21st Congress of International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences, Melbourne, Australia, 13-18 September, 1998
Paper ICAS-98-R.6.1

CAST AIRFRAME PRIMARY STRUCTURE

Walter S., Feirertag F.*
luvic Hitchcock International, Minneapolis, USA; *Boeing Commercial Airplane Group, Seattle, USA

Keywords: cast, airframe, primary structure

Substantial cost reductions are available on certain classes of aircraft structure when they are produced using the casting manufacturing process. In order to learn more about this technology when applied to large flight critical structures, a generic development airframe component has been cooperatively produced by Boeing Commercial Aircraft Group (BCAG), Japan Aircraft Development Consortium (JADC) and Hitchcock Industries Inc (HI!). The casting was designed to meet all structure design criteria for large flight critical applications on commercial aircraft. A developmental manufacturing and testing program has seen structures produced and tested under damage tolerance and fail safe regimes. The joint program, and some of the preliminary test conclusions are briefly presented in this paper.

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