Battlestar Galactica: When Metal Goes Bad

On last Friday's episode of Battlestar Galactica, the crew of the Galactica finally ran up against a problem that is the bane of aerospace engineers: metal fatigue. Fatigue can affect anything built with metal that is subjected to stress, but airplanes and spacecraft can be particularly vulnerable. As shown on BSG, metal fatigue starts with tiny cracks you can't see. Subjected to repeated cycles of stress, these microscopic cracks grow. Left unchecked, they can cause a structural member to fail abruptly, sometimes with catastrophic results. As explained in Georgeo Bibel's terrific book Beyond The Black Box: The Forensics of Airplane Crashes, metal fatigue has been behind a number of aviation disasters, including the loss of two de Havlilland Comets in 1954. The British de Havlilland Comet was the world's first commercial jetliner, and those crashes taught engineers a hard-bought lesson. Until then, engineers had not fully appreciated how vulnerable aircraft ...