Fatigue Analyses of Riveted Lap-Splice Joints in a Narrow-Body Aircraft

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and Delta Air Lines had teamed to conduct a destructive evaluation of a retired narrow-body passenger aircraft that had nearly 60,000 flights. Some of the program objectives were to characterize the state of damage at riveted lap-joint fastener holes in the fuselage of an aircraft at the design service goal; and to develop or verify analysis methods that can correlate and predict the state of cracking at any point in time.