Problem:
Maintenance had no way of diagnosing if a hydraulic actuator had failed or not. On commercial aircraft, actuators are used to move many important pieces of the aircraft (A/C). If an actuator was thought to be at fault, the engineers would order the replacement of ALL of the actuators in the region of the fault. This would cost several days of maintenance man-hours, lost A/C revenue, and the removal and replacement of parts that work fine.

Solution:
Use the SDT270 ultrasound detector with the RS-1 contact probe to listen to each of the actuators. By comparing the sounds of working actuators to failed actuators, the maintenance staff was able to remove and replace the ones that are truly broken.

Result:
Problems found in minutes versus days. The maintenance staff was extremely happy to have a new tool that could point to the source of the problem so quickly.

Special thanks to Karl Hoffower from Failure Prevention Associates, LLC. for sharing this success story with us!