War weary airplanes, who decided and on what criteria

[drgondog]

I've seen wreckage pieces from two different B-52 crash sites that looked like wing structure and had cracks with patches riveted over them and patches over the patches. Aerolasticity, right? And these were supposedly young airframes.

Fatigue is certainly in the domain of Aeroelastic driven structural issues. The B-52 experienced many 1G reversible loads in normal flight - Ditto UH-1 Hueys due to the rotor +/- loading on the airframe - both different from high frequency/harmonic excitation that you saw on the F-4 wing and tail.

 

[Airframes]

Thanks for the reply regarding 'Shangri la ', Bill. I always thought it rather strange that it would just be dumped, rather than stripped for usable spares.

 

[Greg Boeser]

If anything, it would be stripped, then dumped. There's a picture of some planes caught on the ground at Port Moresby and damaged beyond repair, then completely stripped of everything useful. Nothing but the fuselages remained. Not an uncommon occurrence in the Pacific in the early days of '42. Even slightly damaged planes fell under the knife to keep the other birds flying.

 

[bobbysocks]

I heard it was stripped...engine and anything usable and the skeleton was dumped.