Why Science of Mayday?

Photo by Pandu Agus Wismoyo on Unsplash

Most aviation accidents do not begin at the moment of failure.

They begin years earlier, as a crack smaller than a grain of sand initiating at a fastener hole, as a corrosion cell forming inside a structural joint, or as vibration slowly driving a component beyond the loading conditions its designers assumed. By the time the damage becomes consequential, it has usually been accumulating through thousands of flight cycles, across multiple maintenance intervals, often in locations that routine inspection cannot reliably reach.

The final event is rarely the beginning of the story. It is the end of a degradation process that started long before anyone noticed.

That is the territory this publication occupies.

Science of Mayday examines how aircraft structures, systems, and components degrade, fail, and are managed throughout their service lives. The focus is not operational commentary, aircraft performance, or accident journalism. It is the materials science mechanisms that govern structural and systems behaviour over time: fatigue, corrosion, stress corrosion cracking, fretting, creep, delamination, wear, material incompatibility, vibration-induced damage, thermal runaway, and the interaction between material state and the loads that aircraft experience throughout service.

Every aircraft is a collection of materials operating within assumptions. Those assumptions are established during design, validated during certification, and maintained through inspection and airworthiness programmes. When a material, structure, or component behaves differently from what those assumptions predicted, engineering attention follows.

The publication runs two analytical streams.

Accident and incident analyses examine what happens when degradation mechanisms reach their endpoint, tracing the failure chain from an initial material condition to its structural consequence and identifying where that chain could have been detected or interrupted.

Airworthiness directive analyses examine the other side of the same problem: how the industry identifies developing conditions before they reach failure, why particular structural states become airworthiness concerns, and what risks emerge if they remain unaddressed.

Together, they reveal how aviation learns.

The perspective throughout this publication is materials failure analysis. It approaches aviation through the interaction between materials, structure, loading, environment, and maintenance throughout an aircraft’s service life. The central question is not simply why a component failed, but why its actual behaviour diverged from the assumptions embedded in its design, certification, and continued airworthiness management.

The objective is always to trace the mechanism back to its physical origin.

Every failure mechanism discussed here is grounded in physical and material behaviour rather than simplified cause-and-effect storytelling.

Primary sources form the foundation of every article. These include investigation reports from organisations such as the AAIB, NTSB, BEA, TSB, and JTSB; airworthiness directives and regulatory documents issued by authorities including the FAA, EASA, and Transport Canada; and relevant peer-reviewed engineering literature.

Every aircraft structure carries a history of stress, environment, maintenance, and time.

This publication exists to examine how those histories become failures, how the industry attempts to detect them before they do, and how engineering knowledge evolves in response.

Most failures begin long before the moment they are noticed.