Great news to hear, being only a little up the road from work. :):)

Well, that and spending 15 yrs working the full gammet of maintenance jobs from BAe 146 assembly at Woodford to the line at in Boeings and Airbus’s in NZ and Oz leaves me wondering exactly where all the little bits of plumbing and such really are fitted. But if I mention that then I know it makes me one of the few, sorry, many sworn to secrecy or planted as disinformation agents…..:D:D

The bit I don’t quite understand is if these chemtrails are there to drop a concoction of chemicals on us, and proof that the exist is the fact the hang in the air longer than a standard contrail then don’t the two contradict each other? Shouldn’t the intent be that they actually dissipate quickly over a wide area so that we actually get covered in the stuff rather than just watch it float over our heads?

She’s got to be one of my earliest memories of the Fielddays at Mystery Creek. Looking good.

Need to try and rebalance the world, a Kiwi living in Adelaide, South Australia.

I’ve inspected a few airframes over the years, and in general, are cracks good?
Of course not, but are they always reason to ground a plane -no.

Remembering designing a plane (or most things for that matter) is complex and it’s not all about making it so strong it won’t break.

There’s the bit about ensuring that if it does crack how to limit the propagation of it by design (think say, 3 piece spars, if a crack develops it can only travel to the edge of the material)

Then there’s redundancy in load paths, so if a crack does develop then the load can transfer through other joints.

Then there is inspection frequencies, they are not chosen by a random number generator, but by careful calculation on expected failure rates, after all these cracks were not found after the wing fell off, but during a maintenance process.

The design teams hopefully have applied learnings from others failures, in particular to the aluminium components, but remember that FRP components have been in use for many years now too. It would be a brave man to say it won’t happen, but it would be a foolish man to discount the engineering knowledge that has gone into any modern aircraft.

A small amendment

The Internet is mostly populated by people who are under the impression they are right and everyone else is wrong. Just ignore them 😎