Wing Trauma

Tim and I drove out to the airport.  I needed to remove the wings from the airplane so I would have better access to the rear cockpit area.  I am going to seal in the lexan rear window.  Because of the location of the wings it is beneficial to have them off for this procedure.  Anyway, we drove out to the hangar to remove the wings.  I decided to roll the airplane out onto the apron to remove the wings.  It is pretty tight quarters in the hangar with all of the stuff in there so I decided it would be easier to remove and maneuver the wings outside of the hangar.  We rolled the airplane out onto the apron and rolled the wing rack out also.  I put the wing rack next to the wing so we could remove it the wing from the airplane and then set it on the rack.  The wind had been blowing all day and I told Tim I was a little concerned about removing the wings in the wind.  When we arrived the wind was 160 at 12 knots.  No gusts were reported.  We proceeded to remove the wings.  We rolled the airplane out, removed the right wing and put it on the rack.  We then began to push the wing rack around the front of the airplane and over to the left side.  As we were pushing the wind began to gust.  I later learned the wind gusts were 24 knots.  As we turned the wing rack back towards the hangar a wind gust came up and blew the right wing over.  It hit the apron trailing edge first.  We quickly picked it up to survey the damage.  The wing tip was tweaked and there was a winkle in the bottom skin of the tip.  We put the wing back on the rack and placed the rack next to the left wing.  It was now parallel to the wind.  We removed the left wing and put it on the rack.  Being careful to hold both wings in place we moved the rack into the hangar without further incidence.  I was heartsick when I looked more closely at the damage.  There was a bend in the rear spar at the wing root and a kink in the flaperon near the root.  The flaperon seemed to bind  when it was moved.  It looked like there was a definite bend in the end of the rear spar at the end of the wing.  RATS!!  Oh well!!  Nothing that can't be fixed!!  We moved the airplane back into the hangar and closed the doors.  I decided not to worry any more about it until tomorrow so Arlene and I went to a movie last night.