PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - New Cracks Found in RAF C-130 Fleet
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Old 4th May 2008, 15:28
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JFZ90
 
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Mary - the wing test would have completed as it proved / reached a set objective, the the sake of argument a set number of hours of fatigue life - i.e. if the reqt was e.g. 20,000 hrs* and the rig did that, then in simplistic terms that would give confidence in the fleet to that number of hours. A fleet could only be at say 10,000 hours at a time of having already flown for 20 years, hence 20 more years (at same usage rates of course#) is available upto the proven 20,000 hours tested. It is not uncommon for these rigs to stop operations well before the end of an aircraft types life - can't remember the exact dates but I think the Concorde one for example stopped in 1994ish, nearly 10 years before the end of Concorde ops, and even then the reason it stopped ops was not related to having run out of fatigue life.

It is usual for test rigs to be well ahead of the fleet - indeed thats the whole point - cracks etc. appear on the rig, fixes are developed and go into the fleet which is thousands of hours behind and hence will not have developed the same cracks yet. It is possible the cracks reported above were seen on the rig 6-7 years ago with fixes developed. It is also possible the failures/cracks are not easy or economic to fix. It all depends - the key point is the problems are seen on the rig before the fleet and can be safely handled either through fixes (which will have also been tested in the rig) or other action (e.g. scrapping).

The only reason I can think of for the fuselage still being on-going is that it is infact well behind the wing tests in hours and is now on the critical path for extending the life (i.e. fuselage only upto say 13,000 hours, so tests need to be continued to get to 20,000, i.e. same as the wing).

The 130J fatigue tests are possibly along way behind just because it is newer. These tests although accelerated, still take a long time as you are trying to simulate 30/40+ years of use in albeit compressed timescales.

* these numbers just picked from the air, not related to any aircraft type.

# more ops means using up hours more quickly which may mean shortening the planned life of an aircraft fleet (i.e. when test rigs & their duration were planned the assumptions may have been different).
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