Perm designer Roman Pletnev developed a single-seat AKM-5 monoplane. After an emergency landing with engine damage, he did not scrap the machine but turned it into a test stand.
The engineer decided to test the real strength of the structure not only with calculations but also with an experiment. Individual elements of the airframe were loaded to destruction to understand the limits of the structure.
We separately broke the wing, separately broke the fuselage. We loaded them to destruction to confirm the calculations. More than 1.5 tons were placed on the wing console – this corresponds to an overload of about 7G. Simply put, the aircraft withstood a sevenfold overload during a maneuver.
For comparison, during a normal maneuver, the overload is about 2G. The results obtained proved that Pletnev's design has a significant margin of safety even in extreme conditions.
