| ABSTRACT: | FAA CONCERNS FOR RELIABLE NONDESTRUCTIVE EVALUATION
A.L. Broz, Federal Aviation Administration, Burlington, MA, USA
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is aware of the need for reliable Nondestructive
Evaluation (NDE), both in aviation applications and in general. As a result, NDE Reliability
permeates the Research and Development programs, and individual efforts, undertaken and
supported by the FAA. Those efforts are in support of airframes, engines, and other components.
Test protocols have been developed for conducting reliability studies, data generated, and
techniques developed for enhanced analysis of Probability of Detection (POD) data. These have
been published either as public domain reports, presented at meetings, or published as articles in
the literature. Historical data from other researchers has been summarized and published as
available resources to the entire NDE community. Present programs and efforts continue those
kinds of activities. Recently the FAA has also started to support programs cooperatively with
other agencies in the area of the modeling of POD, with an intention of reducing the amount and
cost of doing classical POD studies. This paper will detail a number of these efforts.
Emphasized will be the many efforts on lap splice crack detection, engine inspection, the
Reliability Handbook by Rummel and Matzkanin, and the POD modeling efforts.
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