Dan wrote: > I'd be interested to hear what the actual experiences have been of > others who have had a trim wire failure without the spring & trim stop.
In 1994, as editor of Coupe Capers, I had a long talk on the phone with the accident investigator of a disintegrate in flight Coupe accident. I did not see the final report to see if it confirmed what he said on the phone. He said he was leaning toward ruling it as elevator flutter as a result of trim tab flutter. The specifics were, for no other apparent reason, the tail broke off the airplane, the nose pitched down abruptly, the airflow on the top of the wings caused huge negative g-loads and the pilot was ejected from the plane. I guess he had a long fall. (In the Sebring crash, the empennage seems to have broken and the last part of the scenario seems the same but the cause may well have been forward if the ATP witness's account of fluttering ailerons was correct.) Bill makes an entirely correct point that trim tab wire failure must have happened many times without flutter and destruction. But, thinking about that guy's long, long, fall to the ground, possibly conscious and alert, I think I will always want a trim tab stop and spring on any Coupe I ever own again. I will continue to make sure the spring is strong at least at each annual. That's my personal preference. Still, I won't be a*al-retentive about going for a ride in someone's plane which doesn't have the trim tab stop and spring. Per Bill's point, it takes a pretty restricted set of circumstances before a failure of that wire becomes catastrophic. Ed
