Originally Posted by
paulhat
My curiosity has got the better of me
Whats the story here? Did you damage the aircraft while flying it ?
Also is that a foam core wing ? Paul.
Hi Paul,
Don't want to hijack Thomas's thread here but short story is...yes. The outer 3' of the wing tips are honeycomb aluminum sandwiched between top and bottom skins. Skins could delaminate and fail causing the tip to break off. Tip fails were a known problem along with other wing issues in the late 70s and the jets were limited to 5G. In this case we had a tip fail at 5G and it departed the jet doing damage to the fuse side as it folded up and rolled over inboard. This caused the jet to pitch up and exceed 8G which broke the other tip off because of same the failure. This all happened in about 1 second. After the big boom and lurch, and after getting my heart started again, I was shocked to see both wing tips gone. Structural damage checks showed we were good to 180kts which was a normal no flap landing speed, so landing was mostly uneventful except for the "pucker factor."
I have about 1200 hrs in T-38s and always wanted to model one. If I ever do, it will have the 46366 tail number and white scheme because of this flight!
Gary