… because clearly we didn’t have enough structural strength verifications yet.

At the moment, I’m spending most of my time doing calculations, building test specimens and test rigs, and running tests — you know, the fun stuff.

The pilot harness attachment has now passed its ultimate load test (finally). It’s bonded to the fuselage structure and, just in case that wasn’t enough, also bolted on. The calculations already showed that either the bonding or the bolts alone would be perfectly capable of taking the expected loads. But obviously, that wasn’t quite convincing enough, so a physical pull test was required as well.

So, naturally, this meant building an identical attachment like the one in the aircraft, designing and manufacturing a suitable test rig complete with instrumentation — and then actually running the test. No big deal.

The required tensile force of 1659 kg was reached without any drama and then comfortably exceeded. Even when pushing the load cell all the way to its 1000 kg limit, the attachment still refused to fail. How inconvenient.

So yes, it’s now been proven — quite thoroughly — that the attachment will keep the pilot firmly in the seat, even under extreme loads. Just in case there were any doubts left.