The killing of Bill Cooper and Liquid Metal Embrittlement

[Eric Murray]

On Wed, Nov 14, 2001 at 05:49:34PM -0800, John Young wrote:
> How would the LME work on the interior structure of the plane?
> The skin has little structural strength but does streamline the

On modern cars and aircraft the skin is a structural part.  There was
a post WWII DeHaviland (the Comet I beleive) that kept coming apart in
the air... some of the windows had too-sharp corners that concentrated
stress from pressurization and caused cracks in the skin, eventually
resulting in sudden failure.  Once aluminum gets a crack it
goes pretty fast.

OTOH, LME requires the metals to be liquid or close to it.  Even tin
has a melting point around 500 degrees F, and it's a pretty
low melting point metal.
Engine mounting parts might get that hot, but not the exterior surface.

There's probably other methods of causing quick corrosion of
failure besides LME... what I googled about it makes me not worry
about it as something sprayed on the exterior of aircraft to
cause sabotage.

Eric