My Dad (retired air force) also forwarded this to me, which I found pretty interesting. One of the 'features' of the X-29[1] demonstrator (which was exploring dynamically unstable flight) was that it continued to fly in all sorts of 'outside the envelope' scenarios.
The part that amazes me though is that any human being can sit there and figure out that adding thrust or doing some other action helps or doesn't help when sitting in a chunk of steel that wants to hit the ground hard. I have total respect for folks who stay stone cold rational in the face of their imminent demise.
The thing is, it just sort of happens. It's not some massive effort to remain calm, but rather you just automatically focus. That's how people have described it, and it's been my own experience. I've never experienced anything close to this bad, but I've had a couple of aeronautical close scrapes and there's just no room for fear.
Edit: had the same experience in a car once as well. Total focus on solving the problem. Terror comes after.
I'm a (private) pilot. Many years ago, I faced a sudden engine failure and performed an emergency landing in a minuscule pasture surrounded by a very forested area. It very nearly costed me and my passengers' lives.
The plane was without engine for several minutes before I landed, yet that time was spent fully engrossed and completely focused on the problem. I had clarity of thought like nothing I've ever experienced.
No emotions — no fear, nothing — just stone cold rationality. Going through the checklist, Mayday call, considering options, etc. with swift and decisive precision.
Though I believe the extensive training certainly helped, to this day I'm amazed at the incredible stress response our body has evolved. Even though it happened many years ago, I still think about it a lot.
My instructor explained and trained me to simply focus on flying the parts you have left and don't let the parts that are missing bother you too much, they are gone and can't help anyway.
Forethought (visualization) and training play a big part as well.
You reminded me of something that happened to me while driving a few years ago. I was on the highway in the far left lane going about 70mph. I was driving an Audi A4, which had much better (sensitive) handling than the pickup truck I was used to driving. There was a breakdown lane to the left of me (unusual for most highways) and I thought to myself, "if I suddenly needed to swerve out of the way for some reason, I could flick my wrist and get into the left breakdown lane to avoid whatever was happening in front of me".
Not more than a few seconds after having that thought, I saw the car in front of the car in front of me jump up onto the car in front of it. The car in front of me slammed on his brakes. I flicked my wrist to the left without thinking. Only when I passed (in the left breakdown lane) all the cars piled on top of each other did I realize just how closely I dodged a serious accident. If I had not visualized what I would do in such a scenario a few seconds earlier, I'm not sure if I would've done the same thing.
Plenty of close calls have taught me the value of always knowing my exits and always leaving plenty of space between me and the car in front of me (driving instructors often teach 1 car length for every 10 mph: 70 mph = 7 car lengths).
Unfortunately a lot of these rules only work if other drivers on the road are also following them (around here, in the Boston area, you'll be lucky to have 2 car lengths of space in front of you no matter your speed), so I've learned that simply being aware at all times (no phone, no distracting conversations, and holy hell no text messaging or emails) is the best thing anyone can do for improving their safety while behind the wheel.
This is what they used to call "defensive driving".
Supposedly, people who think through how they would handle emergencies or other bad situations handle them much better than people who don't like to think about it. This is true even when it's a situation they hadn't actually planned through yet, because they have the mental habit of solving problems rationally rather than just pretending they won't happen.
I've saved my car from rear ending the one in front using exactly that manoeuvre - escaping onto the gravel between the fast lane and the central reservation.
I now leave a lot more space between me and the car in front, and I've trained myself to remember that traffic might stop dead at any time.
My guess is that the first car was doing something odd, some tiny instability that caused the second car to change, say momentarily lifting their foot from the accelerator, etc. Your higher brain functions were doing an executive analysis of options, but your lizard brain was already alert to danger and had sounded the early alarm. Have you ever noticed how you are extremely sensitive to tiny sideways movements of cars as you pass them?
Couldn't upvote Mike's comment enough. It all comes down to good training, and methodical thinking - something that's generally ingrained in you with aviation.
As a skydiving instructor, I've had 3 parachute malfunctions that required cutting away & deploying my reserve. Each time something goes wrong, everything else goes out of focus: you have a problem to solve. You first assess the situation and work to regain control - as long as you have altitude, you have room to work & get creative. When you reach a certain "decision altitude" - or determine there's no way you'll be able to land the parachute safely - you make the decision that you'd do better with a different parachute. And you enact emergency procedures.
Beauty of it is, good training makes this automatic. It gives you a decision tree to work off of. IMO, the same sort of decision tree is an excellent thing to think about when crisis planning for companies. But that's another story.
That's an excellent point. However, I don't think it accounts for all of it. There are lots of cases where people can panic and still survive. It lowers the odds, but doesn't reduce them to zero.
After a total hydraulic failure, the pilots still managed to land just using thrust difference between the two engines. I'm impressed anybody survived.
"The aircraft's fuel gauges were inoperative because of an electronic fault which was indicated on the instrument panel and airplane logs (the pilots believed flight to be legal with this malfunction)."
Dudes, wtf? Unless Canadian regulations differ from US ones, you're not even allowed to fly a single-seater in day VFR without a fuel gauge.
it explains why they flew without a fuel gauge. tl;dr - they knew the gauge was broken, but regs allowed the flight if the maintenance crew did a manual sounding of the tanks and the measured fuel was enough. they sounded and measured, but converted incorrectly between pounds and kilos. I think the pilots were severely disciplined for that failure.
They were disciplined by Air Canada as Air Canada held the pilots and ground crew at fault even though the Aviation Board found Air Canada at fault.
Their disciplinary action was later overturned and "the pilots were awarded the first ever Fédération Aéronautique Internationale Diploma for Outstanding Airmanship."
I read about an earlier incident where all hydraulics in a DC10 failed as a result of cargo door failure as a kid. The passengers on that plane were very, very lucky that their pilot had practiced doing this for fun in a simulator. I suspect that a lot of pilots learned this technique precisely because of the earlier incident.
The interview of the pilot Dennis Fitch by Erol Morris in the TV show First Person [1] is one of the most riveting interviews I've ever seen -- would highly recommend it.
Yeah, that's an amazing story. You know things were bad when your landing kills a third of your passengers and you get a presidential commendation for saving that many.
A Belgian pilot managed to land a DHL Airbus A300B4-200F jet after a missile attack had drained all 3 hydraulic systems and damaged the left wing. He also landed the plane using throttle control only.
I'd have to revisit the story to see just how that happened, but explosive decompression is a hell of a drug. When it's happened in the passenger portion of aircraft, seats have been ripped off the floor to which they're bolted. Pulling someone out of a loosely-fastened seat belt (even, possibly, a multi-point harness) isn't beyond contemplation.
The few times someone has been pulled out of a plane due to decompression has been because they were stood right under the panel that failed( Ahola 243 ) or have been sat right on top of the cargo door that failed (aa96 and Turkish 981 ). I'd love to know how decompression unbolted a seat.
As to your req: TWA Flight 800 incident reports claim that the pilot and 70% of the passengers were pulled from the fuselage following structural failure of the aircraft (the front 1/3 of the plane detached from the remainder following a fuel tank explosion). Several rows of seats were also detached.
Situation would have been massive structural failure and exposure of the aircraft interior to the jetstream and fireball, which is more than an explosive decompression, but it is a referenced case.
Specific mentions begin at about 20 minutes into the following video based on NTSB reports:
There's some mention of passengers being hurled from the plane in the NTSB accident report that I can find, but I can't find full cites for the claims of the video:
There's the fact that most of the passengers suffered "severe" trauma (described as "internal decapitation" in the video), likely from sudden deceleration as the nose separated.
Acking your cite req. I don't have one handy, though a review of decomp cases should be reasonable feasible -- there are pretty comprehensive lists of aircraft accidents. And I'll admit not being positive of my information, though I do believe there are cases where a seat or seats have been ripped out.
Read the book that includes this incident Emergency: Crisis on the Flight Deck. Pilot's have 4 or 5 point harnesses, but don't wear outside of takeoff and landing. In level, uneventful flight, it's just the lap belt. Further, if you're walking around, say to the bathroom, you might not yet be belted in.
I know this is kind of nitpicky, but a loss of engine power isn't really an impossible situation if the plane is close enough to a runway. It's by no means easy to land one of those things without power, but they are designed for it to be possible.
In US Airways 1549 mishap, the "miraculous" part is that he ditched in the water in a large airliner with 100% survival. If he had a runway available "down range" it would have been somewhat lesser event to land the jet safely.
Hard to believe that the SR-71 is almost 50 years old and it's still the fastest plane in the world.
[Update]
For some reason, I can't reply to the X-15 comment, so I'll add the extra info here. The X-15 is dropped from a B-52. There are a set of rules to qualify for the record. An unpowered scramjet dropped from another plane isn't going to quality either.
> Hard to believe that the SR-71 is almost 50 years old and it's still the fastest plane in the world.
Its not really that surprising -- survivability through sheer speed seems to have been largely abandoned in favor of focussing largely on stealth (see, B-2 Spirit vs. B-1 Lancer).
With the motivation for pouring money into moar speed gone, you stop getting moar speed.
The deeper the nesting, the longer it takes a "Reply" link to show up. Wait a bit, reload, and it will be there, or follow the "link" link and it will be there immediately.
This is a deliberate feature to slow down "discussions" that are actually unproductive back-n-forth arguments.
If you load a comment within X minutes, it won't show the reply link. If you click on "link", you'll see the text box for entering your reply as normal anyways.
I think nether has decided there are a group of A-10 fanboys who love the plane unconditionally. It has guns not missiles, therefore guns must be better than missiles. Perhaps the same group has unconditional love of SR-71. Not saying any of this myself, just trying to interpret nether's thoughts for you.
In my ROTC days they described the A-10 as basically a "flying gun" ... the rumor was they chose a massive gun, and then designed a plane to fit around it, done.
A better explanation is the adaptive fly by wire system used the remaining wing to generate some lift which would normally cause roll however it compensated by using tail's control surface. Combined with thrust vectoring a high angle of attack to maximize lift from the airframe and a ridiculous amount of thrust and you only need one wing.
PS: You can also fly an F-15 sideways the stall speed simply goes through the roof.
Neither the original F-15 nor the F-15D mentioned in the article have fly-by-wire, which is considered as a feature for the updated F-15SE Silent Eagle.
So interesting aerodynamics and mad flying skills, not fancy electronics :-)
The F-15 has a Control Augmentation System (CAS), and would be difficult to fly without one: http://www.f15sim.com/operation/f15_flight_control_system.ht.... Fly-by-wire means there is no hydraulic/mechanical control system, and is a relatively new feature. But computers have been "in the loop" with conventional hydraulic/mechanical control systems for quite a bit longer, especially in fighter planes, where the emphasis on maneuverability calls for airframes that are a lot less statically stable and would be hard to fly without control augmentation.
It has an adaptive electronic control augmentation system which while not a true fly by wire system still players a huge role in keeping the thing fly able.
When people use the phrase "fly by wire" they usually mean a system where the control stick feeds a digital signal into a computer, which controls the hydraulic servos for the control surfaces directly. The F-15 doesn't have that. Instead, what it has is a system where the stick is connected mechanically to the hydraulic system. On top of that, two electronic systems (the Pitch/Roll Channel Assembly and Aileron Rudder Interconnect) can provide an additional variable control input to the hydraulic actuators, to even out the feel of the stick in varying flight conditions. It also provides inputs to improve the dynamic flight characteristics of the plane: http://www.f15sim.com/operation/f15_flight_control_system.ht... (see the paragraphs under "Control Augmentation System.")
So the F-15's control system provides additional electronic input to the control services to improve flight characteristics, but isn't totally in charge of the airplane in the same way as a true fly by wire system. For example, the electronics cannot move the control surfaces through their full range of motion, and are strictly reactive to the pilot's stick input.
The point about fuselage lift isn't wrong. The F-15 has a relatively lightly loaded wing because it generates so much lift from the fuselage. Which means that the torque created by one wing continuing to operate while the other is destroyed isn't as much as you'd think.
This is not related, but still an interesting event. The Cornfield Bomber: An F-106 that went into a spin, pilot ejected, plane then managed to recover from spin and land itself.
>No warning light was on and the navigation computer worked as usual; (I just needed a warning light in my panel to indicate that I missed a wing...)."
High speed aircraft can generate enough lift to fly just with the fuselage. Wings are really only needed for take-off and landing at low speeds.
You will notice that the F-15 pilot said he landed at high speed, 250 knots or so.
The F-14 Tomcat, F-111, and B-1 bomber have swing wings, which extend on take-off but retract for high-speed flight. The F-14’s wing sweep has a computer control mode so that the wing sweep angle can change dynamically while the plane is maneuvering.
There are lots of stories about airplanes missing wings.
One of my instructors in flight training was flying an F-11 Tiger, and lost both wings during a high-G maneuver. He said that he noticed that the controls got “mushy”. In a lot of jets, the horizontal tail surfaces can angle up or down independently and replace the “ailerons” normally on the wing outer edges. He reported a problem to the tower and did a fly-by. They told him his wings were gone. I don’t know if he landed or ejected.
There have been numerous documented incidents where planes have launched from carriers with the wings folded. I know of cases where this has happened with A-1 and F-4 type aircraft.
When I was in the Mediterranean, I saw an F-4 land on the carrier with an outer wing panel (beyond the fold line) hanging straight down after a collision with a Russian Bear bomber.
I also saw an A-6 land at Naples air facility with a missing outer wing panel as a result of a collision somewhere over the Med.
The F-15 video was pretty impressive. It really shows how much lift is generated by the fuselage, and how at some point, the wings don’t provide any lift but are just pure drag.
If you have enough thrust, you don’t need any wings at all. But then it’s not an “airplane” but a rocket.
Hacker News seems to love fighter planes recently. They are pretty cool. However, there is one fighter plane that I absolutely hate everything about. The F35.
I'm not even sure why we're building this style of fighter jet at this point. A remotely operated or fully autonomous fighter jet seems like the future.
Sure there is some lag introduced if it is remotely operated, but then it has the benefit that without a pilot on the inside, it can preform maneuvers that would cause a human to black out. Plus you can have an unlimited number of copilots looking at radar/video looking out for other aircraft.
If the US were at war with China or Russia, they could certainly shoot our satellites from the sky or locally jam communications with their own drones. You can't remote control a vehicle your signal can't reach.
That seems a naive sentiment to me. You say "go fully autonomous" as if that's a capability that exists when it doesn't.
I don't believe that an autonomous computer program today is capable of deciding when to shoot missiles at people, when to shoot down another aircraft, or when to drop bombs on a building. I don't think a program, with no human input, no GPS, at night, in inclement weather, in the face of enemy sensor jamming, is even able to decide if it's reached its target accurately enough to then attack that target. I also don't think any computer program, even operating only in a simulation, can perfectly evaluate the acceptable level of collateral damage to civilians and infrastructure from its decisions -- to decide, for example, whether it should complete its mission of bombing an enemy unit if that unit enters a home or a hospital. I also don't think either of us is more informed and smarter than the US military and US congress, both of which have decided that there is still a future for manned aircraft for all these reasons.
I don't believe you really think otherwise either. "At this point", we don't even have autonomous cars that work in the real world. With all the best minds in AI working on the problem, with a working GPS and a paved road, our "Google cars" are still foiled by such simple things as a foggy morning blinding the LIDAR. It's going to be a long time before you replace the human pilot in an F15 or a B2.
It is a huge waste of money ~$200m each.
The project has been plagued with technical problems (it doesn't meet its performance specifications, it has structural problems, etc.).
It does not perform any better than current fighter planes in war game simulations.
It is being made for a war that we will never fight with fighter planes. I wonder if America has fought its last human controlled air-to-air dog fight, or it will be extremely rare.
And it was shoved down the Pentagon's throat by lobbyists.
Take a look for yourself http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning_...
> I wonder if America has fought its last human controlled air-to-air dog fight, or it will be extremely rare.
Yes. Drones and long-range weapons delivery (either high energy or SCRAM-driven missiles). Fighter jets? Might as well call out the buggy whips and horse drawn carriages.
Obligatory A-10 shoutout: We still need something that can provide air-to-ground support to ground troops with a long dwell time, but high-speed cruise to fast deployment (shamelessly stolen from The Avengers: http://www.impdb.org/images/a/ae/Avengers2012CGI_2.jpg).
There is a F-35 variant that's designed to provide close air support, but it's the USMC variant and it's designed to replace the Harrier, which is little consolation to the Army.
Of course, designing the same airframe to replace both the Harrier and the F-16 is a ridiculous notion and the F-35 suffers for it.
Frankly, for the type of wars we're likely to fight in the foreseeable future, the most common mission would call for something like a cheap prop-driven plane with a ton of ordnance hardpoints. Take the flight surfaces off, stuff 3-4 of them into a C-17 and fly them to the theater of operations, go to work.
Pilot here. The aviator community loves pretty much anything that flies and won't get us killed doing it. :)
The role you're describing is currently filled - very well, I might add, by the A-10. It can fly low and slow (has a stall speed of right around 140mph), it's heavily armored and can carry massive amounts of armament. Not to mention an enormous gun that can decimate pretty much anything in its path.
They're slated for retirement soon, though. Long term, I think this role will eventually be filled by drones.
I'm not 100% sold on drones. Yes, they work, they're cheap, and they don't expose squishy & expensive pilots to danger. But even with frequency-agile radios, they're vulnerable to jamming and ASAT missiles taking out important stuff in orbit.
I was expecting someone to jump in with the dog-fight argument against using low & slow aircraft. Unlike in Vietnam, today's missiles are reliable and effective, so even a prop plane can engage and defeat a jet at extended ranges... as long as positive hostile ID can be made early enough.
AC-130 is significantly more of a sitting duck to infantry-deployable surface to air missiles. They have to be fairly low and fly in slow circles with the broadside facing the target. It would be hard to imagine a better missile target. One was shot down in the gulf war by one such infantryman/SAM and all 14 crew were killed. A-10s can loiter and provide extended ground support, but can come in/leave quickly, maneuver well, use terrain to hide from ground fire, etc.
I agree with you, but the original description was that of a cargo plane turned into an assault platform. I was assuming the intention was creating something more along the lines of the Flying Fortress, but the AC-130 was the closest thing I could think of that's still in service.
Kinda disappointed the total emphasis is on him being a "hell of a good pilot" instead of the control engineers who allowed the plane to compensate for losing a wing. There's no way that plane would have stayed in the air without their work.
I suspect it's fair to share the credit. Point being that the pilot utilized the plane's capabilities (and his lack of awareness of the gravity of the situation) to land successfully. Wouldn't surprise me to find other pilots who'd failed at that.
In the case of many of the incidents reported here, the scenarios have been recreated in flight simulators. In the case of UA-232 in particular, I don't believe any of the simulator pilots managed to exceed the performance of Alfred Haynes.
The official NTSB report is opaque on this but suggests simulator results weren't encouraging as far as training to avoid this type of accident:
The DC-10 simulator used in the study was programmed with the aerodynamic characteristics of the accident airplane that were validated by comparison with the actual flight recorder data. DC-10 rated pilots, consisting of line captains, training clerk airmen, and production test pilots were then asked to fly the accident airplane profile Their comments, observations, and performance were recorded and analyzed....
Overall, the results of this study showed that such a maneuver involved many unknown variables and was not trainable, and the degree of controllability during the approach and landing rendered a simulator training exercise virtually impossible.
Everyone would have been safe if they were on the ground without all that extra potential energy. Maybe it is the engineers' fault that they were in the air in the first place.
That said, I imagine being controllable while missing a wing was a side effect of the performance goals addressed with the fuselage's lift, or the design goals addressed with the width of fuselage relative to the wingspan. Flightworthiness without a wing probably was not a goal, though we can assume that many features such as the one-way fuel valves that make it able to sustain inflicted damage were very important to its survivability in this case.
It sounds like the pilot adapted his tools and equipment, and successfully used them in a situation they were not designed for. If you develop some innovative software, it may not have worked without the specific compiler you used, but that isn't the same as saying the person who wrote the compiler wrote your software. It is difficult to tell from the story whether landing was something that very pilots could have done, or whether it was a more or less natural response to the feedback he was getting from the aircraft in the cockpit.
I don't want to detract from the incredible skill of the pilot, but the success of this event is also partly due to John Boyd, Pierre Sprey, and the rest of the "Fighter Mafia" who shaped the AF policy that produced the F-15 and F-16.
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress."
Edit for image leech removal. Not somewhere I can upload an image to my hosting, but google for "far side wings fall off" to view the comic - http://goo.gl/bnWsM4
This reminds me of a case study sponsored by DARPA where a plane that suffered significant damage to a wing could still land when autonomous systems took over.
And here's a youtube clip showing a demonstration of the system. A UAV has part of it's wing removed mid-air and the plane manages to land.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGiPNV1TR5k
Also about this incident:
"Nedivi (the pilot) reportedly was demoted for disobeying his instructor's order to eject and immediately thereafter promoted for saving his airplane—which two months later was repaired and flying again." [1]
Ejection isn't a get out of jail free card. I've heard it described as being just barely preferable to crashing. There's a decent chance of significant injury and even death in an ejection.
I recall seeing someone run the numbers, and it turns out that the guy in your link had it worse, as the much lower altitude more than made up for the lower speed.
An ejection seat is actually only slightly safer than crashing the plane; the strain it puts on the vertebrae in particular is enough to force the pilot to retire after a few ejections.
And it sounds like he was flying over water, which carries substantial risks in itself.
Living on a fighter base, I met two people who were forced to eject from a plane. One lost 2" of height due to severe back/spine compression, one bounced off the ground so hard he could never fly again due to leg and hip issues.
Not to mention, an ejected plane can now go hit some school or office building, whatever causing all sort of casualties. Most pilots would rather just try and survive the crash and risk their own life.
There's a typical trend of people underestimating the severity of dangerous situations, but also pilot bravado in thinking, "I've got five minutes of altitude left, I can save this thing!" rather than the desk jockey, hindsight view of "He's only got five minutes to live."
Pilots want to retain their control, and even a damaged plane can usually be controlled. Plus - surprisingly - many pilots claim to be afraid of heights, and cite this as a reason they'd rather not eject. And, of course, ejecting is no guarantee.
I apologize in advance for posting rather far off topic but I am compelled.
Did anyone else who watched the Youtube video have trouble following the dialogue due to the 'background' music? It seemed entirely too loud in the mix for me. The fact that the highest quality was 240p means the audio was also low quality, I'm too lazy to look it up but likely 64kbps or less. Perhaps that is also relevant.
Not to be discounted is the fact of my age and the fact that I stopped watching television some years ago. Which is the cause and which the effect is not entirely clear to me.
It blows my mind that it can accelerate in a 100% vertical climb.
Not to diminish this feat, because it is indeed impressive, but it's a natural consequence of having a thrust:weight ratio significantly greater than 1. It's also horrendously expensive in fuel.
The fuel streaming away visually obscured the fact the wing was missing. While the linked History Channel video appears to be partly reconstruction and partly stock footage manipulated to dramatize the situation, at least part of it appears to have been real footage as well. There's an interior cabin angle that appears to show the real plane with the fuel streaming in such a way that it becomes clear why the damage was obscured. There's also at least one quick shot they seem to have gotten of the real plane landing, as it is clearly missing a wing at that point.
Partially being facetious here, but if he were a "hell of a good pilot" wouldn't this landing not have had to happen? That said it's pretty impressive that he managed to pull this off
Remember that the plane he collided with was being piloted by someone else. I haven't found any evidence to suggest it was the other pilot's fault, but nothing points to this pilot's negligence either.
The part that amazes me though is that any human being can sit there and figure out that adding thrust or doing some other action helps or doesn't help when sitting in a chunk of steel that wants to hit the ground hard. I have total respect for folks who stay stone cold rational in the face of their imminent demise.
[1] http://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/news/FactSheets/FS-008...