STANDARDS FOR SAILPLANE FATIGUE TESTING LOAD PROGRAMS AND EVALUATION

Abstract

Fatigue design and testing isn't listed among the favorite activities of sailplane designers because of the basic problems and economic limitations to be dealt with. It requires official regulations for safety reasons but the Authority, too, has to be careful not to put unecessary burden on the manufacturers. For short, an everlasting subject of the debate for committees. The present OSTIVAS fatigue cases are products of long years and they are still far from being frozen. At the 1994 Budapest meeting of the SDP two questions of detail have been raised and discussed at the 1995 January Omarama meeting. They are: when should full-scale fatigue testing be compulsory; what methods and procedures should be standardized for fatigue test programs and evaluation? The present paper intends to be a contribution to this latter topic