Robert M. Gary wrote:
On May 12, 11:41 am, Matt Whiting wrote:
Jose wrote:
each section
of the wing is only as strong as it needs to be. Therefore, the chance
of failure (at least ideally) is about equal anywhere along the wing
In fact, there's a video somewhere showing a stress test on a wing; the
entire wing fails pretty much at the same time.
Jose
I'd like to see that video as the odds of this happening are nearly zero.

Matt

Certainly one section would expect to fail first, either by chance or
because one section ends up being weaker for practical reasons. I've
seen the video, when the main spar fails the wing shatters, its a bit
difficult to tell where it failed because of the shattering.

I've not seen a composite wing fail so maybe they look different than
the metal ones I've seen. The latter always snaps at one point,
typically close to the root. I saw footage some years ago of an
airplane (I want to say an Aero Commander, but I'm not sure anymore)
that pulled up too steeply and shed both wings. They folded up right
near the fuselage on both sides.

I've seen a few videos of airliner wings stressed to failure and when
they fail it looks like a small explosion with debris flying everywhere,
but much of that is the test apparatus flying around. The failure
occurred at a point. It simply isn't possible to design a wing
perfectly enough or, harder yet, assemble it uniformly enough to get a
distributed failure.

Matt