Private Mach 2.5 aircraft crash and wing flutter failure
Appears in 1 lecture.
Appearances across the corpus
Reno-based homebuilt-loophole aircraft program: $10M deposit aircraft, second test pilot (the owner) killed at Mach 2 / 40,000 ft over Nevada desert. Tom's forensic finding: inadequate adhesive joint on the lead-weight damper at wingtip — wing flutter went unstable and ripped the wing off. Wreckage spread over 50 miles. Tom's signature observation: "Why they didn't put a screw in there to join the lead to the aluminum is beyond me."
A number of times I've been asked to go to Washington and talk to the regulatory agencies, in part because I'm at a university — I'm sort of a neutral party. Sometimes there's a lot of money involved. One day I didn't have to go to Washington because right up here by Burlington Mall the Federal Aviation Administration has offices — they have offices around the country, but these offices have to approve parts manufacturing if it's not the original.