By Laura Sivitz
The day the roof ripped off Aloha Airlines flight 243 at 24,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean, aviation research took a new turn. Officials blamed widespread corrosion as a main culprit in the 1988 disaster. The incident intensified work in a field known as nondestructive evaluation–analyzing the guts of materials without cutting them open.
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Scientists have now designed software that they say should enable a portable scanning machine to check a plane’s fuselage for corrosion more quickly, effectively, and safely than any current tool. Eugene V. Malyarenko and Mark K. Hinders of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va., describe their system in the October Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.