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The F-22 Raptor surpassed another significant milestone in May with the successful completion of first service life fatigue testing. The testing, which was conducted on a production-quality, non-flyable airframe in a special ground-based laboratory located at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics in Marietta, Georgia, is designed to demonstrate the F-22’s durability over its planned service life of twenty years, or 8,000 flying hours. The test was conducted on Raptor 4000, one of two, non-flyable full-scale test airframes. During the lifetime fatigue test, Raptor 4000 was stressed by nearly 200 hydraulic rams designed to simulate loads a flying F-22 might expect during operational use. Each lifetime equivalent of testing involves more than 1.2 million stress events simulating aircraft maneuvers up to and including nine-g events. Fatigue testing of Aircraft 4000 is scheduled to simulate a total of two lifetimes of fatigue evaluation, the equivalent of 16,000 flight hours. |
