They're dropping like flies...

wez130

wez130

wez130

Soldato
Joined
31 Jan 2004
Posts
11,308
Location
Matakana New Zealand
While I wouldn't respectfully say it's an epidemic, I do remain non-complacent on these instances. The last tragic accident I recall for the UK was the Cessna Citation that went down early last year. The late Hudson river emergency landing in February makes three major aviation incidents this year already including the two referred to in the OP. All that is ultimately left is that we learn all we can from our mistakes, implement findings and hopefully minimise as much as possible future aviation risks.

I hate the very idea of even trying to compartmentalize or conveniently place accidents in any kind of box. Most appear to be borne of unusual circumstances and environmental factors that fall outside what we may consider regular. Every instance is somehow unique and it is that unique key point that we have to extract from any in flight evidence and unfortunate remains on the ground.

I feel for every one involved :(
 
Pilot error for the MD11, a known problem for bouncing and flipping. I was just saying last week, they lose one per year roughly. I wouldn't fly on one.

Hated working on them as well.
 
EvilOne said:
Makes me wonder if its still safer to fly then cross the road.
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Its more likely you are killed by your trousers than in a aviation accident.

You have *no* idea how much safety precautions are put in by aero engineers, im in my first year and its already giving me headaches on how to get the lightest yet safest designs!

Civil engineers have it easy :p
 
Plane crashes are so rare that whenever one happens, even if only a few people are killed, it hits the news. Heck the thing in Melbourne last week where nobody was even injured hit national news, yet every day thousands of people are killed in car accidents which are barely even reported.
 
Yeah, it's amazing how much work goes into air safety. I've been watching the new series of Air Crash Investigation recently and in the last episode a plane crashed because a set of counterfeit bolts were used to hold the tail onto the plane, it took years of investigation to discover the cause. The bolts has been in place for several years but an unfortunate sequence of events led to them breaking. One of the generators on board wasn't working before takeoff so they had to use the auxiliary power unit in the tail during the flight. The auxiliary power unit had a broken mount which caused vibrations throughout the plane, the vibrations started resonating at the same frequency as the tail vibrations and then harmonic resonance tore the plane apart.

It's never one single fault that causes a crash, there are always multiple things that lead to it.
 
Greenlizard0 said:
You mean break loose? :/
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Yes it happens occasionally. I've repaired quite a few aircraft where loads have shifted. Where I used to work we delivered an MD11 where a load we secured broke free and lets say caused the pilots some serious grief ;)

After that a rep always inspected the locks to remove all liability from our company.

The MD11 is known for flipping on heavy landing. It truely is the worse aircraft I've ever had the miss-fortune to work on. Dangerous to maintain as well as fly.

Normally on type courses you get a few pointers on things that can catch you out badly on a certain type of aircraft. On my MD course, that was 99% of the course. My course notes for the MD11 sit in my garage ready to go to the recycling center because I'd have to be desperate to work one again.
 
DavieCramb01 said:
Looking at the bbc video ofthe Tokyo crash, what was he doing coming down nose first?

Im not saying im a pilot but OMO, it looked all wrong from the start,
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It didn't come in nose-down - the BBC's video only shows half the accident.

It came in with a pretty normal (however, in my opinion, looking fast) landing attitude, smacked pretty hard into the runway, bounced back up with nose-up, then (this is where the BBC video starts) the nose pitches back down violently which causes the nose gear to collapse, the port wing to detach and the usual MD-11/DC-10 turtle impression.

There's three reasons why this happened - and all of them have one common factor of the weather, especially the wind, at NRT.

There's a whole load of HD footage showing the accident from every angle being shown on Japanese news channels so expect some of that to show up soon.
 
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