Great successes in aerospace start with calculated risk. So do honorable failures, in which the unknown factors just don't break the right way. Then there are the projects that start with modest goals or abundant resources and still manage to fail spectacularly. Consider the Fairchild Republic T46, designed in the early 1980s to replace the Cessna T-37 Tweet as the US. Air Force's primary trainer. This should not have been hard. Trainers don't have to set speed, altitude, or range records. Fairchild built a 62-percent-scale proof-of-concept prototype, which convinced many that its approach was low-risk.
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