As almost all of us know, flutter can cause failure of control surfaces and sometimes the attachment points the control surface is attached to. Neither of the two cases that have been mentioned cause primary wing spar failure. The KR wing remains one of the strongest aircraft wings ever designed.
Seat failures under very high G loads is the closest anyone can point to that relates to or distantly resembles KR "structural failure". Even that can be avoided with better seat design, which most of us have done. Ice (when IFR or descending through a thick ice-laden cloud layer) is the only KR vulnerability (it's what killed Ken Rand). That and flutter, and then only when hot-dogging or grossly exceeding NE (usually both). Am I wrong? Did Sakkie's wing "come off" while turning final? If so, I suspect he was lining up with the runway in preparation for doing a high speed pass which for some reason some pilots seem to get a kick out of. Was he turning final in preparation for landing? If so, he would have been going at normal approach speed that would have not induced flutter. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but my guess he was descending, turning final while building up speed to blow away the audience with how fast he could race just above the runway. A "buzz-job". As it is, my guess is the wing didn't at all "come off". The aileron and some fiberglass and wood debris came off . . . not the wing itself. I wasn't there so I'm entirely open to correction. Mike KSEE N335KC . -- KRnet mailing list [email protected] https://list.krnet.org/mailman/listinfo/krnet
