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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

> 3rd world tier corruption and fraud.

I dunno, that's the intended interpretation from the headline, but the article doesn't really substantiate it. The way you'd see "fraud" in a never-used item like an ejection seat is that it just wouldn't have its components. The expensive stuff would be missing, which to my eyes would be the explosives/rockets, absolutely not the electronics.

What they found was that the electronics looked "shoddy", which isn't (again, to my eyes) the same as "fraud"[1]. More like "we can't get the original parts anymore for this order, just use this off-the-shelf transistor instead", or "crap, we stuffed the wrong parts, pull them out and rework them by hand".

[1] In the way you mean it. Obviously if it's not the specified part then it's not delivering the item ordered. But not really "3rd world tier corruption".

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It's a military fighter jet. EVERYTHING is spec'ed out to the MAX. "We can't get the original parts, just use this off-the-shelf transistor" IS fraud.

I would assume that everything is speced out to low weight, high G-force tolerance, and robustness under vibration. In those cases, even changing the solder formulation could be catastrophic.

The allegation of fraud refers to Teledyne destroying evidence by replacing potentially faulty chips before sending a unit to the investigation lab.

How does a manufacturer of some defective part get ahold of that piece of evidence from a plane crash? NTSB investigates civilian aircraft accidents, and this kind of thing couldn't ever happen. But someone(s) on the DoD or Air Force investigative teams collected this evidence, and at some point someone sent evidence back to the manufacturer, allowing their opportunity to tamper with it? And they weren't even careful enough to not make it blatantly obvious? It's as upsetting as it is crazy.

Possibly the investigators wanted to examine some spare parts that were still in the manufacturer's possession? After all the parts that had crashed might have been too damaged to answer all their questions...

> I dunno, that's the intended interpretation from the headline

My only intentions when writing the headline were to avoid the click-bait format of the original and to communicate that it is suspected that counterfeit electronic components somehow ended up in an F-16. That is supported by this sentence from the article:

> Suppliers Atmel, Analog Devices and Siliconix provided the potentially counterfeit transistors, memory chips and accelerometer chip, according to the Air Force slides.

I have no idea how it would have happened and I hope I didn't phrase the title in a way that suggested any particular possibility.

> just use this off-the-shelf transistor instead"

I don't know if it meets the legal definition of fraud, but it will certainly get you in trouble.

I imagine Aviation is similar to Medical Devices and in that (my) environment, to build a device using a component with a different part than specified in the design, you need at a minimum an evaluation from an EE to see if the suggested replacement is suitable. That's considered a Design Change and the evaluation, criteria to be met, and outcome (possibly including Test Data), along with the peer review will all be documented to create an Engineering Change Order (ECO). Only when that ECO is approved and released, can you then start building the assembly with the new part. Anything else would be Non-Conforming and could cause you to have to recall all the devices that were built incorrectly.

Basically, changing a part is not a trivial undertaking. For non-critical parts, the process will be quicker but nothing can be changed without documented justification.

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