The present paper is concerned with the repair of cracks emanating from holes using as an illustrative example a cracked lug repaired with a bonded steel sleeve. The geometry of the lug is shown in Fig. 1. Two different crack lengths were considered, viz. 1.59 ram and 3.18 mm, and the lug was taken to be a 7079-T6 aluminum alloy. The lug was loaded via a rigid pin and the resultant load distribution around the hole was obtained using the method described in [4,5]. The stress intensity factor at the crack tip was then obtained using the finite element method. To this model of the cracked lug was then added a finite element model of a bonded steel insert. The steel was assumed to have Young's modulus of 206 x l0 v MPa and a Poiss~n's ratio of 0.32 while the adhesive had a Young's modulus of 2.5 x l0 MPa and a Poisson's ratio of 0.32. The resultant finite element mesh consisted of 814 nodal points, 316 linear strain triangles, 7 constant strain triangles, 32 of the four noded quadrilateral membrane elements and one special crack tip element. The effect that this bonded sleeve has on the stress intensity factor K. is shown in Table 1 Here 1 KI /K. u is the ratio of the stress intensity factors after and before t~ sJeeve is inserted while ~A/P and oA/P are the non-dimensionalized values of the maximum shear stress and the maximum compressive stress developed in the adhesive bond respectively. Here A is the internal surface area of the hole and P is the total load applied to the lug. From Table 1 we see that, with a typical adhesive thickness of 0.1 mm, reductions in the stress intensity factor of approximately 50 percent are obtained for both crack lengths. This is a substantial reduction and would lead to a marked slowing down of cracks under a fatigue loading. Let us now turn our attention to the 1.59 mm crack with an adhesive thickness of 0.3 mm and a steel sleeve 3 mm thick. If we perform the coordinate transformation x' = x/3 and y' = y/3 then in this coordinate system the hole is II.3 mm in diameter, the crack is 0.53 mm in length while the adhesive is 0.1 mm thick and the sleeve is 1 mm thick. This geometry is typical of fastener holes in aircraft structures, such as wing spars. The present analysis shows us that a bonded insert for this size hole in a lug reduces the stress intensity factor by 64 percent for a 0.53 mm crack. This crack size is important since it represents the minimum size crack that can accurately be found using present eddy current detection methods. Consequently,