If they were unexpectedly retired early with no FI on the wings, how would they have carried on to their planned retirement date?:)

John.

Perhaps a bit hasty with my quote:o

There was very little FI left on the wings and the FI had to be carefully husbanded. We spent a lot (and I mean a lot:eek:) of money developing a NDT technique to monitor one particular area of the rear wing skin and spar structure which was manufactured with a concession, ie the edge distance to one fastener was too low. This was an area where the critical crack length was 0.5mm after that the wing could unzip. Basically they were flying by inspection and it was an onerous one at that.

Hope that clarifies things a bit.

John