what_next wrote:
The price to pay is increased drag, which at C152 speeds does not really do much harm, as opposed to TB20 speeds.
Can’t be that bad, as a C182RG has less HP and cruises at the same or slightly faster speed than a TB 20.
Can of worms opened… 
The high wing Cessnas with struts apparently have never had an in flight wing failure. The tailplanes may fail.
highflyer wrote:
Can we regard the Cessna construction as safer?
It may be safer on a light plane, even when designed to carry the same flight loads. In the design of a strut braced wing on a lightweight aircraft, triangulation makes the component loads so low that some material dimensions are determined by the minimum practical dimension, and not by stress resulting from flight loads. A good example is the wall thickness of the struts, which is typically determined by incidental loads, ground handling loads and etc, and could be much thinner to carry only flight loads. Wing spars loaded mainly in compression inboard of the strut are another example. In this case the spar design may be dominated by compressive buckling not crack-inducing bending stress. As a result, a strut braced wing typically has many components which are stronger than they need to be and thereby have increased damage or corrosion tolerance. This is less true for a cantilever monoplane, particularly a larger cantilever monoplane, where the flight loads bending the wing push the stresses of more components higher. So even while the weakest link in the structure under flight loads may calculate out to the same ‘G’ loading capability, the strut braced wing (particularly on a lighter aircaft) is likely to be more robust and more forgiving of undetected corrosion/damage even at the same or lower structural weight. For this and other reasons, a friend of mine who is a structural analyst was one of the employees who talked Cessna into keeping the struts on the Caravan.
You should see the wing struts on my friend’s Wittman Tailwind – he sized them for flight loads, does not push the aircraft around with them on the ground, and they are very skinny. Its a bit scary looking out at through the window at them, and BTW that visual impression is another thing that sizes struts on a small plane.
highflyer wrote:
Would have struts prevented the wing from breaking? Can we regard the Cessna construction as safer?
It may have just folded at the strut.
JasonC wrote:
It may have just folded at the strut.
Might not have been a big deal. Check this one out (albeit a C210, no struts and different wing):
http://www.pprune.org/private-flying/185783-cessna-210-incident.html
