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Keri Ginn is an NDT ASNT Level Three as well as a senior quality manager at AAR Government Services. She's an expert in NDT quality management, supplier audits, and business analytics and she's recently written an article for Quality about recruiting the next generation of NDT professionals.

Michelle: In the first article, you talked about an issue on a submarine that wasn't correct. Could you tell us about that?

Keri: Yeah. And that was actually at my first employer out of school.

I had been there about two-and-a-half years. It was a forging company and they were making the hatch door that closed over where the missiles shoot out from the submarine. That dome-shaped door was forged and machined and heat treated. It then went to one other place where it got a final surface machine and then it was going to be installed. There is no other inspection that was going to be done. And we were the last stop.

The supplier, or the customer that we were making it for, had offered an early shipment bonus if we could get this out early, paying you an extra $75,000. And that's really great. It was on time. We were going to hit that bonus. My colleague and I worked second shift. When we found the issue, it was Good Friday, right before Easter weekend.

Like I said, we work second shift, so it's midnight when we're writing all this up. I said it was rejected by all and we went, we clocked out, and we went home for Easter weekend, come back in on Monday, and we were working next to the part, and it was improperly heat treated.

And it's not that it was improper. It just didn't take the heat because it was dome-shaped. So, the part ended up being too brittle. We [had] put a non-conformance on it, come back in on Monday and, mind you, there were only two domes in the entire plant. We were working near it and I look over and I said, “Hey, isn't that the dome that we did Friday?”