Hot'n'High - what you say is true but Concorde was composite construction
From New Scientist Magazine
Letter: Composite planes
Published 30 August 2006
From Iain Barker
It should be noted that there is one significant omission from your “composites as a percentage of total aircraft weight” graph (
15 July, p 40).
Aerospatiale/BAC Concorde was the first commercial aircraft to use a composite structure – an aluminium-honeycomb-epoxy composite was manufactured for the elevon and rudder powered control surfaces. Although this pre-dates the more recent “plastic plane” designs of Boeing and Airbus, it does provide a significant case history for the failure modes and the types of in-service fault detection that may be required by a fleet operator.
Concorde experienced a number of composite-structure failures in flight, including multiple delaminations and in some cases the entire loss of large portions of the rudder control surface.
Some failures were traced to water ingress at repair joints on the composite panels, but most failures did not manifest until after several years of normal service with no apparent visual degradation of the external surfaces. As a result, new non-destructive testing techniques (NDT) were developed, including acoustic flaw detection (AFD), water jet “through vibration” ultrasound scans (C-scans) and laser shearography (holographic visual detection).
https://www.newscientist.com/letter/...posite-planes/
Yes, the article is nearly 20 years old but I bow to the scientists....