Broken wing

No, the Lockheed Electra (turboprop, Allison engines) started falling out of
the skies shortly after their introduction. I believe the first one was
over Wink, TX and there were a couple more shortly thereafter. All sorts of
goofy reasons were tossed around, all the way from wrong rivet sizes to the
biffy leaking effluent onto the spar. The root cause was a peculiar
vibration of the engines called "whirl mode". THe fix was neither trivial
nor inexpensive. We had four of them at PSA and those damned things just
would NOT quit on you. They were also the easiest to work on transport
class aircraft I ever encountered.

Jim


"George Patterson" wrote in message
news:U7Jqf.50934$CL.50059@trnddc04...
Stubby wrote:
Way back, I believe the first jet passenger jet was the Lockheed Electra.
The plane mysteriously fell out of the air and very thorough search for a
cause was instituted.

Sounds like you're confusing it with the DeHaviland Comet. The cause was
eventually determined to be the rapid formation of stress cracks around
the corners of the rectangular cabin windows.

George Patterson
Coffee is only a way of stealing time that should by rights belong to
your slightly older self.