The Europa has very little provision for crashworthiness. The split in the
front
would have occurred at the time of the impact. The rescue services may have
chopped the cockpit hoop and some of the other structure to gain access to the
occupants.
Having conducted many years of work on aircraft structures, including a thesis
on aircraft light crashworthiness, it is very difficult to include enough
protection
for the occupants without incurring a weight penalty that makes the aeroplane
inefficient.
It looks like the aircraft pancaked in this would generate high compresion in
the
tunnel and fuselage side at the forward cockpit causing compressive de
lamination.
As the aircraft settled this would have opened.
A structural box beam, picking up the engine mount and going aft beyond the crew
seats may have helped distribute the landing loads. In this case the next issue
would be to ensure the occupants movement forward and down did not cause
excessive injuries. The belt mounts on the Europa are not ideally placed to
afford
good protection.
For the Flyer magazine Europa one of the proposed mods was to reinforce the
forward
canopy frame with carbon to provide support in case of a roll-over. I am
not certain that this was done prior to the project being sold and subsequently
finished.
At the end of the day the accumulation of optimal design features can make a
significant
improvement in crashworthiness, some of these good practices are being
embodied in new aircraft eg the LAA has championed some features (such as good
harness placement and energy absorbing seat bases).
--------
John Wighton
Europa XS trigear G-IPOD
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