aerobatic kit planes

Dudley Henriques wrote in
:

The guy who owned the one we leased back got a double hit in one day.
He landed on the grass on a field down near the Susquehanna River, tried
to wheel it on and had it nailed until he went over the mound in the
middle of the runway that he didn't know about. The main gear legs
compressed and he caught the prop tips bending the hell out of it.
The next day he called and said he had received the AD on the wing.
He was ONE unhappy camper!!



Well, all you had to do was cut some holes and inspect them, though I think
that was settled on eventually after some consultation with the FAA. I
think when it first came out is was replace or nothing.
To be fair, a lot of spars were found to be damaged. We plan to have a
policy of inspecting the spars on ours if the airplane is groundlooped,
even if it doesn't look lke any contact was made with the tips, or if 4.5G
is exceeded, or if the paint is inexplicably marked due hangar rash. It'll
cost us nothing! Our spars are brand new and are significantly beefier than
the originals. The original ribs had slots in them that allow an extra
1/16th of an inch in thickness and another 1/8th inch in depth, which makes
the spar about 15% stronger. There's a guy out in Washington state who does
this mod and he makes a couple of other small detail mods as well, like
wingtip mounting and feathered doubler plates to avoid stress risers.
Probably even better are getting the metal spars, but our's was done when
we got it, so ...

Bertie