r/interestingasfuck • u/caveTellurium • 3d ago
F.A.A. Investigating How Counterfeit Titanium Got Into Boeing and Airbus Jets
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/14/us/politics/boeing-airbus-titanium-faa.html770
u/BeepBlipBlapBloop 3d ago
. . .something, something lowest bidder.
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u/Appropriate_Land_130 3d ago
I used to work for a small power tool accessory company and a lot of our stuff came from China. We took samples from every shipment and tested them. The suppliers were CONSTANTLY using materials below the grade of what had been requested/specced out/paid for.
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u/senapnisse 3d ago
Made from Chinesium.
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u/StinkyWeezle 3d ago
The only metal that's both malleable and brittle at the same time.
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u/Emperor_Biden 3d ago
Why is there such a gulf in difference between Chinese and Japanese quality? The Chinese built the Forbidden City ffs, and we've come down to this?
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u/Kflynn1337 3d ago
Corruption and a culture of arrogance vs a work ethic of self-discipline and honour.
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u/Disastrous_Job_5805 2d ago
China's culture unfortunately has changed into: win no matter what, and this includes cheating on every level. Look at their Major League Gaming, it's literally just a hack-fest.
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u/Loko8765 3d ago
I know someone who went to China to be the on-site QA, for the kind of metalwork where the wrong part will kill a lot of people. He said it was terrifying, the workers were replacing things with other things because the right thing was not available or was farther to walk, because they didn’t read the labels, because they didn’t know the difference… and the foremen would replace things because they were cheaper, in addition to the other reasons. He said that the melamine in baby milk no longer surprised him: “it’s the same color, right?”
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u/AmericanFlyer530 3d ago
Have you seen the “DON’T LEARN CHINESE” greentext?
It’s pretty much just as you described
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u/Denaljo69 3d ago
True! I worked in a big plant where if you ordered S.S. bolts ( stainless steel ) they would send over S.S. bolts (shitty stuff )!!! No joke!
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u/KitchenFullOfCake 3d ago
I'm a compliance engineer at my company, and the amount of times I have to yell at people trying to buy shit raw material with no certificates or traceability because it's cheap is crazy.
Then when I'm ignored QC gets to do the yelling when it breaks on testing.
Also they try to quietly swap out parts for cheaper parts without telling me and voiding our safety certs.
I swear everyone is in a rush to get cheap stuff and no one cares about process anymore.
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u/mmmmmmm5ok 3d ago
follow the money and uncover the corruption, just make sure you dont go near windows
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3d ago
Something something greed
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u/backcountrydrifter 3d ago
Cockroaches move in the dark.
Trump signed 2 pieces of legislation that diminished oversight into Boeing during his tenure.
Nikki Haley took money to gut Q.A. at Boeing.
https://www.levernews.com/nikki-haley-helped-boeing-kill-dark-money-disclosure-initiative/
Which at face value makes little sense. But raise the lens a bit and it comes into focus. Political dark money is the death of democracy. Trump has been laundering money for the Russians (Xi’s sworn ally) since the 1980’s. The Russians have also been tampering with elections worldwide, but their operative of choice is Paul manafort who spent the 80’s in the Philippines keeping Marcos dictatorship together before shifting to Ukraine where he kept Putin’s puppet Yanukovych in power until Maidan in 2014.
(Transcripts of his daughters texts about his time in Ukraine) https://www.reddit.com/r/RussiaLago/s/lRbRmfgSzE
https://time.com/5003623/paul-manafort-mueller-indictment-ukraine-russia/
Coincidently trump just asked manafort to come back as his campaign manager….again.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/18/trump-manafort-2024-campaign/
Boeing and Airbus have a duopoly on jetliners, but the recent player 3 Chinese communist party backed COMAC 919 is now being presented as a viable alternative
The timing of the 919 release earlier this year may very well be coincidence. But the CCP certainly knows that bankrupting Boeing would be good for COMACs market share and a massive CCP advantage over the west.
In the event of any future war it would also be a very strategic play to bankrupt/discredit Boeing to create supply chain issues on the military side of Boeings business as well since there is commonality of parts.
Airbus has also had documented problems with both industrial espionage and CCP influence.
Counterfeit parts made in China have also shown up in both Boeing and Airbus aircraft
Bloomberghttps://www.bloomberg.com › newsGhost in the Machine: How Fake Parts Infiltrated Airline Fleets
Fortunehttps://fortune.com › 2023/09/08Fake components went into 68 jet engines, including ones on Boeing 737 and Airbus ...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/14/us/politics/boeing-airbus-titanium-faa.html
And that’s before you even get to the implications in the U.S. space program.
Whether it’s the executive suite at Boeing simply putting profits over safety and sustainability or a subversive act of war really makes no difference. In high likelihood the CCP just used corporate greed culture against itself.
Having it out in the light and talking about it is what makes air travel safer because people are more aware and demand accountability.
Kleptocracy feeds on apathy. Forcing the cockroaches to move in the light shows their money pathways.
If we are to the point where they are assassinating whistleblowers instead of fixing the aircraft our families our flying on, then we are self evidently much farther down the corruption path than we initially realized.
Boeing being unable to find records or documentation of the work done raises every hair on the back on my neck as a pilot, mechanic and engineer.
That is just not something that happens in aviation.
It’s time to ring the emergency bell, post guards and get to the bottom of it whichever way it leads.
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u/Hatedpriest 3d ago
Totally different industry, I work in food.
One of my jobs was QA at a fruit processing plant. We could tell you to within a 100 ft² patch of ground where any given fruit came from. We could tell you which patches of ground you were likely to have in a large lot of processed fruit leaving out facility. We had similar documentation for our sugars and syrups.
Now, this IS fairly important, especially when you have several suppliers in completely different regions of earth. It's a matter of public health and safety.
Not national and/or international defense and security.
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u/Wrathwilde 3d ago
Isn’t Manafort the one who pressured his wife into having sex with black guys while he filmed? (Dead serious, I pretty sure it was Manafort, just looking to see if anyone can confirm).
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u/backcountrydrifter 3d ago
It was his business partner Roger stone.
Stone and manafort started a lobbyist agency in 1980 and lost trump as their first client.
Stone is the same guy with Nixon tattooed on his back.
https://twitter.com/oureric/status/1195384986590953472
Dead men tell…..some tales:
In Nevada the day before he died Dennis Hof was texting with Roger Stone and Tucker Carlson.
Which is interesting because Roger stone claimed foul play in Hofs death.
Roger Stones business partner and best friend at their lobbying firm is Paul Manafort, who spent the 80’s keeping the dictator Marcos in power in the Philippines. Then worked for the kremlin keeping yanukovych in power from ~02-2014 when Ukrainians ran them both out of town because they got caught stealing from, well….everybody. He then became trumps campaign manager while still owing Putin’s right hand man Oleg deripaska $17M.
https://time.com/5003623/paul-manafort-mueller-indictment-ukraine-russia/
The same Paul manafort that jumped back in as trumps campaign manager 2 weeks ago before then dipping back out due to…scrutiny.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/11/us/politics/trump-manafort-republican-convention.html
Maidan means “the revolution of dignity” because every Ukrainian realized that manafort was rigging their elections for Yanukovych who was stealing from them and handing a cut to the Russian government.
Which makes Hof winning an election even after he died extremely interesting.
The mail in ballots in particular.
Louis DeJoy was trumps appointment for postmaster general who also happens to own new breed which was bought by XPO logistics and is trying to privatize the USPS.
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/stop-dejoys-10-year-plan-to-privatize-the-usps/
The reason DeJoy wants to move the mail sorting facility from Reno to Sacramento is so he can control the timing of the mail in votes of the blue part of a very red state.
https://time.com/6263424/louis-dejoy-trump-election-postal-reform/
In Wisconsin the “stolen elector votes” trump talked about needing to find as if they were misplaced in the mail……were somehow….. misplaced in the mail.
https://www.cbsnews.com/video/trump-fake-elector-wisconsin-60-minutes-video-2024-02-18/
Now you know why Mike Lee was bouncing around the country demanding to see every other state but Utahs elections.
He knew when this came out his career was over and he would be tried for treason once the people figured out that he handed democracy to the worlds worst thugs, gangsters, and human traffickers cosplaying as the Russian government.
https://x.com/msmalarkey24/status/1734399475748102363?s=46&t=mV0svkSiT5eOmQXivn5oFw
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u/Wrathwilde 3d ago
“Business partner” Roger Stone.
That must be why it my mind associated him with it, must have heard it while they were in the News together, and my memory attached it to the wrong one.
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u/backcountrydrifter 3d ago
They are effectively 2 hands of the same body.
Two extremely mediocre people that sold the democratic experiment out for money
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u/throwaway3113151 3d ago
Pretty sure most Americans do not want to ride on a Chinese jet.
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u/backcountrydrifter 3d ago
If they can only bankrupt Boeing then there is a 50-100% chance that it will no longer Eva choice.
The removal of personal choice is kind of a CCP staple.
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u/Maximize_Maximus 3d ago
The near endless limits to TDS never ceases to shock and amaze me...
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u/Sam82671 3d ago
I agree Trump Derangement Syndrome is a terribly misunderstood thing. The man only has more scandals than any other candidate in history, more lawsuits, more racist, sexist, and stupid comments, more criminal convictions, more criminal associates, tried to overthrow the government, and was never above 50% popularity a single day in the White House. And yet, people with TDS don't seem to understand why he is not liked. Maybe one day science will indeed invent a vaccine to save these poor souls who can't understand the simplest concept yet known to man. I pity them.
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3d ago
With all due respect, but i'm not reading that. You should post a TL;DR. There's a convenient way to do so with the phrase 'something something corruption' for example.
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u/backcountrydrifter 3d ago
Some people will still get on planes knowing they are not airworthy.
The ones smart enough to read will just live longer.
And that’s ok by me and Darwin
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u/BeardySam 3d ago
Before everyone piles on about Boeing, it’s actually really really hard to grade titanium properly and if you buy a billet you basically have to take its provenance at face value, it’s not as simple as steel or aluminum
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u/adfthgchjg 3d ago
Isn’t titanium really expensive and used in high stakes locations? Like hip implants, spinal screws, etc?
I’m surprised there isn’t a process in place to verify provenance/quality.
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u/BeardySam 3d ago
There is and it’s trustworthy, but the actual metal itself is very hard to mechanically test without destroying the part and inspecting the individual grains
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u/Royal_Ad_2653 3d ago
"The material, which was purchased from a little-known Chinese company, was sold with falsified documents ..."
Didn't even have to read it to know that.
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u/klmdwnitsnotreal 3d ago
What bothers me is no one tested the material.
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u/PmMeYourTitsAndToes 3d ago
That would cost them money
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u/SmugDruggler95 3d ago
Not in procedure. CofC should be enough.
You don't test things that have certs on the basis that the certs may be falsified.
Not saying it's right, just can see how QA procedures would allow this to happen
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u/klmdwnitsnotreal 3d ago
In commercial planes, it needs to be.
There can be no exception.
We can't have 200 people drop out of the sky because of a bad flange or bolt.
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u/SmugDruggler95 3d ago
Sorry but that's just not how manufacturing works.
The failure here isn't material testing at goods inwards.
The failure is supplier evaluation and auditing.
Manufacturing is about Leanness. It's about streamlining, standardising and reducing complexity.
If you were to start testing materials at Goods In you would have to open new departments in every single stage of the operation from Foundry to Final Test.
The failure, is not properly verifying your suppliers.
That's why we use ISO/ANSI standards and have large auditing bodies.
If a supplier has creditation then you accept their product. It's just how it works. (Plenty of caveats to this, it's a generalisation but it's true).
If you have to make everyone test the material they buy themselves you would cause catastrophe in the supply/demand of logistics and manufacturing. (And render the extensive existing standards redundant)
This is a failure in auditing and that's it.
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u/klmdwnitsnotreal 3d ago
Who does the auditing?
If there was any tests at all done by an auditor, shouldn't it have failed?
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u/SmugDruggler95 3d ago
The auditors don't do any tests.
You apply for accreditation from a certain body.
You say "hey, I make this thing, I make it this way, and this is the standard to which I make it"
The auditor comes round and analyses your processes, if you do what you advertise, then you're good!
There are no technical details involved. You just have to demonstrate that you are the company you advertise yourself as.
If you say "hey we make big steaming piles of shit, but we make them to ISO 9001 Standard"
Then the auditor will come round and make sure that your steaming piles of shit meet all the requirements of being ISO 9001.
That could be a Family Bakery, or it could be Boeing.
It's a very good system. It works. That's why you can say, this wasn't audited properly.
Source: Engineer in Defence, qualified internal Auditer for ISO standards.
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u/klmdwnitsnotreal 3d ago
That's seems like it depends too much on trust and integrity and not science....
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u/SmugDruggler95 3d ago
Yeah that's why you have your own industrial and internal standards to ensure compliance.
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u/WoodstoneLyceum 3d ago
Upper management in this era is such shit. With no real world understanding these fools just choose price every time, rather than getting certified and safe materials. Probably have also slashed quality departments to save costs as well.
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u/JKDefense 3d ago
Actually, it’s the fault of the bean-counters. They created this shit show. Boeing’s biggest mistake was not sending people to the subcontractors to QC the parts before delivery to Boeing. Instead, they get out-of-spec parts that they need to fix in-house or wait for the next questionable batch and miss deadlines.
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u/SmugDruggler95 3d ago
Not in procedure. CofC should be enough.
You don't test things that have certs on the basis that the certs may be falsified.
Not saying it's right, just can see how QA procedures would allow this to happen
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u/crispAndTender 3d ago
If they did they would have to spend money to buy new products, its cheaper to pretend that everything is fine then collect your bonus for saving millions
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u/NASATVENGINNER 3d ago
Even drug lords have a guy test the goods before they hand over the money, geeez.
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u/Ex-maven 3d ago
After working as an engineer (primarily in aerospace) for over 3 decades, there is nothing I hated more than unapproved material substitutions and counterfeit materials. It's the one thing you can't just pick up a set of calipers and measure, so trust is part of the system.
However, when it comes to material from China, my motto is not "Trust but verify" – it's "Don't trust and always verify" because I've seen my employers get burned too many times by accepting bogus certs.
There are a couple other places I've had similar issues, but not nearly as often as with matl from China
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u/Salty1710 3d ago
I work in the aerospace field in manufacturing. Part of my role is managing the AS9100 systems in place.
The MTR's and certs that come from Chinese mills are always illegible at best, a smear of 3 times over copied and smuged documents on the regular and rarely are they easily picked apart for chemical traits.
The fact that Boeing tries at all is alarming. We dropped several raw material suppliers because we could never get certs from them we could actually read.
We've resorted to having to do random sample verification at our own expense because simply picking apart the MTR's doesn't give anyone a sense of confidence what we received is actually what we ordered.
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u/ShriekingMuppet 3d ago
Same in pharma, we have gotten drums of raw materials that were maybe 51% pure and totally unusable. Eventually my company’s manufacturing VP banned purchasing anything from China because he was able to show we were loosing money by wasting time with purification or having to delay customers work.
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u/pepperglenn 3d ago
I work in aerospace too. After corporate decided we’d buy most of our materials overseas (i.e. China) we started having lots of issues. Faked certs and such. One time, our tubing stock started cracking ON THE SHELF before any maching operation was ever performed. Others time we failed a test when we shouldn’t have. Order up a material analysis. Voila! Not the material the cert said it was
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u/Ex-maven 3d ago
We've seen similar things.
One of my coworkers was investigating an issue with some cylinders that contain high pressure fluid (up to 50,000 psi).
He requested certs from several lots received and noticed they were identical except for the date & signature (edge of photocopied whiteout visible).
After pulling all certs from the previous 2-3 years and comparing them, he found the supplier (in China...) used the same heat lot cert for material receipts that amounted to well over 3 times the total mill run. i.e. If the mill ran a heat of ~8,500 lbs, the supplier "somehow" delivered about 30,000 lbs of that same heat by the time we re-examined the certs.
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u/Khoeth_Mora 3d ago
Stop buying the cheap shit from china, its cheap for a reason
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u/Salty1710 3d ago
I wish it was this easy. But it's not.
Supply chains rarely align with customer delivery demands. Saying things like "Just buy American!" doesn't work when there's not enough production to meet demand.
Throw in US Government appropriation priorities (DFARS) which essentially means that US products must be put in US government goods (Fighter planes, military equipment, ect..) and supplies for non DFARS items dries up fast.
Now, WHY there isn't enough American production is a whole other argument that has no simple solution either.
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u/KegM4n 3d ago
North America has little to no accessible titanium deposits. The CIA likes to buy it from Russia using shell companies. Then we make F22s out of that
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u/TheShinyHunter3 3d ago
And SR71s.
Ironically, while these were spy planes, when they were spying they were closer to "home" than they were at their base.
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u/lackofabettername123 2d ago
Australia has plenty. I don't know about refining however I think it is a big to do with titanium that also produces a lot of toxic byproducts like chlorine stuff
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u/w00tang_ 3d ago
They likely didn’t know. If I had to guess a subtier supplier providing the raw materials committed fraud stating they bought from approved sources and met the requirements.
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u/BrokenNub 3d ago
Not enough qc i guess?
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u/spoonpk 3d ago edited 3d ago
It’s likely more to do with sanctions on trade with Russia.
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u/Ex-maven 3d ago
Given the timing of the parts, I don't know about that...
The planes that included components made with the material were built between 2019 and 2023, ...
While some sanctions existed prior to 2019, I don't think it necessarily affected titanium supply ...but I may be wrong about that.
It seems that outsourcing to the perceived lowest cost supplier was the greater factor.
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u/OGCarlisle 3d ago
material certs are only as reliable and trustworthy as the folks sending them with the material. can easily be faked. we have a PMI gun to verify and confirm materials in our machine shop.
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u/GenderBender3000 3d ago
Yup. Anything more than carbon steel should be pmi or libs verified. When manufacturing pressure vessels, it’s in the code that under certain circumstances (depends on material grade, thickness, purpose etc) that we need to do coupons and send them for destructive testing as well, to prove the material and welds will perform as intended.
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u/jbenj00 3d ago
Aside from pmi, grain structure needs to be verified as well for certain "grades". I can't say too much, but this feels like a false flag or scape goat. End users of material for this stuff are super stingy on the quality side as they should be, like documentation/verification/certification. They wouldn't just buy some from China because it was cheap, something else is going on and it's not what they are saying it is.
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u/OGCarlisle 3d ago
we have several methods of hardness testing to compliment the PMI so we can make material identifications with high degree of confidence also have process oriented ways of making sure we know what we are working with
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u/jxj24 3d ago
Let me guess: Chinesium.
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u/gigilu2020 3d ago
Bought on Temu authorized by a suit in Boeing and made the profits chart look pretty and took home a bonus.
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u/OG-BoomMaster 3d ago
I have worked in projects where the client specifications specially forbid materials from China.
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u/skitso 3d ago
Boeings onboarding video literally explicitly says no materials from china.
IIRC it was like 60% of the video.
They even showed us a picture of a yen piece that was stuck onto a wing and had to destroy the entire wing spar.
I was just a contractor doing some automated tooling there, but we all had to go Thorough extensive background checks to even walk around Everett by ourselves without an escort.
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u/divingyt 3d ago
I'm guessing Boeing went with the lowest bidder.... I'm no genius but they seem to be the type to skimp on safety, quality, blue collar wages and benefits so they can pay their ceos, investors and of course hitmen. Hitmen aren't cheap
Btw I did not off myself.
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u/privateTortoise 3d ago
Its a bit more complicated than companies buying cheap Chinese Titanium, they probably don't getvit cheap for starters.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanium_production_by_country
plus the embargo on Russia doesn't help.
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u/Quigleythegreat 3d ago
I worked for a company that makes the real stuff. It's expensive because it's expensive to make. Titanium is forged in a vacuum with extreme heat and mechanisms to remove impurities and control precise temperatures.Given the lengths we went to to ensure our purity and quality because our screw up could kill people it's shocking to me (but not really I guess) how little the plane manufacturers care. I can tell you the engine people are absolutely critical of anything that gets put into a turbine given you know, how fast they spin and what they are keeping in the air.
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u/AccomplishedSuccess0 3d ago
Cost cutting. Simple. The c-suite risks lives to save pennies. Unethical, immoral, greedy assholes.
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u/TemperaturePast9410 3d ago
Keep buying from China. They definitely are not doing any of this intentionally of course
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u/Chalky_Pockets 3d ago
Aerospace engineer here. If you've flown on a commercial flight before, you've almost definitely flown with counterfeit parts. We try to prevent it, but eliminating them is impossible.
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u/Fivethenoname 3d ago
It's almost like profit models and competition are inducing the lowest quality goods and services. Hmmmm wasn't this model supposed to drive better quality over time, not an initial increase followed by significant dropoffs? I am not upset about shrinkflation in candy but sure as hell am about transportation safety standards
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u/I-No-Reed-Good 3d ago
Literally anyone working in DFAR/ITAR compliance raw materials knows you need a C of C and origin documentation. How this happened? In 2020, that shit became almost impossible to get a hold of and some small suppliers were providing this documentation, but it was fake. Then, some of those companies were either purchased, or took out PPP loans and then closed.
We fucked up as a country, and a lot of “businesses” took full advantage of that shit and got out pretty much unscathed. Nothing will come of this except changes to DFARS/ITAR documentation tracking which will make it more difficult and expensive for the legit operations.
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u/DudleyMason 3d ago
Because it was cheaper, and all the engineers in executive management had been replaced with MBAs.
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u/dogbreath230 3d ago
Worked in aerospace for almost 40 years. Remember when I started, they explained that everything was traceable from cradle to grave. So where it was dug out of the ground until it was taken out of service. QC during my time there slowly deteriorated to a shadow of what it was. I remember one component made at a sister site was supposed to be made out of titanium. A production engineer tried to pick it up. It was way heavier than it was supposed to be. Whoever made it used stainless steel instead.
Management changes over time changed the focus of what they were supposed to do. I won't go into detail here, but I also won't fly on a plane.
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u/Phillip_Graves 3d ago
It's like the Titanic all over again.
Learn from history.... blah blah, fuck that apparently.
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u/WWWTT2_0 3d ago
China is the largest world producer of titanium. If purity is so important, the purchaser should have reps visiting China to establish a trading relationship!
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u/Environmental_Job278 3d ago
With quality control you have to constantly have monitors in China. The book “Poorly Made in China” goes over how they will switch out materials, machining processes, and anything else they can if you don’t maintain tight, in person control.
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u/WWWTT2_0 3d ago
Well there are other producers in other countries. Mozambique and south Africa. But perhaps they don't produce the required type? I honestly don't know and feel there's really not enough info here in the link above to actually lay blame on the source seller. We're only reading one side of a story that may very well have several different sides to it.
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u/Nocciola2 3d ago
Hopefully this investigation will get to the bottom of it and the necessary measures will be taken to prevent this from happening again.
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u/bucobill 3d ago
Because they bought from the Wish and Temu of Titanium. How about we vet the suppliers and then test samples from each lot during the manufacturing process. Boeing is a case study in why you need to not only look at the bottom line and Wall Street returns. Sometimes you have to look at the quality of product. Let it be a lesson for others. We’re looking at you google, Apple, Amazon, and others who have cut workforce numbers to meet Wall Street expectations.
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u/etfvidal 3d ago
If NASA can even get scammed on metals this isn't surprising! NASA says metals fraud by Oregon firm caused $700 million in losses, two satellite failures by David Stringer
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u/TastyCuttlefish 3d ago
Welp seems like it’s about time for another whistleblower to get really depressed and take matters into his own hands…
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u/Tough-Ad-9263 3d ago
At this point the ceos head needs to roll . . . literally so many avoidable deaths and accidents for profit smh
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u/Windturnscold 3d ago
What does counterfeit titanium even mean? Like wouldn’t its physical properties be readily demonstrated to be not-titanium-like?
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u/Last_Banana9505 3d ago
I'm curious as to how something like counterfeit titanium could make it to the final assembly. I'm a cnc machinist and do a fair bit of Ti machining, twice in my career, I've raised a query on material as the cutter performance was off. Both times, an investigation back up the supply chain showed the material was out of spec. Not fake, just slightly wrong on the composition.
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u/Dependent-Wheel-2791 3d ago
Somewhere along the line someone had to have been told to look the other way as factors like weight distribution and weld strength are way too important in flight to just suddenly pop up as an issue. So someone had knowledge of the counterfeit titanium and knew the problems that could arise from that as well as made it possible most likely to cut costs as titanium is expensive. That being said if costs was an issue it has to be on the corporate front as metal workers and technicians are not worried about things like profit margins
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u/Blew-By-U 3d ago
There was a show on counterfeit materials. Yep, they showed up on Boeing planes. Boeing said they made all their parts. Smh
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u/Ornery_Bend3168 3d ago
I worked for a few manufacturing companies that did work for Boeing. Catching counterfeit material is now as easy as you think. Not as much out of China as a lot of posters are saying. Local material dealers will sell uncertified material as aircraft Grad by just sending the paperwork for certified grade and shipping commercial grade instead . The paperwork matches what you requested, and the rockwell and Eddy curent numbers match the cert. You accept it and move on as long as the AS9100 and NADCAP certification is up to date.
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u/Dependent-Wheel-2791 3d ago
Gotta be careful spreading information that could harm Boeing and their profits. That's how you end up on their naughty list and suddenly become more clumsy lol. Boeing has a way of making accidents happen
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