Just watched an Air Crash Investigation episode in which the investigators studying the wreckage say that a certain bolt shearing off during flight caused the crash. How can they tell that the broken bolt was during flight and not because of the crash?
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They don’t find a broken bolt and say, “Oh, that’s what caused the crash.”
They’ll find something like a wing section that came off during flight immediately before the crash that would have been found farther from the rest of the debris (indicating that it came off and started falling out of the sky before the plane started falling). Then they would consider that part and how it was affixed to the aircraft, which would lead them to examine the fasteners or welds in the area where the parts would have been held together, and that’s how they find the broken bolt.
From their knowledge of the aircraft and mechanics and physics that would be able to piece together likely scenarios that might describe how that piece broke off. If the bolt was sheared off (impact) you might start looking for evidence of a collision with something in the air that could cause a bolt to break like that. If it’s fatigue, that will show up in testing.
So if you’ve got a critical bolt that is necessary for holding a part of the plane on and it fails due to fatigue, the investigators can piece that together from looking at the big picture, not just that one broken bolt.
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