PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Hull loss - where do they go?
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Old 12th Jul 2013, 13:15
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Genghis the Engineer
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As it's the USA, the NTSB have charge of it for the moment. Most likely they'll have relocated it to a secure empty hangar, possibly on a nearby Air Force Base. They'll be doing a certain amount of investigation and analysis of the wreckage as it's just not good practice to assume you know what happened from the initial analysis. At the very least, anything with a memory will be removed and read, and accident witness marks checked.

Additionally, there will almost certainly be post-crash and survivability lessons that can be learned, and that will require substantial evaluation of the wreckage. For example, there were issues on the Heathrow 777 concerning failures of the emergency lights and bits of the in-flight entertainment flying off. So you can expect a large team going over every aspect of how the aeroplane withstood (or didn't) the wreckage.

It'll be kept secured at-least until the report is issued, then potentially it'll be kept longer if it's needed as evidence in any future legal actions. Only when it's absolutely clear that there's no ongoing legal action, and no residual questions about the crash (which may be about post crash survivability and nothing at-all to do with the cause) can the wreckage be disposed of.


It's unlikely that the manufacturer would then take it on, but they will have been involved with all of the ongoing investigation and had opportunity to learn anything they wanted or needed to know en-route.

Finally, everything will be destroyed, to make quite sure none of it ever ends back on a flight.


In the UK, it would be AAIB and their facility at Farnborough, but otherwise all the same.
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