As always Jan...well done...
The third and fourth shots shows all too well what this paragraph is all about and taken from the "Link"...
The shot in your reply Jan also shows very well the upper and lower mass balances on the elevator.
Although the P-38's empennage was completely skinned in aluminum[N 2] (not fabric) and was quite rigid, in 1941, flutter was a familiar engineering problem related to a too-flexible tail. At no time did the P-38 suffer from true flutter.[31] To prove a point, one elevator and its vertical stabilizers were skinned with metal 63% thicker than standard, but the increase in rigidity made no difference in vibration. Army Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth B. Wolfe (head of Army Production Engineering) asked Lockheed to try external mass balances above and below the elevator, though the P-38 already had large mass balances elegantly placed within each vertical stabilizer. Various configurations of external mass balances were equipped and dangerously steep test flights flown to document their performance. Explaining to Wolfe in Report No. 2414, Kelly Johnson wrote "... the violence of the vibration was unchanged and the diving tendency was naturally the same for all conditions."[32] The external mass balances did not help at all. Nonetheless, at Wolfe's insistence, the additional external balances were a feature of every P-38 built from then on.[33]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-38_Lightning
by BlackAce » Wed Nov 30, 2011 5:17 pm 
