Criticality - American Society for Quality

21
AV-8B Butterfly Valve Gasket
Problem (April 2000):
• Gaskets Used in Reaction Control System
– 2 MAG-13 Failures
• 1 Detected Because of Fire Warning Light and
Other During Recurring Inspection
– No Evidence That Manufacturer Was
Approved/Qualified
• Wrong Material in 1 out of 3 Contracts
• Bulletin Issued -
– Visual Inspection .. Replace Within 1 Year
– Purge Inventory
“The one part of this issue that really crumbles my
cookies is that this appears to be the same vendor who
made other bad gaskets a couple years ago. We had
to purge the system then too. It appears that DLA
has gone right back to the same vendor. We just
don't have the resources to address the same problem
twice (nor the intestinal fortitude). … now, the AV8B
program has to wrestle with how to purge the system
and more importantly, our aircraft, of this "bad"
batch of gaskets. We'll continue to work that issue
with our program guys and I think there are ways to
mitigate our impact. We don't have a huge safety
problem here but it has to be fixed soon. It makes a
lot of extra work for our engineers and, especially, the
squadron maintenance guys who are already
overworked.