Airplane teardown process perfected
September 20, 2012, 01:58 pm
An airplanes teardown and process of teardown provides valuable information for the aviation industry and have been associated with aircraft scrapping, recycling, disassembly, decommissioning, part-out and demolition, according Aircraft End-of-Life Solutions.
AELS uses two definitions to describe the process: Aircraft disassembly, "the process comprising all the activities required to remove all the valuable components from an aircraft, which can be reused in another aircraft;" or aircraft dismantling, "the process comprising all the activities required to make it possible to recycle materials from an aircraft."
A recent dissertation by Melinda Laubach-Hock, the director of the Aging Aircraft Laboratory at the the National Institute for Aviation Research has streamlined the teardown evaluation process. Her work titled Structural Teardown and Analysis: Evolution of the Teardown Process allows the lab conducting the teardown to more quickly and effectively, without compromising the quality, obtain data through the structural teardown process.
“Throughout my career, I have participated in over 15 major structural teardown programs with government and private industry and have noticed the lack of a standardized teardown process has resulted in common pitfalls that have driven up cost, increased the time it takes to obtain results, and, in some cases, degraded the quality of the teardown data,” Laubach-Hock said. “At the request of government and industry members of past teardown programs, I developed the proposed teardown process in an effort to standardize the teardown process and incorporate lessons learned from previous teardown programs."
The way in which the dissertation was released allows this information to be directly provided to the public, offering a step by step process for planning and executing a structural teardown, allowing for the minimization of problems to come up throughout the process, when compared to teardowns in the past.
In the dissertation Laubach-Hock discusses four case studies done on teardowns in the past while implementing potential improvements to those studies when using her proposed method.
“The newly developed process makes the Aging Aircraft Laboratory at NIAR an ideal option for industry and government agencies looking to assess the current condition of aircraft structures and develop methods for aircraft sustainment until retirement,” Laubach-Hock said.
The Aging Aricraft Laboratory provides large section extraction, detailed disassembly, chemical coatings removal, nondestructive inspection, failure analysis and process development.
For pilots, this means increased knowledge about the planes they are in and improved safety. Pilot life insurance is available providing increased peace of mind, no matter how safe a plane is.
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