Originally Posted by
WHBM
Well that's just silly hyperbole. Nobody is proposing that the structures handle 300% ("many times") of requirement. But we hope they will put a little bit of contingency in there. Maybe 110%. But the desperation to get it down to 100.001% of the requirement is what alas leads to this situation, where it fails at the 99% point. Which means, bluntly, it's a fail. And shows among other things overall poor design ability..
Not at all, there is still a safety factor, but if you make the safety factor bigger you waste fuel every hour the aircraft is flying. One of the ways the aircraft industry can get away with much smaller safety factors than other industries is the effort that goes into design verification and rigorous ongoing maintenance and inspection. However as an engineer who has used tools such as finite element analysis I find it astonishing that they seem to be able to routinely get within a few percent of the target for such complex structures. Can't help wondering if there is actually a little bit of smoke and mirrors in the details of how they load the structure to help ensure failure occurs at the target load.