But here’s a funny one. I flew with a guy a few years ago who got a job flying civilian B-707 tankers configured to hen USN fighters across the Pacific from CA. On departure, at V1, his no. 2 motor departed the pylon, and actually flew away in a corkscrew (there’s a video somewhere taken by his buddy filming from the airstairs of another 707, parked). THAT motor took out the no. 1. By the time they realized the problem they were at initial pitch attitude. As the plane climbed it began to roll to the left as the FE tried to make something out of the no. 1 which was still producing partial power. My FO, the Captain on that flight, decided to bring 'em all back to idle and land with what little runway he had left. Remember that they had enough gas for themselves AND a bunch of F-18s headed for Hawaii. Because of the uncontrolled left roll, they hit the grass between the runway and the parallel taxiway. The jet slid through the taxiway elbow and hit a ditch. The impact blacked all three pilots out. When they came to, the plane was stopped just short of a seawall.
He described how he could see FO’s and FE’s mouths’ moving but could hear nothing but a loud ring. Slowly his hearing came back and all were screaming, including himself. The plane had broken apart just aft of the cockpit. The flight engineer was struggling to open the door. It was blocked by a wall of mud that had followed the plane as it stopped. The three of them pushed the door open through the mud only to find themselves face-to-face with a wall of fire whipping and roaring just yards away and coming towards them. They decided to jump the few feet to the ground below. They landed in three feet of mud. Imagine trying to run away from a giant kerosene fire only to be trapped by a sucking mud. But they did, barely, and sat against the seawall to wait for rescue. There’s another video out there of the three of them walking the last few feet covered in mud as the jet burned, filmed by an ever-present SoCal news helicopter that got there within minutes.
The NTSB ruled my buddy at fault for aborting the takeoff after V1. They had done a test in a 707 simulator that demonstrated that the plane could have flown. The test did not consider that the No.1 engine had been critically damaged by the impact of no.2 as it corkscrewed away. For a year, the stress of the ruling nearly killed him. Then one night Sully called while my FO was shopping a K-mart with his wife. For thirty minutes they talked while he sat on the parking lot curb. Sully said, maybe more delicately, “F the NTSB! You did the right thing and saved your crew.”
Very much this. Lots of performance calculations factor in things like the 2-second response delay and other stuff like net vs. gross climb gradient (deductions for pilot technique, age of equipment, etc…). The Citation I fly doesn’t even give you credit for thrust reversers for takeoff aborts or landing distance…so you are usually going to do way better.
I just want to see the write up for that one in the Aircraft Discrepancy log…
Well funny you should say that. Because the D-bag who owned the airline bought the planes on the cheap from god-knows-where and pencil-whipped an AD from the 60’s (THE SIXTIES!!!) that required airlines to replace the original engine mounts with newer titanium mounts. So the WU should have been something like, “Steel engine mounts successfully failed 50 years later than Boeing predicted.”
Cryptic messages like that leave a lot to be desired. I am willing to pass anything along to him you feel is relevant that you wish to relate via PM though.
Prior to this he spent 35 years flying tankers for the USAF.
Yeah…I noticed the NTSB report must have been changed after your buddies year of hell because now it makes no mention of pilot error and focuses on the AD and the structural failure…nowhere in the probable cause does it cite the pilot (good for him!)…
"PROBABLE CAUSE: “The NTSB determines that the probable cause of this accident was the failure of a midspar fitting, which was susceptible to fatigue cracking and should have been replaced with a newer, more fatigue-resistant version of the fitting as required by an airworthiness directive. Also causal was an erroneous maintenance entry made by a previous aircraft owner, which incorrectly reflected that the newer fitting had been installed.”
Whoever pencil whipped that entry should have gone to prison. I mean…if those guys had perished it would have been negligent homicide at the minimum I would think.
Nice…! I wonder if the Aerosoft A318 (P3D) can do the steep approaches (I think I remember reading the baby bus could do them).
Getting back to something you mentioned earlier (about BIAR probably being the land of Fokkers and other steep approach capable aircraft)…you guessed correctly. In doing the research for the article…the most common types seen there over the years were Fokker 50s and 27s. Currently I think the Air Iceland/Flugfelag Dash 8-200s are the most frequent visitors.
The history does include some 727s, MD-83s, Q400s, and pretty much every light single and twin you can imagine.
Sorry Wheels. Didn’t mean to be cryptic. Yesterday was a tough one with a medical diversion to CYYT. So I’m beat and not in a headspace from which helpful prose is sprung. Given his wealth of experience, your friend could find safer work. By “safer”, I don’t mean physically safer. I mean the risk that comes with having your ticket under a big fat FAA spotlight all the time. I’ve been there. I flew DC-10s for an airline that later enjoyed the distinction of being the forth in US history to be shutdown by the FAA for safety. I know what it is like to work for a billionaire with an airplane fetish.
The Captain in my story above was furloughed from United and had a family to feed. The economy was in the tank in the early aughts and he took what job he could find. As a former tanker driver himself, Omni was a sensible match. Today, pilots (even old pilots) can name their airline.
That’s all I meant. The story was told to me at midnight as we crossed the country. I was seething at the treatment he experienced from his dishonest and disloyal company and the NTSB. He showed me the report @BeachAV8R. Now we flew together at least 6 years ago and my memory is bad when I am at my best. I do not deny that my details are off. What I read was perhaps intended for him directly and was not actually the final ruling. It wasn’t damning in a direct way. But it did clearly suggest that the performance should have been sufficient to fly away. For him it was devastating. I still think he demonstrated a feat of airmanship that deserves to be praised, not damned. The decision to pull all four* throttles to idle and fly controlled back to the dirt and near certain doom is a superhuman one to make.
I wish your friend the best. Flying at the worst company beats being on the ground at the best, in my most humble opinion.
*the no.2 thrust lever refused to budge because the linkage was trashed—adding to the confusion of their few seconds in the air.
Not to dwell too long on the subject…last night I was thinking that if this had been an ejection seat equipped aircraft, there likely would not had been any blame placed on the pilot flying. They all would have punched out and that would had been the end of it.
Then it really struck me. You RW pilots who don’t have the option to “deplane early” have a whole different, much deeper philosophy (for lack of a better term) regarding these situations. Maybe that is a bit MOTO but it had never occurred to me before.
…anyway…this accident is similar to the 4 October 1992, El Al Flight 1862 accident. The B747F was airborne when the #3 engine broke off, flew forward and then fell back hitting the #4 engine and breaking it off the aircraft. National Geographic did a pretty good “Mayday Aircrash investigate” episode.
I saw that! I believe they had already released it for XP11.
This part is interesting:
We have also included Dynamic Fire & Rescue response. This means that the fire service will respond when an aircraft emergency is declared on approach and fire trucks will deploy to your aircraft position once on the ground!
Perhaps @Sine_Nomine can try a similar emergency at EGLC!
EDIT: P3D version doesn’t have the dynamic emergency gear…I could always program a mission for it.
No apologies necessary smokinhole. All I was saying with my post is that if you felt or actually knew something was really off with that company I would pass that information along to him and he would have to decide how to process it.
No. I was talking out of my big, fat gob! For all I know Omni has changed hands. And, even if still despicable and mismanaged as a company, the crews are serving our Navy in a unique way that the Navy itself is unable to do for itself. That’s worth more to the world than flying tourists to Porto.
Well the NTSB report clears him:
“The loss of thrust from both left engines made it highly unlikely that the airplane would be able to continue with a successful takeoff and, considering the possibility of serious structural damage, the pilot’s decision to reject the takeoff was appropriate and properly executed.”
That’s a nice read. Clearly I had some facts skewed but overall I think I did ok. It might be that we flew together before the ruling. The document he shared with me that night was a simple couple of pages and the conclusions were not nearly so clear-cut. He was still hugely affected by the accident when we flew. I learned a great deal from him.
To be honest - the way you’ve praised the Flight Factor Airbus already, I don’t know that you’d be as smitten with the P3D version.
I have it…having upgraded from the older P3D version, but I haven’t installed it on my recently rebuilt rig simply because I know I have the FF A320 waiting in the wings. As a platform, I much prefer the fluidity and feel that X-Plane gives, so I’ve moved more and more away from P3D. But that said, P3D has such a great scenery library available that it makes it impossible to walk away from it forever.
Anyway - my opinion would be to stick with the FF one unless your professional curiosity gets the better of you! I do like that the A318 is part of the package because I think the 318 is one of the coolest looking miniature planes ever.
Speaking of steep approaches though, I do wish someone would come out with a fully modeled BAe 146 at some point though. I bought the half-done one for X-Plane and do not recommend buying it…the product support is awful. There was one for P3D, but I don’t think it works in P3D v4 yet…
EDIT: After I RTB from my son’s weeding, I will start a thread. The overall procedure is quite simple. In your favorite mission editor, place a few default emergency vehicles–couple of fire trucks, fire chief SUV and maybe an ambulance–on the taxiways at the approach end of the runway you will be using.
Draw their paths onto and down the runway.
Using a trigger, set so their paths activate as the aircraft touches down in a specific area…you’ll probably want to use a combined trigger: touch down area AND altitude < 2 m AND speed < your landing V speed minus a couple of knots.
Then you will want another trigger area attached to your plane (that only becomes active once the jet is on the ground). Once this area trigger is activated, it will “trip” and stop the emergency vehicles when they arrive close to the airplane (at the distance e for the area you set)
There are a couple more tidbits like “placing” and activating the emergency lights and, if you want to, adding a siren or two.
I used this method in my simNovel, Pilate’s Ghost, for an A-320 that lands on a small GA runway in the Swiss alps.
