The whole purpose of test flights is to see how the plane behaves, gather data, and tweak the design depending on what that data tells you. The plane did not crash, so clearly nothing catastrophic occurred. Sounds pretty normal.

Er, that's what test flights are for. I recall that SpaceShip One also got a tail redesign as a result of flight testing.

It'll only be an issue if some daft planning type has got it scheduled to go straight from testing to production without allowing some time for going over the test findings and fixing the problems found in testing (What do you mean you thought there wouldn't be any? WTF did you schedule the testing for then?). Anyone that shite gets out of aeronautics and into IT consultancy* where they belong real quick.

Move along, nothing to see here.

*For the angle, of course.

In other news:

Pope is Catholic

Bears sh** in woods

Virgin Mobile,

Virgin internet

Virgin Trains...

its the standard Customer Service message

Clearly we'd be better off with an agile approach to aircraft development. "As a pilot I want to not die in a flaming ball of jet fuel and shattered composite." Might take a few iterations to pass QA, mind, but ultimately that has the beneficial NFR of whittling down the wage overheads on the flight roster.

You missed off Virgin Holidays (particular vehemence against them seeing as we nearly had to take them to small claims until they settled out of court, barstards the lot of 'em gggrrrrrr).

Locate a problem, work out what's causing it and then devise a 'cure'.

Has there been any aircraft that has flown perfectly and hasn't been changed over the course of it's lifetime.

sigh - non-news.

ttfn

Increasing the size of the fin/rudder or tailplane/elevators is not uncommon during the development of an aircraft to improve controllability and response in yaw or pitch respectively. The more work you do up front, the less likely it is that changes are needed. The A380 has a massive rudder in comparison to the airframe, clearly Airbus did enough work to determine the need for this truly massive slab of metal.

Scaled Composites aren't exasctly Boeing or Airbus so I'd be impressed if a simple scaled-up airframe needed no tweaks at all.

.....Virgin on the ridiculous.

Mines the one with the award for stating the bleedin' obvious in the pocket

Maybe they could consider changing the name of the aircraft from WhiteKnight to WhiteKnuckle

Mines the one with the change of underware in the pocket

Can't agree more, though I have to be pedantic and say that the A380's empennage is composite.

Anyone willing to go up in one then?

Have you copyrighted "underware" yet?

I feel a whole new computing concept coming on

I will redefine the O/S as underware, applications as overware, lappys (yes I said lappys) would run on outdoorware, accounting programmes on cookware, Firewalls would of course be rubberware

Penguins would get skiware and the apple equivalent would probably be tupperware - oh hang on - thats a real ware ....

Anyway

2) PROFIT!!!!

What? You have to stop for 5 hours halfway up?

Shouldn't that be

3) Profit!

Experimental Aircraft found to have minor control issues on first test flight!

NO FLIGHT PLAN WAS FILED!

Air Safety Authorities have grounded ALL aircraft, balloons, rockets, the Space Shuttle, and even bungy-jumpers everywhere, until an investigation into why a new design had a minor control issue on it's first flight can be carried out.

"We cannot take any risks with people's safety" an Important Government Official said today "People would live forever were it not for scientific and engineering failures like this. It is the Government's and Lawyer's resposibilty to make sure that everyone, everywhere is protected from ANY harm of ANY kind at ALL times. Except if they live in Africa, they don't count'"

Pictures at 11.

Nice one! Next time I do a spec for some non-English-speaking clients, I'll slip underware in there somewhere as if it's standard language for driver-level code. :)

> Has there been any aircraft that has flown perfectly and hasn't been changed over the course of

> it's lifetime.

I could tell, but then I´d have to send someone kill you.

AC & black helicopter, obviously.

If you're paying........

Ask google how many people have died in Burt Rutan designed craft ('rutan accidents' = 46 dead in one type of Rutan aircraft alone - the VariEze.)

Remember, they won the xprize after only two non-fatal flights. However subsequent testing resulted in the deaths of 3 ground crew after a fuel explosion. The list of fallen grows and grows.

Personally, I'm in no rush to hop aboard SpaceCrash Two with Virgin IntheAtlantic for a ten-second sub-orbital spin which I have a less than 50-50 chance of surviving.

If Rutan was a drug, he'd be withdrawn from the market.