PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - B737 bird strike 10/4/03
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Old 13th Apr 2003, 19:52
  #45 (permalink)  
Genghis the Engineer
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You'd struggle, in my opinion, to design a safe aeroplane that can't suffer a tailstrike.

Once in a blue moon things go badly wrong and the pilot has to earn his money by keeping an aircraft on the edge of the stall at very high AoA (and thus incidence), say climbing out over rising ground through windshear.

If you put in place an incidence protection system that made sure a tailstrike was impossible (and you could certainly do that), you'd almost certainly result in an aeroplane that a pilot couldn't fly like that, you'd also probably have to include sufficient safety factors into the rotation as to effectively increase the runway length required and thus make the aircraft uneconomic.

So, I can't - and speaking as an Engineer (not as a pilot) here, see that it is possible to design an aircraft which is both viable and safe, and is totally resistant to a tailstrike. What you do, and I believe this is normal in airliner pitch control law design, is create characteristics such that a lot of pilot input, beyond that normally used, should be necessary to go to a very high incidence. Thus tailstrike becomes unlikely, but a pilot who needs to can take an aircraft right to the edge of stall.

And then, having done that, we have to reply upon piloting ability. I think it's inevitable once in a while that the combination of control laws and pilot training will break down and you'll get a tailstrike. But, emphasising, I think it would be foolhardy to design a totally tailstrike resistant aircraft, the ultimate protection has got to be in pilot training (allied to a sacrificial structure under the tail).

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