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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If jump off your roof and break your leg, the break point on the bone will look different than if you smash it with a hammer and then jump off the roof. Same for this. Investigators know what a bolt looks like when it breaks due to the forces of impacting terrain and what a bolt looks like if it breaks due to the force that caused it to shear mid-flight.
Beyond that, they can tell by the crack if it was a sudden break or the result of repeated stress over hundreds/thousands of flights as those two breaks will leave very different effects on the bolt.
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