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."I just left Jack Rogers," Casey said."I think he's planning a story that says we're shipping the wing to China, and there's trouble in the executive suite." "Uh-oh," Eileen said."That's not good." "Edgarton better talk to him, and put it to rest." "Edgarton isn't doing any press," Eileen said."John will be back at six o'clock.You want to talk to him then?" "I better, yes." "I'll put you down," Eileen said.PROOF TEST10:19 A.M.It looked like an aviation junkyard: old fuselages, tails, and wing sections littered the landscape, raised up on rusty scaffolding.But the air was filled with the steady hum of compressors, and heavy tubing ran to the airplane parts, like intravenous lines to a patient This was Proof Test, also known as Twist-and-Shout, the domain of the infamous Amos Peters.Casey saw him off to the right, a hunched figure in shirtsleeves and baggy pants, bent over a readout stand, beneath an aft fuselage section of the Norton widebody."Amos," she called, waving as she walked over to him.He turned, glanced at her."Go away."Amos was a legend at Norton.Reclusive and obstinate, he was nearly seventy, long past mandatory retirement age, yet he continued to work because he was vital to the company.His specialty was the arcane field of damage tolerance, or fatigue testing.And fatigue testing was of vastly greater importance than it had been ten years before.Since deregulation, the carriers were flying aircraft longer than anybody ever expected.Three thousand aircraft in the domestic fleet were now more than twenty years old.That number would double in five years.Nobody really knew what would happen to all those aircraft as they continued to age.Except Amos.It was Amos who had been brought in by the NTSB as a consultant on the famous Aloha 737 accident, back in 1988.Aloha was an inter-island carrier in Hawaii.One of their airplanes was cruising at 24,000 feet when suddenly eighteen feet of the airplane's outer skin peeled off the fuselage, from the cabin door to the wing; the cabin decompressed, and a stewardess was sucked out and killed.Despite the explosive pressure loss, the plane managed to land safely at Maui, where it was scrapped on the spot.The rest of Aloha's fleet was examined for corrosion and fatigue damage.Two more high-time 737s were scrapped, and a third underwent months of repairs.All three had extensive skin cracks and other corrosion damage.When the FAA issued an Airworthiness Directive mandating inspections of the rest of the 737 fleet, forty-nine more planes, operated by eighteen different carriers, were found to have extensive cracking.Industry observers were perplexed by the accident, because Boeing, Aloha, and the FAA were supposedly all watching the carrier's 737 fleet.Corrosion cracking was a known problem on some early-production 737s; Boeing had already warned Aloha that the salty, humid Hawaiian climate was a "severe" corrosion environment.Afterward, the investigation found multiple causes for the accident.It turned out that Aloha, making short hops between islands, was accumulating flight cycles of takeoff and landing at a faster rate than maintenance was scheduled to handle.This stress, combined with corrosion from ocean air, produced a series of small cracks in the aircraft skin.These were unnoticed by Aloha, because they were short of trained personnel.The FAA didn't catch them because they were overworked and understaffed.The FAA's principal maintenance inspector in Honolulu supervised nine carriers and seven repair stations around the Pacific, from China to Singapore to the Philippines.Eventually, a flight occurred in which the cracks extended and the structure failed.Following the incident, Aloha, Boeing, and the FAA formed a circular firing squad.The undetected structural damage in Aloha's fleet was variously attributed to poor management, poor maintenance, poor FAA inspection, poor engineering.Accusations ricocheted back and forth for years afterward.But the Aloha flight had also focused industry attention on the problem of aging aircraft, and it had made Amos famous within Norton.He'd convinced management to begin buying more old aircraft, turning wings and fuselages into proof test articles.Day after day, his test fixtures applied repetitive pressures to aging aircraft, stressing them to simulate takeoffs and landings, wind shear and turbulence, so Amos could study how and where they cracked."Amos," she said, coming up to him, "it's me.Casey Singleton."He blinked myopically."Oh.Casey.Didn't recognize you." He squinted at her."Doctor gave me a new prescription [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]