If memory serves, Jimmy Stewart never says why originally he thought the tail he was testing in the lab was going to fall off, did he?
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In his explanation to the lab director, he claims the tail will fall off due to "nuclear fission" in the aluminum atoms, which is pure nonsense. Aluminum isn't fissionable, but I suppose the screenwriter wanted to throw in a term that sounded to the audience like something a "boffin" would say.
shareNational Geographic has a couple of series called, "Seconds from Disaster" and another called "Airline Emergencies" or something similar. If you watch it, next to human error metal fatigue seems to be the the most common reason for modern planes to crash. In that regard, I believe this story is right on.
"He was running around like a rooster in a barnyard full of ducks."--Pat Novak
Yes. The metal fatigue explanation is completely believable, though the references to "nuclear fission" are spurious to the point of sounding like sheer lunacy.
shareA fantastic example of LOLSCIENCE.
shareRemember the age of the movie, and the novel from which it was taken.
We have 60 years of knowledge to look back on. In 1948, nuke fission was a black art, and not understood in the slightest by the vast majority of people. There is no need to sit on top of the mountain and belittle the people below.
Definitely nonscience science - vibration is a sign of motion/is motion - but the energy it transforms is transformed to heat, not nuclear fission (it doesn't, btw make a new type of energy)and , as already noted, aluminum doesn't do that - though heat and vibration will mess up it's structure/fatigue it.
Essentially it was meaningless gibberish - the worst I can remember in a quality film. Today, by the way, is the first time I ever saw it. That set of lines brought me her..
if it isn't funny enough have someone hit in the face with a fish. Since Thorne Smith likes it ...
The novel and the film were produced in the late 1940's early 1950's. Nuclear Fission was a hot topic with pseudo scientists and making mass audiences keep interest so I think we can forgive the author for taking liberties here...The more interesting fact to note is that the film I feel is an indictment on the British Aviation industry about rushing new bright shiny airfleets into the air without doing proper engineering safety tests...
shareThe reason he was doing tests was that nuclear fusion could cause the aluminum to form into a crystalline structure -immediately and without warning- after a certain number of hours of stress/flight. Thus becoming instantly brittle and cracking. Thus causing tail section separation in-flight. NOT a good thing AT ALL. While that may not be exactly what happens, the bit about the vibrations being a form of energy that must be absorbed by something (namely the metal and structure of it) sounded better than the nuclear fusion (or fission)? part.
Vibrate a bridge at the right frequency and it will fall apart...and metal fatigue is common in planes today.
...so he was onto the right idea there. Maybe not the exact correct explanation of how it occurs though.
Cars are so much easier. There are HIGHWAYS on the ground.
What a bizarre explanation. Seriously, metal fatigue failures are common (unfortunately) in aluminum alloys used in aircraft construction and always have been. Such fatigue is by definition caused by vibration involving deformation of the material strictly within the range of purely elastic behavior for the part in question. Where susceptible alloys may be in use, this is dealt with in practice by ongoing programs of inspection for incipient fatigue cracks as well as by testing to failure on the ground duplicates of critical structures that are expected to be subject to vibrational stresses in service in the air. At the time of the movie, this idea was comparatively new since aluminum skinned aircraft had not been in service for enough years for all the kinds of fatigue issues that are known about today to come to be discovered yet, since fatigue typically requires vibrational cycles in the millions, tens of millions, or even more before failure is observed, so that it can easily not show up not only for years but even decades.
Note that this does not have the slightest thing to do with nuclear reactions of any kind. Moreover, there is no "crystallization" mechanism involved, because indeed there is no such mechanism recognized by science. To the contrary, all aluminum alloys are crystalline by nature to begin with, as are all other alloys in metallic systems. Basically, metal atoms in metallic objects are normally found in crystalline arrangements and any other arrangement occurring naturally would be cause for serious (if not to say, earthshaking) scientific consideration.
My metallurgical engineering degree comes from the University of Florida, I qualified in nuclear submarines with the United States Navy prior to that, and I began flying airplanes myself some years after that, so it would be fair to say I have some familiarity with all these subjects.
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well he is talking at microscopic level( meaning what is happening inside after the fatigue for them to give away! metal melts due to massive heat).
Well, nothing has really changed after 2001 accident neither by design nor by training except some caution to the pilot not to switch the rudder full tilt, I think!
So if the pilot suddenly switches the rudder full tilt, it can result in a failure period. Looks like it is no different than a sudden toppling of 2 or 4 wheelers due to sudden turn of the steering!
But this looks like more likely to happen in big planes than small planes.
The fighter planes who do all kinds of maneuvers seems to be ok!
Well, in a word, no. I already gave a general explanation of this. When I have more time maybe I can give a more detailed explanation (or maybe find a web site to post, if IMDB will allow that).
I agree that we need to make allowances for the time this story comes from, though it's a bit of a shame for modern audiences that he had to mention "nuclear fission". Without that phrase I would have believed absolutely that he was correct and telling the truth. Instead it gave him a bit of the air of a crackpot and cast doubt on whether his theory would be proven. Then again the film was signalling so hard that he was right that I pretty much knew the tail would fall off in the end.
shareWell, it's pretty obvious that they wanted you to wonder if he weren't a crackpot, nuclear fission references or not.
shareI think the writers felt they had to concoct a story more fantastic than ordinary metal fatigue which would have been noticed by less select characters at the aircraft plant. Something new and unbelievable. They succeeded.
shareMetal fatigue was a well-known phenomenon. I tend to agree that the term "nuclear fission" was thrown in because it sounded new and mysterious to audiences, since few people knew anything such things.
The poster a few posts back who said the writers may have gotten the idea from the somewhat similar problems that caused several of Britain's Comet jet airliners to crash is wrong. Both the film (1951) and its source novel (1948) came out well before the Comet was in service. In this case, life imitated art, more or less.