A defining event which led to demanding an awareness of aging aircraft and corrosion was the Aloha Airlines Flight 243. In April of 1988, a Boeing 737 suffered an explosive decompression and lost a significant amount of aircraft structure, but andwas astoundingly was able to land in Maui. The NTSB determined thethat the cause of the accident was due to structural failure caused by metal fatigue. Investigators reported several cracks and corrosion. “A flight attendant who was ejected from the aircraft as a large opening was torn in the fuselage and who was never found” (Cusick, 2018, p. 29). This accident resulted in the U.S. Congress passing the Aviation Safety Research Act of 1988.
As a result of the Aloha Accident and other accidents, the FAA developed the National Aging Aircraft Research Program which studies how the age of an aircraft affects its safety. Operators of aging aircraft are required to develop a plan to guarantee the safety of their aircraft through inspections, monitoring, and corrective maintenance.
Cusick, Cortés, &and Rodrigues (2018) stated, that there is a primary concern forof corrosion damage to aging aircraft.
When aircrafts are inspected and maintained, corrosion and accidental damage should be managed and controlled long before the design life is reached. On the other hand, the problem of fatigue-related damage increases with time, or, more appropriately, with prolonged use as measured by flight hours or flight cycles or both. Fatigue damage to the fuselage is caused primarily by the repeated application of the pressure cycle that occurs during every flight. Fatigue damage to the wings is caused by the ground-air-ground cycle that occurs during every flight, pilot-induced maneuvers, and turbulence in the air. Thus, the goal of measuring aircraft structural safety by flight hours is more important for the wings than it is for the fuselage.