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Re:Air France 447: The ‘Coffin Corner’ and a ‘Mesoscale’ Maw by stcredzero on Monday June 08, 2009 @10:13PM (#648399)
Yes, but that depends on the amount of turbulence, yes? Perhaps the margin of safety needs to be bigger for that region of the ocean?
Re:Air France 447: The ‘Coffin Corner’ and a ‘Mesoscale’ Maw by lutorm on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @08:33AM (#648930)
Weakly so. The idea is that you want the wing to stall and lose lift before it generates that design load limit you don't want to overstress. You generate lift by increasing angle of attack, but the idea is that the wing should stall, and thus stop generating lift, before. The amount of lift a wing can generate depends on its airspeed, so if you keep the airspeed down, the only situation in which it could generate a dangerous amount of lift would be if you entered a region of very high horizontal windshear such that the airspeed all of a sudden increases to above maneuvering speed. (So in principle you should be at least the gust speed below maneuvering speed to be safe, so here is where the margin of safety enters. But it's a second order effect.)