Field Investigation 7
Course subject(s)
4. Aerospace Engineering
You and Holmes now perform an inspection of the landing gear and look at the various details. You start inside the aircraft and find the landing gear lever. It is in the gear down position. This is consistent with what Derek has told you. Next, you find the hydraulic reservoir, which is empty. With effort you look at the different hoses which run through the aircraft of the landing gear hydraulic system. You find nothing on the right-hand side system, you turn your attention to the left-hand side system. Once you at the left wing you see Holmes, he points to a hose connection which is loose (image below).
![](https://ocw.tudelft.nl/wp-content/uploads/AviationCS-Loose.png)
Holmes: “I have inspected the hose connection end with a magnifying glass and there are clear signs of fatigue. A mechanic also had a look at it and agreed. The hose with this connection is known to shake and vibrate during landing. This tells me that the connection can be loaded cyclically and can fail over time.”
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Forensic Engineering: Learning from failures by TU Delft OpenCourseWare is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://ocw.tudelft.nl/courses/forensic-enginee…earning-failures/.