John
It is a fair question, but we'd need to be careful in interpreting
the answer - Monos tend to be older and more home-crafted than tris
so you'd have to disentangle those factors from any possible direct
link between slop and undercarriage configuration.
Incidentally, a senior bod at the PFA told one of our colleagues
earlier this week that "We may never know the full story". We may be
stuck therefore with having to adopt the scatter gun approach to
ensuring the integrity of our aircraft.
Willie Harrison
G-BZNY (passed all its FSB 006 checks today. Popham here we come...)
On 26 Jun 2007, at 15:31, TELEDYNMCS@aol.com wrote:
> In a message dated 6/26/2007 2:59:32 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
> europa-list@matronics.com writes:
> At this time, we don't know that any wear (if it was actually
> present) did cause
> the flutter. The AAIB/PFA may decide that the evidence shows that
> it did but
> they haven't, to my knowledge, announced that yet.
>
> Please don't missunderstand me, I am all for improving the
> integrity of the Europa
> tailplane system but let's base the discussion on known facts
> rather than
> guesses.
>
> Mark,
> I'm not guessing about anything here. The purpose of the question I
> posed was entirely aimed at obtaining facts about whether or not
> there anyone had noticed a correlation between torque tube wear and
> landing gear type, not to guess whether or not tailplane flutter
> caused the accident. It's the PFA that is all hot and bothered
> about associating pitch system wear and tailplane flutter, not me.
> It's the PFA that has issued documents that infer a link to
> sloppiness in the pitch system to tailplane flutter based on a
> single, isolated incident, and the notion (or guess if you will)
> that tailplane flutter is what caused the crash, not me. It's the
> PFA that seems to be the one that is doing the guessing here, not
> me. All I did was read the documents the PFA released regarding
> this incident and, based on their commentary, asked a legitimate
> question about whether anyone had noticed a correlation between
> landing gear type and torque tube wear. Although it seems like an
> obvious question to me, judging by the responses thus far,
> apparently no one has bothered to look for a correlation.
>
> If Europa 04 keeps records on who they've sold Mod 62 kits to and
> what kind of landing gear the aircraft uses, it would be easy to
> see if the wear on the torque tube(s) is more prevalent in mono's,
> trigears or neither. Since the PFA seems to be suggesting
> (guessing) that wear in the pitch system possibly lead to tailplane
> flutter which resulted in the recent crash in the UK, it stands to
> reason that the PFA would want to isolate those aircraft where the
> wear is more likely to occur, if indeed wear is more prevalent in
> one type of landing gear as opposed to another and if sloppiness in
> the pitch system lead to tailplane flutter and if that flutter
> caused the crash. If indeed this is the case, the focus of any
> corrective action should be directed where it is most needed. What
> the PFA has done so far is the scatter-gun approach.
>
>
> Regards,
>
> John Lawton
> Whitwell, TN (TN89)
> N245E - Flying
>
>
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