Design limit load is for an aircraft at max allowable weight, with the max authorized g loading (often -1 to +2.5g) or the worst anticipated gusts (about 50 ft/sec depending on altitude). You then need to tack on 50% to get the required ultimate load.

50% is indeed not a huge safety margin like you'd get with a bridge or something, which is why you need trained professionals flying it and regular inspections. If you fly into a big enough thunderstorm, the wings can definitely come off. Of course a bigger safety margin would be nice, but every pound of wing spar is a pound less payload. If the FAA required 200% of design limit, flying would be significantly more expensive.

This is why there's maneuvering speed (VA), or turbulent air penetration speed (VB). It isn't necessary to over design it, you just slow down and, voila, the airfoil will sooner stall than break - and the stall is brief, feels like sluggishness, like a squishy slow stall, not abrupt, and recovery is similar perhaps a bit more abrupt as the airfoil regains lift.

Sure, as long as the gust is mostly vertical (usually true), and you're able to maintain below Va. All of the up and down motion in a serious thunderstorm can easily cause you to exceed Va or even Vne. Many aircraft have broken up in flight because of this. Now it could be that in many accidents, it wouldn't have mattered how strong the wing was -- eventually the speed build build up to the point where a big gust would break it, but I'm sure there are many where say an extra 50% strength would have made the difference.

Now that's also not to say that if you're going to add weight to an airplane in the name of safety that the best place to do it is the wing spar, but there is certainly a tradeoff between safety and weight.

> 50% is indeed not a huge safety margin like you'd get with a bridge or something

Safety margins for bridges are like 25-50%.

That's interesting. I know that they used to be a lot more. Perhaps we should be glad that most of the bridges we drive over were built before FEM, and they just used a lot more steel. I wonder how well a bridge designed with a 25% safety margin is going to perform when it's poorly maintained for 50 years and rusting like a lot of bridges in the U.S.

The reason this works is that the safety margins accumulate. You have a safety margin on:

* the loading on the bridge, which can be higher than the calculated amount.

* the resistance of the materials used, that can be lower than the requested amount.

* the quality of the soil,

* the lifespan of the bridge,

* ...

So the loading can be 25% percent higher, the materials can be 25% worse, the soil can be 25% worse, the lifespan can be 25% higher, ... and at the end you get a bridge that would still work if everything fails with a margin of 25%.

If the loads are 30% higher, the bridge might or might not fail. Who knows. Even though there are many other safety factors, and the bridge probably won't fail, it was not designed for that. There might be a critical part somewhere that has a resistance that's 25% worse than what it should be, and it therefore can only support a 25% overload, and with 30% that part might fail.

Bridges are designed to fail very slowly, loudly, and visibly, to avoid loss of functionality (e.g. when a bridge start to fail, this becomes obvious, and you still have months or years to sanitize the bridge).

I expect airplanes to have much tighter safety margins (<15% or <10%). The loads are more accurately known, the materials are higher quality, everything passes more extensive quality assurance tests, weight is much more important and companies are willing to pay prime prices on materials, manufacturing, etc. to reduce it, etc.

Safety margins aren't chosen arbitrarily. The job of a safety margin is to quantify an uncertainty, and with enough money thrown at each one, most of the uncertainties can be quite precisely quantified. Then it's the job of the designer to say "This plane should be in service for 50 years", and from the uncertainties and statistical analysis you can compute the highest load that the plane will receive in those 50 years with a certain quantified margin of error, and continue the design using that.

Sorry, I mistyped. It is indeed the maximum theoretical load as calculated by the engineering team.

Specifically from the video description:

> This Boeing 777 wing was tested to destruction, finally breaking at one fifty four percent of the designed limit load.

I would still expect the `maximum theoretical load` to be well above the `designed limit load`.

And it is, it is 154% or slightly more than 2.5x the 'design limit load'.

90% of $100 is not $190

Interestingly the 154% number seems to be gone from the article now

The language is tricky, if you interpret it as I did, or 154% "more" than the design limit, then it is the design limit plus 1.54 more design limits. Like saying you salary is $100 and we're paying you 90% beyond your salary. Then you would expect to get $190.

If you interpret it to be 154% "of" the design limit, then I would agree it would be 1.54x the design limit.

Since other publications from Boeing, and Boeing staff at the "Future of Flight" museum in Everett have said that the planes are safer because they can withstand over twice their design limit, I read the 154% number as the amount "over" the limit.

Since folks from Boeing read Hackernews, it would be great for one of them to chime in here with some clarification :-).

It's not a matter of interpretation or tricky language. The video says "of" [1] so it's 1.54 times the design limit.

[1] https://youtu.be/Ai2HmvAXcU0?t=45

The video was clear and left no room for interpretation.

Planes are safer because “they can withstand twice their design limit” is senseless. The 2x factor you are thinking of is the design limit. The design limit has all of the huge safety margins built in for the normal load limits.

The planes are designed to take at least 2x the max normal loads.

It’s in the above Boeing video not the article.

Slightly more than 1.5x you mean. And yeah, since the design limit load is already going to have a safety margin over the max anticipated load, as long as the test performs some amount beyond that design level, it's good.

Edit: This is assuming the 'design level' is the level it was designed to withstand, which is how I would normally understand the term. Having watched the full video now though, it sounds like it actually exceeded the expected max force that could be expected in the real world by 1.54 times, and that the design anticipated about 1.5x. So indeed, it hit dead-on the design expectation, rather than vastly exceeding it—but that's fine, because the design included a 50% margin of error (and one would hope, a conservative worst-case estimate).

This is the way I see it, you get to the design limit, that is 1x the design limit, then you up that by 100% so now you are at 2x the design limit, and then you go 54% more so you are at 2.54x the design limit.

It's 154% of the design load, not 154% more than the design load. So 1.54×.

Ok, I'm hijacking this thread because there's some confusion about 'limit' load.

http://rgl.faa.gov/Regulatory_and_Guidance_Library/rgFAR.nsf...

You're not hijacking it, just adding some contextual information, namely: "Strength requirements are specified in terms of limit loads (the maximum loads to be expected in service) and ultimate loads (limit loads multiplied by prescribed factors of safety). Unless otherwise provided, prescribed loads are limit loads."

Was that an airplane joke?