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Re: Whitley test "produced a failure at 98% of the design load" is that good?
Mark, any airplane will break if you push it hard enough. The description of the AW's concern (fuselage bending just aft of the spar) doesn't match your description of rudder, elevator and empenage damage. These were likely two unrelated cases.
It is possible that AW decided it was quicker and cheaper to limit diving speed than to reinforce the rear fuselage after the test failure. Given the pressures of the time, the RAF appears to have agreed. This goes on a lot, even today. The "design load" of any component is based on some worst case combination of speed, power, g-loading, etc. The combination is sort of arbitrary, and delivering an airplane with some design case at 98% of what it started out at may not be a bad thing. If everybody involved had taken the time and money to strengthen the rear fusleage to get back to the original design load, there is still no protection for anyone who goes over the design load conditions in actual service. Something else would have broken, somewhere else.
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