but would it not possibly overload the wings? now you have weight hanging out there, that wants to continue straight ahead, while your elevator is trying to bring the nose up.
No. What typically breaks wings is excessive bending at the wing root. Wing mounted stores (as opposed to fuselage mounted stores of the same weight) produce
less bending (*in flight). Think of it this way, if the weight of the bomb is aligned closely with the resultant lift vector of the wing, then there's far
less bending in the wing structure than if the bomb were mounted under the fuselage.
Here's a simple, cheesy example: take a yard stick and hold it in the middle, flat-side down. Now slide a small barbell weight to the center of the yard stick where your hand is. Let's say the yard stick is your left wing and the weight is your bomb. Your hand is the "lift" from that wing (we're ignoring the fuselage in this example). Your resultant lift vector (hand) for that wing is aligned with the bomb (barbell weight), so even if you pull some "g's" (give it a good yank upward) the "bomb" isn't producing any bending in the "wing" at all.
Now, keep holding the yard stick in the same spot, but start sliding the weight to the right (i.e. closer to the centerline of our pretend airplane). Now we're starting to introduce a bending moment into our yardstick "wing", and the further you move it, the higher the bending stresses in the wing get (I guarantee your yard stick is not happy about this
, and would probably break if you gave it a similar yank as before). This is what centerline or fuselage-mounted stores do to the wing.
Again, this is grossly simplified, but I believe it still illustrates the behavior.It
is possible to overload the bomb rack and the local attachment structure though. This is why rolling pullouts are often critical design conditions for planes with wing mounted stores. The combination of loads normal to the wing due to pitch up and rolling, as well as any lateral (centrifugal) load on the store is sometimes enough to break rack attachment points, sway braces, or the rack itself. A good designer will insure that the underlying wing structure is stronger than the rack attachment joint so that the store or store/rack combination breaks away before the wing itself is severely damaged.
For anyone who's interested, here's the MIL Standard which I'm familiar with which covers this kind of thing.
http://www.dtbtest.com/PDFs/MIL-STD-8591.pdf* I said in flight because wing mounted stores
can easily produce big bending loads in the wing during hard landings, but in that case it's a function of how far the store (bomb or fuel tank) is from the landing gear. An airplane with wingtip mounted stores (like the old F-89D with it's big-ass missile pods) would probably be susceptible to this kind of failure.
<End of long-winded dissertation
>
