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Originally Posted by skymstr02
What I'm saying is that some civil registered 337's may have experienced the same stresses that an O-2 has. If you are not the original purchaser from Cessna on your aircraft, you do not know what kind of stresses have been accumulated on the airframe. i used to work on a 337G, N200ZF, that was a fish spotter. It had a 175 gal fuselage fuel tank to give it 22 hour endurance. It was not uncommon for that airplane to take off at 6100 lbs, and seven leg it from Houston to Cape Town South Africa. What kind of stresses have been placed on that wing structure?
Fatigue is cumulative on aluminum and it doesn't matter if Lt. Hamfist or commercial pilot Hamhand is at the controls.
O-2A wings are different from 337 wings, as there is additional structure on the rear spar to absorb the firing loads from the hard points. The wing spars and center carry thru spars are also physically larger than its civillian cousins. Even the wing attach bolts are two sizes larger than its 337 counterpart. An O-2 wing will not mate up to a civil fuselage.
There's no way that a prudent engineer could simply dismiss a portion of the population just because if was never in military service.
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You are absolutely correct. And when we ask if your airplane is used for low level work, even then we are not getting a good picture of what that means.
Take for example someone doing fire spotting, where they are making tight turns, maneuvering at low altitudes, with lots of thermals. At the other end of the spectrum, some one who is doing polar bear tracking, where, they are flying over a non-thermal environment, basically straight and level, though at a low altitude.
You can't simply say 0-2's had higher stresses. I would argue that the fire spotter gets more stresses, on a continuing basis, than most of the 0-2's in civilian service. Remember that the 0-2's that were beat up pretty badly were simply scrapped.
When you buy a plane, and you look at the log books, you can't tell what kind of use the aircraft had. My former aircraft had lots of hours, but it was a all used as a corp plane for a collection of companies, and for a number of years, was flying every day.