I think the same thing is happening to our engine manufacturers. I heard only one company makes Hydraulic lifters in the world. So unless the Engine manufacturer has someone on site inspecting the manufacturing process you might end up with junk. Which with lifters is only an economic disaster for the owner. Its easy for the manufacturer to shift blame onto the owner. Ie. not flying enough etc.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
If you ask me, it is a darn poor performance to contract such vital parts out in the first place.
Does the plane have machined spars? I imagine almost anything machined is subcontracted to others by most aircraft manufacturers in the current environment. I remember being in a machine shop north of Los Angeles twenty years ago and they were set up with a very long bridge mill to machine one piece Airbus spars. They got the job because they already had the unusual machine from some long ago program. As I remember they told me they only had a couple of guys they trusted to run it because it took careful setup due to its size and the associated deflections.
Presumably Piper would carry some insurance cover itself for such items.
Outsourcing of the cranks was allegedly at the root of the Lyco crank saga too. This is part of why the big Western firms who make stuff in China have their own people out there – because the big consumer IT firms cannot afford a screwup like this. ISO9000 etc means nothing if somebody screws up and delivers crap 
I would suspect Piper used a specialist CNC company for the spars. Not many companies will have this big stuff in-house. Socata had it in-house because they were milling big items for Airbus and various bits of the French military; they would not have had the huge CNC stuff in-house just for the TB and the TBM.
In my business I outsource the PCB assembly; it needs machines costing well into 6 figures. But all subsequent processes (final assembly and test) is in-house, to make sure the product gets plenty of “eyeball” before it goes out. Many people who outsource everything have been burnt, and most of those have been burnt a few times, but they are mostly the sort of “serial enterpreneurs” who don’t care. In the cheap consumer IT business there have been many cases of 100k items arriving from China and 20k of them have a major fault.
In the Piper case the fault was obviously not visually obvious otherwise they would not have gone on to build the rest of the wing around it. Hence I am betting on the material. Same with the Lyco cranks – nobody could tell by looking at them.
achimha wrote:
If you contract out a spar (the core of the core of an airplane design), you have to be in a position to verify compliance as the design holder. That is extremely poor performance as a company
If you ask me, it is a darn poor performance to contract such vital parts out in the first place. What the heck is left in the factory? And yes, if you do this, you’d better be darn sure that what you get back is in compliance and not find out that it isn’t after delivering 38 airframes.
Incidently, is it known who manufactures the spar for Piper?
But still, I reckon we have to first see what happened really and why Piper had not reacted earlier. What ever it was, it may well be a big wake up call to other companies who outsource almost everything.
Yes; somebody has to take it over, and yes there should be a way for a new TC holder to milk the existing fleet find that an economic proposition. Especially if they take over the parts business, without which nobody will be interested anyway. However with an N-reg this is not an issue; you can just carry on flying.
But we may be a bit too quick on this. The cost to Piper of making a new wing is probably c. $20k, so they need to make ~80 if them. That is $1.6M which is not so much, and they can presumably go after the subcontractor, who should have product liability insurance.
Peter wrote:
On EASA-reg, if the TC owner packs up, the planes are all grounded…
I don’t think so. There are plenty of orphaned airplanes around flying merrily. And I’d presume that someone would take over the TC of the Piper fleet rather sharpishly.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
As a service bulletin, is it legally binding for non commercial ops? Piper considers it compulsory, so I reckon they are going to make it an AD in a big hurry?
There should be an AD pretty soon. This is classical AD material — a structural component that does not comply with the certified design.
If you contract out a spar (the core of the core of an airplane design), you have to be in a position to verify compliance as the design holder. That is extremely poor performance as a company. They want to charge $3m for this airplane which is outright crazy given that the much more capable TBM is $4 and it turns out they don’t even manufacture the spar. I’ve taken a closer look at the aircraft and it is a nice update for the PA46 but apart from the crazy price tag, the build quality was shockingly bad, the paint job alone of the one they had at AERO would get a first year apprentice fired over here…
Peter wrote:
If this was a dimensional issue it should have been obvious on a visual inspection of incoming goods, never mind subsequent installation into the aircraft (the wing is basically built around the spar).
That’s interesting and points toward several questions: how long have they known, how long did they take to be absolutely sure, and who took the decision to publish the SB.
I understand the possible major risk with letting the aircraft fly, but hey, releasing this, you also admit they do harakiri.
Quite a dilemma.
