bunch of nerds up in here! A wing deflecting means nothing to someone that's never been in a plane. Bending is easier to wrap their heads around I was walking with a student back to the building and heard a big plane landing and it turned out to be America's 757. Not sure who's in town Fantastic photo on my end.... Need one of those zoom and enhance features like the movies
We leave Thursday evening.I understand the lift part so to say,but my mechanical mind says understanding how it works will make me try to think of everything that could go wrong. My plan is to just make sure I'm early enough to partake in enough man pops I won't care.
I had a chance to see one of those relatively up close at Delta's maintenance shop. Lots of little bumps and blisters all over the place. The plane was fenced off and no photos allowed. Apparantly the inside was pretty damned impressive with features besides seats and meeting space. Next to it was JANET plane. 737 white with red stripe. We ran into the Air Force crew and my friend (manager of services for non Delta clients) spoke to them about the service and when they were leaving. After we walked away he said the box the co pilot had contained all navigation history and stayed with them at all time. He said the inside was basically shitty 737 people hauler.
DATS what Im talkin bout'...... Check out all the weights dangling.....Love it! All "Strain-Gauged" up too.....I'd like to see that data. I saw video of a similar test going to total failure......Holy Crap Impressive. The F22 testing I was involved in was fuselage. We were having problems with the "Side-of-Body" Titanium Hot Isostaticly Pressed (Ti-HIP) castings cracking. I was the NDI-Guy. Strain Gauges would spike, sometimes you could hear it......"OK, Charlie....how bad did we break it??!!!" .....fun job.
Man that is a crazy picture. Really makes me feel way better about the wing flex that happens during fairly normal flight.
In many cases they are tested to destruction to gather data regarding where they do actually fail and why (versus design and projected issues). But also (like in the case of the photo above), they like to dismantle and gather information on an intact flexed surface to see how it performed.
Was that the 777 wing failure test? Very cool indeed. I worked with guys who were in the factory when it popped. It was projected to fail at 150% and the number was exactly 151% when it went boom. The sound of broken fasteners raining on the floor was supposed to be pretty impressive. Now I need to search the video archives to see if I can find the video as it's been a couple of decades since I last watched it. Little known trivia - The opposite wing on the 777 failure test was a folding wing. That's all that I know. Edit: the 777 wing failed at 154% load. Video is on you tube if you search for "777 wing failure test video"
Hell yeah, great stuff! I've done structural testing on composite components and the sound of a failure under millions of pounds of load is shocking even if you're expecting it. Figuring out how to replicate a distributed load using all of those whippletrees must have been fun.
I flew on a 787 soon after they were put into service and was amazed to see the wings bouncing up and down. I don't recall ever seeing that on conventional planes. Seems counterintuitive, but I guess composite wings deflect more than aluminum?
I did a semester of NDT in college and always found it fascinating. Too bad the only good jobs around here in that field are ultrasonic testing pipes in the nuke plant. Not very exciting.....