{"id":137207,"date":"2023-02-20T06:05:23","date_gmt":"2023-02-20T11:05:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=137207"},"modified":"2023-02-19T20:37:01","modified_gmt":"2023-02-20T01:37:01","slug":"af-grounds-135-fleet-over-minor-flaw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=137207","title":{"rendered":"AF grounds -135 fleet over minor flaw"},"content":{"rendered":"

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yeah, seems the tail, aka the “vertical stabilizer” for we earth-bound types, can literally fall off the airplane. Not something I am guessing you want to have happen in mid-flight, eh? Did I say ‘Minor flaw’? I lied.<\/p>\n

Air Force Materiel Command, which does logistics support for the service, said in a press release<\/a> Wednesday that flight operations were being stopped for KC-135 Stratotanker<\/a> refueling planes, RC-135 Rivet Joint reconnaissance planes and WC-135 Constant Phoenix<\/a> radiation detecting jets as it investigates their tail pins. The stand-down encompasses more than 400 aircraft in total, according to service fact sheets about the planes.<\/p>\n

As of Feb. 12, two days prior to the formal inspection order, 90 aircraft had been inspected, and 24 were found to have the faulty pins.<\/p>\n

The tail-pin inspection takes about 30-minutes. If a faulty pin is found, aircraft “will be authorized a one-time flight to a repair location” to have it replaced, the command wrote. Most of that work will be done at the Oklahoma City Air Logistics Complex. The repair typically takes less than a day, according to Air Force Material Command.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Military.com<\/a><\/p>\n

In a nutshell, seems the whole vertical stab (that’s the fixed vertical part of the tail which the rudder swings on per Google) is held in place by pins and what they are finding is that a fair amount of planes have pins installed which are undersized and made from inferior metal…basically, counterfeit parts. I know in the car world this is an ongoing problem – fasteners marked as Grade 5 or Grade 8 which ain’t, out of spec replacement parts… and I would bet cash green money that we will eventually find that somewhere in the supply chain someone ordered these pins from a supplier who had the parts made offshore, and didn’t sufficiently quality-inspect the resultant parts. The Quality lads say you can’t inspect in quality.\u00a0 But as Ronald Reagan repeated (no, he didn’t coin it – ironically it’s an old Russian phrase) “Trust, but verify.”\u00a0 Repair depots, especially in critical applications like aircraft parts, can NOT trust that their suppliers will be perfect and need to check incoming parts before installing them on a plane.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  yeah, seems the tail, aka the “vertical stabilizer” for we earth-bound types, can literally fall … AF grounds -135 fleet over minor flaw<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":668,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[213,187,238],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-137207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-your-tax-dollars-at-work","category-air-force","category-government-incompetence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/668"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=137207"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137207\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=137207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=137207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=137207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}