Aluminium in the aeroplanes?

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Yeah it does, but it doesn't usually crash. One of my friends went in with his F-100 and the other went in in an F-4, both with hotly burning mtal falling off as they went in. I wasn't there in either case (it was in Viet Nam), but was told they got hit, some magnesium caught fire, and neither punched out. That's all I heard. Makes me not want to fly with too much magnesium around.

About the Rutan canards. I know maybe 10 guys who built or bought them and flew or fly them. 4 went in. That's not a very good ratio, so I just shy away from them. Of the 4 two were unknown causes, one developed a fuel leak and the gasoline ate away the foam core of the wing, and the other one had the canard snap off in flight. They weren't wearing parachutes. Many people at the Planes of Fame participated in the search for that one. There was no rescue part.

Flight has risks, no doubt. No point in making them worse by unwise design, poor construction, or any other stupid causes.
 
Ya' got me there, Graugeist ... it doesn't.

I'd say that the start of this thread tells us how hard it is to predict the future of any material or, indeed, any technology. When the Commodore Vic 20 came out, I wasn't too thrilled with the potential future of PCs ... and look where they are today. Still, I would NOT have gone on record as saying they had no future, even at that frustrating time of development.

What is frustrating about magnesium is that it is still used in places that are dubious from some points of view. At least most commercial planes today don't go down in magnesuim flames, so there must have been positive progress.
 
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the circumstances surrounding your friends...and i am indeed sorry for your loss...is quite different from the use of magnesium on GA and commerical ac. they took arms fire. whether and how much magnesium came into play may never really be known as neither punched out. but even at that more planes and lives were lost due to iron metal filings than to magnesium.
 
Magnesium is an element made for the aerospace industry. It is abundant and it's alloys are, light, easy to cut or machine, hard to dent (absorbing impact energy without brittle fracture), good absorbers of vibrations, and often more ductile than equivalent aluminium alloys, vital in extrusions of which there are many in most air frames.

You will seriously struggle to get on any flying machine apart from a balloon with a wicker basket, that does not comprise a significant amount of magnesium alloys and that's before you look at the engines. If you are really worried about the presence of an element so prevalent in modern aircraft then best stick to driving

The properties of any metal alloy are often very different from those of the elemental metal. That's why the original article that gave rise to this thread got it so badly wrong regarding aluminium. That would include flammability.

Cheers

Steve
 
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stona said:
The properties of any metal alloy are often very different from those of the elemental metal. That's why the original article that gave rise to this thread got it so badly wrong regarding aluminium. That would include flammability.

Cheers

Steve
Click to expand...

Indeed, Steel is an alloy of Iron and Carbon, the presence of even small amounts of carbon combined with the correct heat treatment transforms Iron which is quite soft into steel which can be as hard as the proverbial hobbs of hell. Carbon itself is quite literally soot, no real properties at all (cept when its a diamond of course)
 
Unfortumately a lot of Aluminum in our original North AMerican O-47 did just that when it was landed gear-up! Not a good day for the O-bird, to say the least.

Many things get rather explosive when turned into dust. Coal burns, but coal dust is a great explosive! Aluminum has similar properties along those lines.
 
stona said:
And flour. Many a flour mill used to go up with a bang!

Cheers

Steve
Click to expand...
Actually many things around us are prone to violent reaction under the right circumastances. There have been several sugar mills that have exploded voilently from sugar dust and when I was a kid living in Fullerton, Orange County, experinced a massive explosion and fire from the nearby Sunkist packing plant a few blocks over from where I lived. The citrus oil in the air detonated from some source and rocked the area, killing several people, destroying the block and shattering windows for quite some ways.
 
I forgot that one but how true. Makes a nice white mushroom cloud out of a gristmill! But there's no bread or cornmeal afterward ... fortunatey the grinding stone usually survived the blast to be used again until they forgot to be careful with the flour again.

Oops! Damn! Blew that sucker up ... AGAIN! Hope we still have a few loaves of bread left ...
 
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