One of the main reasons I subscribe to this site is that there are many who are much smarter than I on the forum. Hopefully, someone has a suggestion on an off the wall matter.

 

I park in a large enclosed hangar next to a Lear Jet that has a large high powered Radar Imaging pod on the bottom of the airplane. The company that uses the airplane flies all over the world doing  ground imaging work from 40,000 feet. I don't know much about how the equipment works and until recently did not care. Due to the economy, the airpane has been sitting for some time. The last 2 weeks however, the company that owns the craft has had people working on the imaging equipment in the hangar.

Yes, this is going somewhere.. Last week I noticed I several areas on my airplane where my white paint was turning yellow. Similar to what you would see happen after years of exposure in the sun. Strange thing is that the "yellowing" happend over about 4 days. During this time the high power radar imaging equipment was being worked on. It was told it was also tested in the hangar.

My question is for anyone in the group that has an understanding of this type of technology is could this have been the cause of my yellowing paint? The strange part is that, only some places on the airplane turned yellow. Right side  elevator, right side of hte canopy frame and the inner wing on the pilots side. To add to the mystery, All of the areas that turned yellow are generally in line from where the suspected paint yellowing radar emitter would have been. I was told by a representative of the company that it is indeed a powerful radar and that it could not be fully powered up in the hangar as it would do the same thing as a microwave does to anyone in the room.

If someone has some insight about this stuff, I would love to hear their thoughts on the matter...

 

Thanks in advance...
Randy Snarr