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How often do they replace aluminium aircraft?
How often do they replace aluminium aircraft?
Design service life is an important variable, with input from accountants being critical. There's no point designing an aircraft to last past the point where it is expected to become obsolete for either tactical or commercial reasons. Typical numbers for airliners would be from 40,000 to 100,000 flights, with short haul types getting more design cycles than long haul types that comes to about 200,000 flight hours in either case. On the other hand, where a short lifespan (due to an expectation of rapid progress and/or combat attrition) and low duty cycle (due to air forces not having an imperative to sweat their assets) combined with a desire to maximise performance at the expense of durability, military aircraft are sometimes designed for as little as 5000 flight hours. When they get those calculations wrong, you need something called a Service Life Extension Programme - either things start breaking sooner than expected (sometimes due to changed tactics - see a whole bunch of cold war bombers which were designed for high altitude and suddenly had to switch to nap-of-the-earth flying to mitigate unforeseen SAM risk), or you keep stuff on the fleet for 100 years due to five generations of "replacements" proving too expensive/useless (hello BUFF)
To the actual question; I'd be surprised if any reputable company was designing any aluminium cycle parts, even the weight-weenie options, for under 2,000h of typical service loading, so the 'replace every 2 years' advice is for people who use one bike for about 15-20,000 miles per year. The mandatory EN 14781 test, though, only requires 100,000 cycles (2 sets, one in phase and one out of phase) which is really only about 24 hours of riding, so it's there to weed out utter rubbish rather than provide any assurance that stuff will last a reasonably long time.
Wouldn't manufacturers mention it on the packaging
Some of them do; not a specified service life, but ass-covering language like 'inspect before every ride' and 'this high performance racing widget won't last forver'
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gbj_tester
^^ any sort of evidence that alloy bars should be binned every two years? Wouldn't manufacturers mention it on the packaging if there was any sort of failure likely, or face enormous lawsuits? How often do they replace aluminium aircraft?