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FLIGHT July. 6, 1939.

Panels of inner wing portion in their jigs. Actually, there are 1,650, and they are all different. Storekeeping in particular must be attended with considerable care in order to ensure that the right bar always goes' in the right place! An interesting and really very simple system has been adopted for attaching the fuselage fabric. The details are shown in sketches. The main stringers have the fabric wired-on, but intermediate stringers, also of wood, are merely located by cord and not attached to the metal structure at all. When the fabric tightens up after doping there is, of course, no tendency for the fabric to come away, other than that caused by airflow. Presumably this is not sufficiently great to cause any trouble, as one does not notice the fabric '' flapping'' in the way it can with some forms ot attachment. That it is indeed perfectly secure is shown by the fact that Wellingtons in service have been dived at about 300 m.p.h. without the fabric coming adrift.

Threespar
In the Wellington the wing fabric is attached to the geodesies by bolts and wires. i n other words, the longerons are not attached to the spar frames direct, but via the geodesies. This arrangement results in very neat and simple joints. Except for the spar frames, and one or two others where local loads are heavy, all frames have disappeared from the Wellington fuselage. The straightforward geodetic arrangement is interrupted by the bomb bay in the bottom of the fuselage. For a distance of twelve feet or more the continuity is interrupted to give way to a flat raised floor above the bay. The amount of reinforcement that has been needed to carry the stresses past this break is really surprisingly small. The floor members themselves, by the way, are of the same geodetic construction as the curved panels. From the foregoing it may be gathered that the primary structure of the Wellington fuselage is very simple in its general theme, although the fact that the geodesies are of different lengths and different curvatures, according to their location in the structure, complicates matters somewhat.

Wing

Reference has already been made to the fact that the wing of the Wellington is of the three-spar type. The main spar is placed in the deepest part of the wing section, approximately on the centre of pressure, and is in the form of a girder, with tubular booms and channel-section bracing members. In the inner portion of the wing the spar boom tubes are in duplicate, but towards the tip this arrangement changes to a single-tube boom. The inner spar portions on each side extend from the centre-line of the fuselage (there is a joint here) to the outer face of the engine nacelle. From this latter point to the tip the spar is in one unit, although a joint occurs where the change from double to single booms takes place. The tubular booms are machined on their outer faces, leaving thick walls where the geodesies and certain other attachments are made, and a thinner wall in between. This type of spar boom, somewhat costly to make, is an example of the care taken in avoiding all unnecessary weight in the Wellington. It might be mentioned that when the materials manufactureis have perfected a system now being evolved, a tapered spar boom of extruded section will be Inner main plane spar with wing root ribs. The spar booms are joined on the centre line of the fuselage.