Originally Posted by
Outwest
However as I said as far as I know there was never a situation where the head and half the gear box split and departed, and this is when a/c were designed with slide rules. I would hope things would be better engineered today with the tools available now.
Between the new tools and the competitive nature of the industry as it necks down, one of the things that the tools do is aid and abet attempts at optimization, which among other things allows for new and interesting ways to chase the weight bogey with an over all aim to (among other design objectives) increase effective payload? One wonders if, in the slide rule era and only three significant digits, more components didn't get a rounding up in erring on the side of robustness. The other thing I wonder is, from those who have been involved in design and test, is how much and how many tests to ultimate load (deformation or failure) you'd see in the slide rule era versus now? Don't know, and am thinking out loud a bit.