Unknown to pilots, at the base in Bali mechanics had replaced a faulty angle-of-attack vane on the almost brand-new jet with a used one from a repair shop in Florida. The vanes, sitting like nostrils on either side of the plane’s nose, are designed to detect how steeply the craft is flying into oncoming winds. A protruding part of the vane rotates in response to the airflow. It’s attached to what looks like a system of gears inside—actually small electrical transformers called resolvers that read the angle in comparison to a static reference and then feed that information into the plane’s
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