One of the last Starships for sale

I must say I am concerned about the use of quite this much composite material in the 787. At the moment of course, Boeing seem to have the upper hand over Airbus in this market area but of course neither a 787 or an A350/A370 have been fully built or flown yet.

My main concerns are over the durability of the material and its joins over what we have now come to expect as the typical lifetime of a commercial aircraft which is 20-30 years of fairly intensive operation.

When I was stuyding engineering at university, one of my coursemates was doing a project on the fatigue life of [supposedly identical] carbon fibre samples and I remember him saying he was disappointed he couldnt find any pattern to his results. Achieving consistancy of manufacture is one of the greatest difficulties with composite materials, the presence of voids being somethign that is meant to be very tightly controlled for aerospace applications.

Of course people like something new (ok, except maybe on this particular part of the forum 😀 ) so aircraft like the Starship 10/15 years ago and the 787 now have great appeal, but to my mind composites raise as many questions (at the moment) as they provide answers. No doubt though some good work is being done by materials scientists around the world and these problems will be overcome.

Good to see Boeing are going to use composite technology extensively in the new 787! 😮

Not being an engineer I can’t say for sure, but my hunch is that a composite AC tail section would stand up better than a metal one subject to various stresses from vibrations, propwash, etc. At the end of the day, I’d trust Bert Rutan’s design and Beech’s ability to “glue” it together better than Ferrari seems to have done in the case illustrated.

The Starship was made by a process that is no longer being used…but Raytheon says it learned a lot from the program about the material which it’s using for other programs including its Beechcraft Premier biz jet which features a composite fuselage.

Bob Scherer is the world’s largest Starship enthusiast and his webpage is here: http://www.bobscherer.com/Pages/Starship.htm

I’m told he has literally tons of spares

There’s another 10 of them a few yards south west…
shame, nice to see something different, and the owners obviously rate them

Here’s the last resting place of a few of them – Marana

http://maps.google.co.uk/?q=Tucson,+AZ,+USA+(tucson)&ie=UTF8&z=18&ll=32.512675,-111.322752&spn=0.002045,0.005364&t=k&om=0

Good to see Boeing are going to use composite technology extensively in the new 787! 😮

prophetic more like……………

I remember a quote from a US mag i think, from a guy owning a starship, commenting on the buyback programme, who said they had to ‘pry my starship out from the stiff hands of my corpse before I give it up”

good eh? 😀

That looks too clean a break to be carbon fibre failure, that looks much more like the bonding of 2 sections has failed

i was going to put somthing similar, since there are no broken fibres, and the nose isnt hanging on by fibre threads, but the text did say that it didnt break at a joint……i suppose it could be a layup joint in the mould (layups with no overlap?!) which isn’t neccessarily visible on the finished tub.

That looks too clean a break to be carbon fibre failure, that looks much more like the bonding of 2 sections has failed

YAK-11 – Raytheon has concerns about the long term structural integrity of the aircraft. They use a lot of composites and I believe one is being used for examination into the longevity of carbon fibre structure.

It seems that the early commercial uses of carbon composites has the US insurance industry worried about longevity and future claims.

In Aug of 2004 at Mazda Raceway in Calf, a wealthy Dutch Ferrari importer was playing boy racer with one of the ex works racers during a Ferrari club event and had what appeared to be a minor shunt into a tirewall at something under 60kph.

The nose of the F1 Ferrari (a 1999 model) broke clean off leaving the drivers feet exposed. The break occured where there were no joints or previous damage repairs.

Now this car was tested under the supervison of the FIA to a very high impact standard.

Now Ferrari are concerned about these older first and second gen type carbon cars, both from an aging concerning (the unknown) and of possible non factory repairs to these race cars. Even the type of primer and finishing paint coat applied years later can cause chemical reactions that could affect the quality and strength of the materials. They just don’t know enough about how the storage, upkeep or even the chemical properties of even cleaners affects the products long term strength. There is also of course fear of the rich fools that buy these cars and do silly things with them as well!

“I was sitting under a tree at the exit of turn 6 and saw the whole thing. He wasn’t going that fast, got on the throttle too early and spun to the inside and hit the right front on the inside tire wall. It wasn’t that hard of a hit. It was scarry to see the driver sitting there with his legs hanging out, totally exposed. I’m glad the corner workers got the rest of the cars slowed down. The driver was Federico Kroymans, the Ferrari and Maserati importer for the Netherlands, the car is a F399. He was able to get himself out of the car and limp around. He is tall and a bit overweight, so I wonder if they modified the monoque for him to fit. It was a clean break at the bulkhead where the steering wheel attaches.”

Ferrari investigates tub failure

Ferrari is investigating why one of its F399 chassis tore in half during an accident in a historic race at Laguna Seca in the United States. Technical director Ross Brawn said: “We have got the car back at the factory and we are looking at it. Although it’s the same model as the one Michael had his accident in [at Silverstone in 1999], it’s a very different sort of accident. In Michael’s he had a front impact and the wheel came back into the cockpit and that’s what broke his leg. With this one – as far as I understand – the car went backwards into a barrier and the wheel became stuck in the barrier as the car spun around it, putting a tensile load on the car.” The ’99 Ferrari was torn in half.

It may end up that a whole generation of motor racing cars will be unable to be raced in future (20 years or so from now) at historic racing events, such as the Goodwood event because of these fears. Without factory support in the future, one can guess that insurance companies might decide not to offer a rate. If that happens, track owners may decide that the risk is too great to allow them out onto the track.

It would seem that the general aviation industry would have even greater fears concerning the aging of these types of materials considering that they have been using these items longer then the motor car racing industry has. There is a great difference between a race car running around a race track with containment (walls and guardrails) and a Beech Starship’s tail falling off while over a city…

i remember reading somthing about vibration fatiguing in the tail cone from the propellors as being fairly critical…..I believe burt still uses his. Cool airplane, don’t know whether I would want to own one purely on the basis of maintenance costs.

YAK-11 – Raytheon has concerns about the long term structural integrity of the aircraft. They use a lot of composites and I believe one is being used for examination
into the longevity of carbon fibre structure. There were also other concerns about
pilot training on type from memory.

Whats the problem with them then?

I took a look at a couple of clearly airworthy examples a couple of years ago in California. They looked stunning – if sodding noisy in flight!

Although Beech/Raytheon had offered a buyback programme, it was still possible to fly them as a large number of parts were shared with other types. Clearly that’s going to get tougher in the future.

I seem to recollect that Burt Rutan was at the forefront of keeping them flying. Didn’t he use one as a chase plane for Spaceship One?

No, Davis’s right no parts support – plus Raytheon are in takeover talks….

TT

Didn’t Beech go on a buy -back programme to try to take them all off of the market? Or is it non-flyable?

It is flying

Raytheon became increasingly concerned about the long term liability of the Starship and started a programme to buy them back from their owners. Most owners sold them back but a few hae said no and how they are fixed as regards keeping them in the air remains to be seen!
Raytheon has passed a few onto U.S museums.

Didn’t Beech go on a buy -back programme to try to take them all off of the market? Or is it non-flyable?