`Cape Air Cessna fleet consulting`

Tom's ongoing forensic consulting relationship with Cape Air's head of maintenance — Cape Air is the Cessna fatigue leader; cracks unfamiliar to Cessna show up there first. Tom's one-page letters get forwarded to Cessna and the Burlington, MA FAA office. Same outlier-leader pattern as Aloha.

I do similar work for Cape Air. They fly Cessnas, and they put more hours on Cessnas than anybody else. Their head of maintenance, whenever he saw a crack or a problem he had never seen before, would call me up, send me the part, and say, tell us what happened. I'd look at it metallurgically, look at the fatigue, and give my assessment. I'd write a one-page letter, sometimes a page and a half. Over the years I learned that what he would do is send it to Cessna, because Cessna needed to know what was going to happen to all their other aircraft. Cape Air was getting more fatigue cycles than anybody else. They were the market leader in cracks. They would also send a copy to the Federal Aviation Administration, which for that particular type is in Burlington, Massachusetts, right across from Burlington Mall. I never had to get into some sort of fight, and I never got direct feedback from Cessna or the FAA, but I know from other things that happened that they were reading my reports. I was just doing a failure analysis of why it occurred — was it a stress concentration, was it higher stresses than expected. In most cases it was just really old, and things wear out after time. And that's basically what happened at Aloha Airlines.