Metal bonding sticks in aerospace work

Aerospace shops such as Triumph Structures-Kansas City are machining more metal-to-metal bonded aerospace components.

Essentially, what aircraft engineers are doing is splitting flight-critical parts in half, then joining the two pieces together with a precision layer of high-strength adhesive. The logic behind the practice is that if a component fractures, the adhesive gap will prevent the fracture from propagating through the whole component to cause complete failure of a critical component.

Instead, fractures stay in one half of the part where they originated, while the other half remains untouched.

The component is damaged, but it does not put the aircraft in jeopardy.