the SR was designed to leak...
Posted on 03/10/2012 6:19:02 PM PST by U-238
Maintainers with the 33rd Fighter Wing have determined that three loose fasteners caused the small fuel leak during the F-35’s first mission flight Tuesday.
The wing’s first F-35A Joint Strike Fighter took off at 10:07 a.m. for what was supposed to be a 90-minute flight. The sortie was cut short to roughly 20 minutes when the pilot of an F-16 acting as a chase plane spotted what appeared to a small fuel leak on the F-35. Maintainers with the 33rd Fighter Wing conducted an extensive review of the jet and determined three slightly loose fasteners allowed a small amount of fuel to seep from the jet during its initial flight, Eglin Air Force Base announced Friday. Maintainers also found residual water from an earlier wash of the aircraft
(Excerpt) Read more at nwfdailynews.com ...
Routine stuff for aircraft maintenance.
I agree. Small stuff.
Righty tighty, Lefty loosey!
Ha...I remember seeing trash cans under Tomcats...to catch the dripping fuel.
Doesn’t sound too serious.
Not as bad as the SR-71 leaks?
The SR-71 is retired.
the SR was designed to leak...
They do not say what part of the craft had the loose bolts. Why is the integrity of any part of the fuel system dependent upon any bolt whose head is exposed to the outside? You’d never build a car that way.
One of the advantages of cadmium plated fasteners is reliable and predictable torque application.
I’ll bet dollars to donuts that the suspect fasteners are one of the “green” alternatives forced on DoD by the Greens. They are already having corrosion issues with F-22 because of the Greens forbidding hexavalent chromium and cadmium from the design.
Cadmium worked great and nobody was getting poisoned by it. Sure, cadmium is poisonous; just don’t sprinkle it on your breakfast cereal, and you’ll be fine.
True; the heat generated from Mach 2-3 by skin friction expanded the fuel cell skins and allowed the leaks to seal inflight. No big deal because the JP-7 fuel was not flammable at all until heated inflight when used to dissipate airframe heating enroute to the engines. Remarkable engineering for 50 plus years ago, and no one has ever bested the altitude/airspeed records for air breathing aircraft. YEA Skunk Works and Kelly Johnson!!
JC
roger that... and designed with a slide-rule, pencil and paper at that
Yep, I earned an engineering degree in the 60’s using a slide rule. The secret was one had to be smart enough o estimate an expected answer to know where to put the decimal point. Nowadays, kids just accept whatever answer the computer provides with no idea whether it is credible or not! Modern computer modelling is also wonderful unless significant variables and parameters are faulty or missing, then you get garbage answers. Combine that with gubmint money to “prove” political issues, and you get junk science like with the global warming crapola!!
JC
bingo, garbage in, garbage out...
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