Trojan T28 Crash Damage Assessment

That's a lot of pieces!

Time to assess the damages to my Airfield Trojan T28 after my recent crash.  First, I have a bag of parts and damaged fuselage and wings.  Starting with the bag, I have a propeller that is now in about 10 pieces (the hub shattered), two elevators (the foam hinges completely failed), rudder (the pin hinge pulled straight out), front landing gear doors (rear hinge pins sheered off), cowling pieces, and left landing gear cover.

These are easily repaired

Now to review the wings and fuselage.  The wings look really good, but closer inspection show that the aileron foam hinges are half torn and will need to be repaired.  The fuselage shows a lot of damage.  I'll start from the rear.  Well we already know about the tail surfaces, so I wont review these, but hears a picture.

The crack can just be seen here
running down the middle

Side buckling provides a hint of
more damage

Just past the cockpit and under the wing mounts, the fuselage is cracked all the way across, but only about half an inch deep.  Moving forward the battery almost completely blew out the foam blocks (sorry no picture).


Underneath, the leading edge of the front landing gear housing is buckled and pushed back some and the nose wheel flops, up and down, lose.

Front landing gear just flops around

The impact caused both doors to break loose sheering off the rear hinge pins and breaking both horns attached to the middle of each door sections.

The propeller hub, while scratched,
was undamaged

The cracks can really be seen here

The cowling had the air scoop section broken off and was cracked along the air scoop recess and around the motor shaft opening.  Also, all three cowling mounts were ripped loose and the foam around them torn.

The crack is worse
than it appears

This was the most damaged mount

Finally, several clevises have had their pins broken, but all control horns, push rods, and servos are in tact.

Oh, almost forgot, the cockpit canape has been cracked in the front, but the pilot did not come loose and there appears to be not other damage here.

You can see from the scuff in the prop hub that this thing hit pretty hard, but surprisingly enough, the motor and shaft sustained no damage and so far seems perfectly fine!

Now comes the repair process and that will be the subject for my next post.

Thanks for stopping by my blog.  Please feel free to post comments, good or bad, and be sure to come back and check for future posts.