On Jan 10, 10:53*am, Darryl Ramm wrote:
On Jan 10, 5:35*am, gldrgidr wrote:





On Jan 9, 11:11*pm, "
wrote:

And if the spar is the same on the L23 shouldn't they be grounded as
well...

Not if this is a fatigue problem. *Fatigue would only show up after
many thousands of hours of service.
Remember that the L13 has been around for many years without any
problems until now.
The much newer L23 's might not suffer any failures for 20 more
years.
The FAA should be determining what a reasonable safe expected service
life for the L13 is, and then ground only the L13's that have
accumulated more than that number of hours service.
There should also be some kind of approved fix to bring these gliders
back into service.
Apparently sailplanes are a low priority with the FAA.
Has the SSA applied any pressure to get this resolved?

There should be a tooth fairy and Santa Claus as well. What actually
needs to happen has been talked about here in detail - from both the
FAA and SSA perspectives and I believe pro-active owners are trying to
work on this. Just spouting off what the FAA should be doing is going
will get nothing done.

"Fatigue would only show up after many thousands of hours of service."

Well if only real world engineering was that simple. There was a fatal
crash in a not too old L13 that Austrian air saftey investigators
determined appeared to involve fatigue. Then EASA and the FAA followed
up with a slate of ADs to try to understand/manage the possible
fatigue issue, and I believe those agencies actually looked at this in
more than a cursory way. I kind of expect those folks know more about
fatigue than you. If you are a subject expert and think they are wrong
then do all the owners a favor and take up the issue with EASA and/or
the FAA.

A small local club owns only a L13 and are left with no club glider
and I am sure there are other clubs in the same mess.

The TC holder needs to drive the failure/fatigue analysis and
engineering fixes. Affected owners should be starting there. The FAA
and EASA was not tasked with engineering fixes for aircraft.

All this, including the SSA angle has been well discussed here in the
past. You can search the r.a.s. archives on Google groups (where the
original post was from).

Darryl- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Among those posts, LET has published a document setting out how they
intend to resolve the issue, and a time frame of early spring to get
it done.
After that, EASA and the FAA will have to agree to it.
The SSA has also published a detailed report from the FAA on the
problem.
That FAA report is very discouraging. Clearly, the piggyback rivets
used in that area of the wing structure are a big issue for the FAA,
and LET's document doesn't address that issue at all. LET'S planned
eddy current cract detection fix is also going to have to address the
issues already raised by the FAA about the effectiveness of such
tests.

I would not be surprised if there were somewhat more than 100 clubs in
the same situation as the one you are close to.
However, I'm afraid that given that Blanik L-13's were designed in the
50's, when repair labor costs were low, and they tend to be complex to
fix in some areas at the best of times, one shouldn't be surprised if
the fix that is eventually approved is complex and expensive to do.
And that, as you are obviously aware, is not going to be a good thing
for Soaring.