PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - BREAKING NEWS: airliner missing within Egyptian FIR
Old 10th Nov 2015, 04:06
  #1986 (permalink)  
andrasz
 
Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: Where it is comfortable...
Age: 60
Posts: 911
Received 13 Likes on 2 Posts
The thread seems to be going round and round in circles again.

@ everyone discussing a possible control surface failure

Please try to explain how such a failure could have brought about the breaking of the rear fuselage. While intact, the fuselage (especially if pressurized) is very strong and resilient. It will not break up due to aerodynamic forces even in unusual attitudes. It is pointless to discuss any potential failures in the tail plane without addressing this. I believe any rapid overload on the control surfaces would break them first before the fuselage itself could de damaged.

@ everyone discussing a bomb

If it was a bomb as suspected, then all the subsequent break-up sequence is just an academic engineering exercise with no bearing on the cause.

I'm not sufficiently familiar with the rear fuselage structure to be able to add anything to the conversation, but perhaps someone with more knowledge could address that barring a bomb, what structural failure (if any possible) would be required to cause an instantaneous catastrophic failure and departure of the tail. My understanding is that the fracture of any single load bearing beam would not be sufficient, the remaining beams have sufficiend design strength margin to take over the increased load (just look at the Aloha convertible, where more than 50% of the fuselage structure was missing yet it still held together).
andrasz is offline