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Old 2nd Feb 2013, 22:48
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D120A
 
Join Date: Oct 2002
Location: Surrey
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Art, was that the sortie where the spar fracture had caused the wing to 'half-fold' so much that the flap motor spline drive disconnected on that side? I heard that the crew tried to lower flap and got an immediate uncommanded roll as it deployed assymetrically, but the pilot not flying was monitoring the flap gauges and called it immediately, resulting in 'flaps up' and a safe flapless landing.

RIH, thank you for the treatise on fatigue, I shall bookmark it for ever. I remember how the work of the late Harold Parish (at Huntings before Warton, where I knew him) and Alfred Payne in Australia, testing many wings to destruction, enabled WAP Fisher and Roland Heywood at RAE to establish successfully the safety factor(s) that had to be applied to the results of major fatigue tests to define the safe service life of an aircraft - and have given us structural confidence ever since. But I had assumed that all alloys were reasonably well-behaved and produced a comforting Gaussian distribution of fatigue cycles to failure. I am surprised the Valiant lasted as long as it did, and rather pleased that my attempt to get a trip in one at Marham (as an ATC cadet, not a chance!) came to nought.
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