A Near-Death Experience

God looks after fools and little children.

Ok, I'm getting old and times might have changed since I was in the Army and used cranes. But back then, the fastest way to get a sargent's boot up your ass was to do something stupid safety-wise like walk under a load.

Where were their heads at?

The whole thing would have been a non-incident if they would have lowered the plane and inspected the rigging at the first sign of a problem.

I think they are still working on the mess, and it may cost nearly as much as replacing the entire satellite to tear it down, send every part back to the manufacturer for a complete tear-down inspection and recertifying the component for flight, replacing the obviously damaged structural components, and then putting the whole thing back together. Obviously, Lockheed Martin is going to lose several hundred million $ on this incident.

Jon

did it work after thay put it back together??

A few weeks ago we had a seminar at work about counterfeit or improperly specified parts. It started off with a video of a several hundred foot tall radio tower that collapsed as it was being erected, taking 4 or 5 installers with it. The image of those bodies falling stays with you a while. Later inspection showed that counterfeit bolts had been used for key structural elements.

That reminds me - I really ought to replace the bolts on that import engine hoist in the garage.

Mike

A developmentally delayed fellow enjoying himself at a carnival here in Taxachusetts died this fall because some slob substituted an undersized bolt holding on the side of the carnival ride car he was in. The bolt is mentioned in this article.

Other stories I've read about this accident went into more detail about the bolt being much smaller than the OEM ones on all the other cars on that ride.

They'll probably never nail the stupid s**te who did that, but some insurance company is gonna shell out plenty I bet.

Jeff

Accidents can happen so easily. A twenty plus ton load dropped about a foot to the deck of the truck trailer last week. The sling chain snapped a link. The trucker was crawling around underneath checking his trailer afterward :')) The guy on the pendant was standing on the deck about ten feet in front of the thing when it let go. I was behind a large frame a safe distance but did seethe flash of light as the link failed. No one was in line with the chain as it flew around. We have 23 more lifts like this one. We now have new half inch chain instead of the 3/8 which was maxed out between the two cranes. We also had been walking around grinding off weld scabs only a few minutes before it was located over the trailer. Randy

This one is not quite along the same lines, but nonetheless a very interesting item with potential deadly consequences. I work for a very large aircraft manufacturer. In the process of building widebody airplanes, the front and back body sections are joined to the center body and wing section in a huge jig called final body join. After the sections are slid together and aligned, there are a number of titanium temporary fasteners that are installed to keep anything from moving. It's called "pinning" Sixteen or so pins, I think. So, early one morning after an airplane had been joined and pinned, someone (well, the story seems to change slightly depending on who you hear it from!) decided to jack the tail up six inches. Okay, so here's a rather long airplane and the leverage exerted from about a hundred feet back on three varied aluminum alloy layers, none more than a quarter of an inch thick is pretty incredible. Can you imagine what happened next? Up until this point, I had never seen a bent titanium fastener of this type. Not just bent once, but dog-legged. Well, I'm told by those that were walking around at the time that it sounded like popcorn or .22 rounds going off, and these fasteners came flying out a rather great velocities. People were diving all over the place to avoid something they had no clue about. The skin material next to the holes was swaged/squashed up and/or pulled "long" and when the strain was too much, the "nuts" on the pins gave way, letting these things fly. The damage was so extensive they went ahead and finished building the plane, stuck together with a few hundred temporary bolts, then when done down the line, they pulled it aside and replaced several million dollars worth of skin panels and underlying structure. Pretty incredible what it looked like, being able to see all the way through the plane to the other side, with nothing but the skeleton seeming to hold it together.

"B.B." wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@library.airnews.net... | This was at my dad's work. They were moving an F-16 with a crane | when there was a loud pop. Naturally, they stopped the crane, and | unnaturally a bunch of people started walking around the plane to figure | out what had popped. Including roaming around beneath it. | Nobody found anything, so everyone got back and they started moving | the whole thing again. A second later, popohshitwham! F16 on the floor | with a few million in damage to it. | Turns out when they recently overhauled the cranes there someone | ordered a wrong bolt--was off by one line in the chart. So the | connection between the hook and the pulleys wasn't strong enough and | gave way. | They're extremely lucky the thing didn't fall on those idiots under | it. At that time it was down to one half-sheared bolt holding up the | whole weight. | | -- | B.B. --I am not a goat! thegoat4 at airmail dot net |

Um. After maintenance don't you stress test your cranes with a max load of test weights?

I really don't know. Like I said, it was at my dad's work--not mine.

NOAA-N-Prime. They bolted it to the adapter, but didn't notice the adapter wasn't bolted to the turnover cart, after it'd been borrowed by the DMSP folks. Oops.

Check out which has the final report. "We recommend ass beatings all around but it won't change a thing"

"The Technician Supervisor even commented that there were empty bolt holes, the rest of the team and the RTE in particular dismissed the comment and did not pursue the issue further. Finally, the lead technician and the Product Assurance (PA) inspector committed violations in signing off the TOC verification procedure step without personally conducting or witnessing the operation. The MIB found such violations were routinely practiced."

"The MIB finds the LMSSC system safety program to be very ineffective. Few resources are allocated to system safety, few requirements for safety oversight exist and little programmatic supervision was provided for the safety representatives."

"Also, some team members were notified as late as quitting time the day before the operation that they were to perform the next day."

Gee Golly! That's NEVER happened to me!!

-gc

On Mon, 27 Dec 2004 15:13:18 -0500, Jeff Wisnia vaguely proposed a theory ......and in reply I say!:

remove ns from my header address to reply via email

And "The Sizzler fatality was the second amusement ride death in Massachusetts this year. A 55-year-old man with cerebral palsy was thrown from a roller coaster at Six Flags New England in Agawam in May."

Seems like riding funfairs is _un_fair, if you are already suffering from nature-inflicted debilities. Talk about kick a guy when he's down!

Not been near cranes for over twenty five years now and even before that Cranes had to have a test certificate so had any chains or wire ropes used for lifting purposes. No test certificate, no insurance. These had to be renewed annually. But that was in the UK.

Steve

It's all part of some manager's master plan to save a couple bucks to make himself look better to investors. Gotta justify your existence right?

Where I worked, we had sets of 45 gallon oil drums filled with concrete rigged up to test cranes at max load. It was a hassle bringing them into the clean room but cranes that had undergone maintenance dang well got tested before they were trusted with a satellite.

If that's the tower that collapsed in Texas, a friend of mine, Cowboy was his nickname, was one of the flyers, rest his soul. That was to be one of the tallest towers in the world, if I remember correctly. Seems like at the time, someone calculated the time it took them to hit the ground at something like 9 or more seconds, enough time to think about it.

RJ

message

Sounds like it was the same tower. Sorry to hear that you knew one of the victims.

Sounds a little hard to believe.

How high did they hoist the plane to move it!

Is this another 5mph bumper issue - I'd think a plane like the F-16 could be dropped 5' and not take it in the tires and shocks ?!

I thought it was Aircraft Carrier rated !

I believe about the bolt - any day - that is critical today - and to many young people don't know or don't realize the life and death issue because.

Martin

I think it's in "Chariots for Apollo" but there's a story of when they were about to crate one of the Lunar Modules.

The crane crew insisted on a test, and the NASA manager is bitching about the delay, when WHAM!! the crane drops the test load. The foreman just looks at the NASA guy and walks off.

-gc

This story isn't safety related, but is quite funny. When I worked for BAe Military Aircraft at Brough some years ago they supplied McDonnell-Douglas in the US with several wings for the Harriers they were making under license. When the wings were offered up to a fuselage it was found that the fixing holes in the wings and the fuselage didn't match up! It was actually BAe's fault, and the wings had to be returned to our factory at great expense and reworked.