Abstract:
The safe fatigue life of the Piston Provost was established by full-scale, programmed load, fatigue tests, the load spectrum being collected from 'in service' records. Forty 'life-expired' wings and an appropriate number of fuselages were used to continue the programmed load tests to failure with the object of determining the degree of scatter. A standard deviation of 0-087 and a coefficient of variation of 0.022 indicates less scatter than has been suggested in other literature. The estimated life obtained by using Miner's cumulative damage rule is compared with the mean of the experimental results.