Am I wrong in recallng that one of the main reasons for disabling the F3 autosweep was fatigue.
The initial assumption was that the F3 would generate less fatigue than the GR1; however when they wired one up and did tests it was dramatically higher*. Specifically, it spiked and went through the roof when the wings swept when pulling G.
So the system was disabled and the brief was to sweep before or after, but not during, the turn........
(*The assumption being that the GR1 at low level would suffer more, but in fact the carried stores and majority of flight wing swept kept it in a benign regime. The F3 constantly thrashing the wings back and forth with no tanks was much worse. At which stage they introduced a test rig and ran it to keep ahead of the fleet; which lead to one FI programme after another to fix things as more bits fell off.
I did hear the story that the final life of the airframe was determined when the test item "disintegrated catastrophically" in the rig. But that was possibly anecdotal.)
Last edited by ORAC; 10th Oct 2012 at 12:01.