The early Caravelles had another problem far more serious!! Their wings!! They had no provision for air brakes or spoilers and the only way to slow the a/c down was to deploy the flaps resulting in intense vibration and buffeting which in some cases took the wings off!!!
This I didn't know. They had to have pretty darned robust flaps then, to double for airbrakes with no immediate damage to either surfaces or actuators, no matter how inefficient and dangerous it was. The only plane I knew was built with no airbrakes is the DC8, but then in the 8 the reversers of the inboard engines (2 and 3) can and are opened in flight to double for airbrakes with no excessive problems (as the number of DC8 still flying is nothing to sneeze at).
Actually, if I remember correctly, some earlier DC8 had airbrakes mounted on the fuselage (and not the wings), but it was found they were highly ineffective in reducing the flight speed and so removed in favor of the in-flight reversers (I guess the Douglas engineers didn't want to or couldn't redesign the wings).














