Cessna 150 horizontal stabilizer condition (picture)

I believe that older Cessnas left the factory painted in lacquer. If someone subsequently painted enamel over it, it may have been incompatible. Not a defect of airworthiness, just a defect of appearance…

My 150 looked like that when I first bought it, original paint, with touch ups…

It looks like scratches in some extremely thick paint layer.

I wonder if they balanced the stabiliser after painting???

Tunnelling mice or voles, looking at the sheer size of them. ;-)

I have seen quite deep scratches from mechanical deicing, but they tend to be straight and parallel, not like that.

That looks like a failed repaint at some point where rather than strippng, they have just layered the paint heavily in a poorly informed attempt to cover defects. The heavy paint has then split and cracked like the surface of a muddy puddle in the summer content://com.android.chrome.FileProvider/images/screenshot/15997585454403394595.jpg

Then in another attempt at a quick ‘just tidy it up’
job someone has thrown another coat of paint over it.
Failing that the as Pilot DAR has intimated one of the previous layers of paint has had incompatibilities that have maybe survived the initial application but have reacted over time.
In some cases paint can still be leaching solvents for many days after application and in others dormat chemicals can be reactivated by application of new ones.

Snoopy wrote:

Is this of any concern regarding airworthiness?

No problem whatever on a 150. Ugly? Yes. Airworthy? Yes.

Now, if it were a very fast airplane, things could be different. I know that some small jets are very critical about clean leading edges.

Pilot_DAR wrote:

I know that some small jets are very critical about clean leading edges.

As are the better performing gliders.