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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Is it the flight that crashed into NY and the copilot rocked the rudder back and forth causing the vertical stabilizer to sheer off? We had a macabre joke at an old job about that.
There are a couple of ways, like if the bolt is found far away from the crash site, that would suggest that the bolt broke before the plane hit the ground. If the component is relatively intact after the crash, but the bolt is broken, it probably happened pre-crash.
An example of above is Alaska 261. They were able to retrieve the components from the tail section and were able to see that the components failed in a certain way that indicated consistent wear. Like, the threads on the nut of the bolt were shorn down almost evenly and the lubrication was missing, that is something that happened before the crash.
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