"Capt.Doug" wrote in message
...
"Dudley Henriques" wrote in message
Total replacement of a part based on an estimated failure span is good,
but
even with that in place, considering the astronomical cost of doing this,
flying these old airplanes past their projected airframe runout I think
will
always be a crapshoot.

The airframe doesn't need to be old. Cape Air has installed spar straps in
their C-402C fleet (47 C-402s) after an incident which inspired the Cessna
400 series wingspar AD.

D.


This is absolutely true.
I didn't mean to imply that only older airframes are affected. All airframes
are affected starting from the first day they become operational. Sometimes
it's caught and an AD is issued, but many times, especially with older
airplanes, the issue misses the AD route and just lies there waiting.
I can remember 1 AD involving the P51D during the time I was involved with
the airplane, and that one was on the 24D50 Hamilton prop. Just imagine
projecting the failure timeouts for the rest of the airframe as we used it
for display work. Thank God we were fairly good at estimating.
:-)
Dudley Henriques