’s cost can be attributed to the expense of testing parts. With jetliners costing up to $125 million apiece, testing can cost $6.25 million.
At the heart of quality control testing is the quality of those who do the tests. An estimated 80% of the nation’s 12,000 top inspectors--so called Level III test technicians--have been qualified only by their own employers and have never passed tests administered by technical societies.
Level III inspectors are the most capable, supervising Level II inspectors and writing procedures for them to follow. Level I inspectors, often considered trainees, have limited responsibilities.
There are no rules about what must be covered in written exams for inspectors, and parts suppliers are able to hire anyone they want to administer exams to inspectors and certify them.
“There are . . . unethical people out there” who will administer examinations of any degree of difficulty that a company wants, said Ron Selner, manager of technical services at the American Society of Nondestructive Testing. “We have even seen documents that . . . say if a guy fails a Level II exam and gets 60% of the answers correct, then he is a Level I . . . You ought to go back and give him a Level I test. He may not be any better on a Level I.”
The current system of quality control testing gives enormous responsibility to inspectors. They face enormous pressures as well. Honest disagreements over the quality of parts can turn into heated confrontations. If inspectors stand up for what they believe, they risk getting fired.
Consider Michael Lee Meadows. The veteran aerospace inspector refused to certify a Navy missile casing based on his evaluation that it had signs of a crack. His boss at El Segundo-based Airite Division of Dover Sargent Co., a forging house, disagreed with the conclusion. “He asked me if my opinion would be any different if I were standing in an unemployment line,” Meadows recalled.
Meadows, 38, refused to certify the part and was fired last year as a Level III non-destructive test technician. He now lives in Mojave and works for the Air Force.
Richard La Chance, Airite’s general manager, said the $10,000 missile casing that Meadows wanted to reject was good and that Airite’s metallurgist sided against Meadows. La Chance said the company had earlier destroyed another missile casing in a special destructive test to satisfy an assertion by Meadows that it was bad. La Chance said the destructive tests showed the unit was good, but Meadows said that the test proved that casing to be defective.
“The question was, when I have a referee--and then another referee--and I still can’t get parts moved, what do I do at that point?” La Chance said. “He refused to be a part of the team.”
A High Price
Leading quality-control experts say such incidents are not uncommon. “I lost my own boy three jobs in quality control simply because I taught him don’t take anything that is second best and don’t stand for any unethical practices by management,” said Selner, the executive at the American Society of Nondestrutive Testing. “Because he wouldn’t sign off for (defective) things, he got ditched. Now that was not the purported reason that he got laid off or fired, but that’s why he lost his job.”
There are a range of quality-control tests. The most widely used include: fluorescent penetrant inspections, in which parts are dipped into a dye that exposes cracks under a black light; magnetic particle inspections, in which magnetic fields combined with a dye help to expose cracks; radiography, in which parts are X-rayed; and ultrasonic tests, in which sound waves detect flaws in the grain of the metal.
The tests are sophisticated, but the cover-ups are simple.
One inspection process requires that only a sample of parts be tested, but if any one part in the sample fails, then the whole batch must be tested. Getting around that requirement is easy. When a bad part shows up, throw it back into the batch, pick out another part and keep testing until you have all the good test parts you need. In one variation of the scheme, the same good parts are used over and over in X-ray examinations.
Cases of outright fraud are increasing. VSI Inc., a leading supplier of aerospace rivets and other fasteners, pleaded guilty in May to four counts of falsifying test results. Two former quality control supervisors at the firm’s Voi-Shan unit in Chatsworth also pleaded guilty.
Voi-Shan possessed an approval stamp for “Inspector 11,” but there was no Inspector 11. Rather, the stamp was used to approve defective parts, said Tom Runion, one of two Voi-Shan inspectors whose allegations led to the criminal probe. An estimated 37,000 certifications were made using the Inspector 11 stamp, according to Runion’s attorney, Will Ramsey.
Los Angeles-based Northrop paid a record $17-million fine earlier this year when it pleaded guilty to criminal charges that it falsified tests of guidance systems for nuclear-armed cruise missiles.
In Tampa, Fla., Aerodyne Investment Castings pleaded guilty last year to criminal charges that it certified castings for warplanes and tanks made with scrap metal rather than the required virgin alloy.
Derek J. Vander Schaaf, the Pentagon’s deputy inspector general, says phony testing is one of his top priorities in investigating defense fraud. “We have had dozens and dozens of cases that have been pressed over the years,” he said.
But many Pentagon officials in the field view fraudulent testing as a minor problem.
“We like to think of (fraud) as more of an exception than the rule,” said Robert Gibson, a branch chief for quality assurance at the Pentagon’s Defense Contract Management Region office in Los Angeles. “We deal with 5,000 (firms in the Southern California) region. If we thought they were all fraudulent, we would need an organization as large as the industry to police it.”
The Pentagon has a local staff of 636 quality assurance representatives and specialists, who receive eight weeks of formal job training and then go on to audit contractors and conduct actual inspections of parts in some cases.
Fearful of fraud and sloppiness, some private firms are getting tougher on suppliers. Boeing, the world’s leading aircraft producer, has tightened surveillance of suppliers in recent months, though it asserts that Boeing aircraft are safe. The company has recently assigned six workers to a special unit for investigating allegations of flawed products and improper testing.
“The industry has had a lot of problems with fraud cases, and we felt that was an untenable situation,” said Bob Bogash, Boeing’s director of quality surveillance. In addition to the fraud unit, Boeing has a contingent of several dozen quality-control representatives in Southern California.
Warren Rose, owner of Bell Gardens-based V&W; Castings, discovered the hard way about the Boeing quality-control representatives. On a routine inspection several weeks ago, a Boeing man spotted an unauthorized welding repair being performed on a V&W; casting. As a result, Boeing disqualified V&W; as a supplier, Rose said.
Boeing will permit such welding repairs, Rose said, but only if it gives authorization--something he didn’t get. “They saw the welded casting, and at that point they blew the whistle,” Rose said. Despite the problem, he asserted, “I have integrity. I fly on airplanes myself. I don’t want to go down because of a defective part.”
Although faulty parts won’t necessarily cause an aircraft to crash, the failure of some critical parts poses major safety risks. The jet engine disk that ruptured in the Sioux City DC-10 accident was one such part.
The disk started as a billet of titanium cast at the Titanium Metals Corp. of America in New Jersey and then was forged into a 27-inch disk at Alcoa Corp. in Cleveland. The last stop was at GE’s jet engine plant in Kentucky. It was apparently inspected at each factory, but the flaw was never detected.
When the disk failed, metal fragments disabled three hydraulic systems on the DC-10, leaving the jumbo jet with virtually no controls.
Since the disk was made 19 years ago, General Electric and its vendors have changed their processes, and company officials testified in a government hearing that a flaw such as the one at issue in the Sioux City crash is now less likely to occur. General Electric officials declined to be interviewed.
The accident hearings, however, have raised questions about whether tests were capable of detecting the flaw even if performed correctly. Memorandums uncovered by federal investigators indicate that GE and Alcoa officials had questions about the adequacy of the tests dating back to 1972.
Moreover, serious discrepancies were found in GE’s quality control records. Six so-called “sister disks” from the same batch of titanium were still operating in other engines at the time of the crash, according to production records. But when federal investigators recalled those disks, chemical analysis showed that they could not have been from the same batch, a spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board said. The mystery remains unsolved.
Meanwhile, the FAA is concerned about what the Sioux City accident says about shortcomings in the system of parts testing. Leading outside experts are dismayed. Says Dewey, the testing society official, “We cringe when we see those kinds of things.”
