AAIB reports are freely available
I can thoroughly recommend them as in-flight entertainment.
Though you may find yourself doing a pre-flight inspection as you board.
https://www.gov.uk/aaib-reports
If you have ever travelled on an aeroplane, the chances are you have experienced some form of turbulence. For those of us who fly infrequently, it can be alarming and unnerving, but rest assured that for the pilots and crew who experience turbulence every day, it is business as usual. You will normally receive a message to …
I remember hanging around in Schipol, waiting for a connecting flight. While I was sitting in one of the bars, there was a big-screen TV playing Discovery Channel for anyone who was interested. Yep - it was showing something like "Air Crash Investigation", "When Planes Plummet" or something like that, with some wonderfully graphic footage of aircraft ploughing into mountainsides.
I was watching a program on my tablet in Schipol last year waiting for the gate to open. I looked up and see a plane on fire with lots of people at the gates looking directly ahead probably as confused as I was.
Only realised after it was put out it was a training rig in full view of gates we were at.
the in-flight movie during "Airplane!" which I believe were excerpts from this documentary. Around the 6:00 mark, IIRC.
The best thing is the reason for that test crash was to to see if a newly developed fuel designed with a high ignition point would work ad intended and not burst into flames if memory serves.
It didn't work.... Quite spectacularly too (I recall it had some sort of catalyst near the engine which kept pumping fuel before being atomised reaching a high enough flash point to make the lot go up in in flames.)
This whole fuel idea was shown on Tomorrows World. They started by demonstrating that kerosene is hard to ignite by turning a blow torch on a dish of the stuff. They then did the same with an atomised spray to show how easily it burnt then.
The invention was an additive that reacted to violent movement, eg a crash, by turning the kerosene form a liquid to a jelly. The idea being that “solid” kerosene wouldn’t burn. The catalyst near the engine would disable the gelling mechanism.
In the test, a remote control plane was supposed to crash land on a runway that contained 4 obstacles designed to rip the wings (fuel tanks) apart. The pilot made a small error on landing and one of these obstacles ripped through an engine causing a flash fire. The additive did its job and the flash fire quickly subsided even though the destroyed engine led to more fuel than expected being available to the fire. Unfortunately, the flash fire was enough to get some of the luggage smouldering and a few minutes later a secondary fire started that eventually burnt out the plane. The test was deemed a failure.
Here's a scenario posted earlier by Boris the Cockroach.
"The book for the plane said grease every 5000hrs (or whatever it was) , manglement put that back by another 1000 hrs to save money, grease monkey forgets to do it, inspector does'nt check its done, nor checks the nut for play."
Not an accident. A sequence of people not doing their jobs properly. Most days it would work out fine because although someone didn't do their job properly (which may be a design failure rather than a maintenance failure), someone else would have spotted it or some other system would have spotted it, and consequently no one would have been hurt. Sometimes it doesn't work out like that.
It's like that in lots of areas, not just flight safety. Construction workers are often supposed to wear hard hats. They don't actually need them, generally, unless something else has gone wrong. If that something else has gone wrong AND they're not wearing a hard hat, it's quite possibly hospital time (or worse).
Stay safe. You know it makes sense.
In this case, the AAIB do indeed use the word "Accident", with a specific definition that can be found here: AAIB Accident definition (GOV.UK)
Because they determine the facts, rather than apportion blame, political correctness doesn't get a look in. As it should be.
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Let's test it on the BBC today?
Could electric shocks curb spending? NO!
Could Thunderbird 2 become a reality? NO!
Are pancakes now Britain's favourite food? NO!
Could eating more fat boost health? NO!
Can Egypt's tourism recover from terrorism? NO!
Are 'killer' hornets on their way to the UK? NO!
Are 5 countries about to join the EU? NO!
Are we innovating at the slowest rate in a century? ... Yeah that one's self-evident to anyone who follows tech news.
For anyone who hasn't stumbled on it, Patrick Smith's 'Ask the Pilot' blog is well worth a follow. He's a trained pilot who knows his stuff - and I can also recommend his book of the same name as a present for anyone who is scared of flying:
http://www.askthepilot.com
Here's his take on turbulence:
http://www.askthepilot.com/questionanswers/turbulence/
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For some reason I read the end of that link as Farsi Deplane and was expecting some sort of word play on Farsi speakers getting off an aircraft.
Well of COURSE a Boeing 707 was brought down by turbulence. It's a Boeing! A 'Murkin plane.
The planes involved in 9/11, all Boeing. The plane that knobbled Concord ... that was a 'Murkin McDonnell Douglas. 'Murkin planes are flown continuously without maintenance until they fall apart mid-air.
A whole fleet of Boeing 737-300 were grounded when the roof panels literally started peeling off mid-flight, because nobody checked the rivets for fatigue for decades.
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If you want to experience turbulence I'd recommend a trip in a small one engine craft. Or even better a glider plane flying through a thermal.
I once had a girlfriend getting angry on me when we were flying together in a commercial airliner because she thought I was playing tough during "feeding time". My father was member of an aero club and took me along regularly that time, so I honestly felt nothing notable.
Good training for getting married, though...
Try a paraglider; probably the only aircraft in which the wing is not only flexible but liable to tie itself in knots in severe turbulence... though most of the time it will put itself back together for you, with a little help.
On the other hand, huge fun :)
a glider plane flying through a thermal
We don't fly *through* thermals, we fly *in* them. Feel the bump, wait a couple of seconds and then push the lifted wing down hard to start circling. Pull back to V(min sink). Keep an ear out on the vario and hope you found a good one.
> experience turbulence I'd recommend a trip in a small one engine craft
(Mine was a two-engine plane - a Twin Otter[1] but the same principle applies)
Many years ago (1988) we flew from Plymouth to Jersey. On approaching the Jersey coast the pilot warned that we might want to hold on to our seats as it got 'a bit bumpy'.
Sure enough, coming over the Jersey coastline, we dropped what felt like about 50 feet. And then rose again, pretty quickly.
Was fun.
[1] And I just missed out on going in the co-pilot seat - pilot offered to let someone sit up front with him as long as we didn't touch the controls. I suspect he would get sacked nowadays if he did that..
In very light aircraft operating with only one pilot, the other front seat normally counts as a passenger seat. If it's used that way regularly it probably won't have dual controls, but often it will. Many times the control column can be removed fairly easily. Same goes for light helicopters.
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When the article includes gems like "the level of turbulence required to bend a wing spar is something even most pilots will not experience in a lifetime of travelling", and then even goes on to explain that wings are meant to flex, then you know that you're down at the level of an Open Day tour guide or a Sky News reporter, not a technical summary.
Nah, Harris College when I were a lad.
There were nowt wrong wit Polytechnics, except that they were under the control of local government not central government and they kept making central government look daft.
So they had to be removed from local government, and became universities.
> nowt wrong wit Polytechnics, except that they were under the control of local government
That was *everything* that was wrong with Polytechnics. I went to Leicester Poly in the mid-80's to do Information Technology. After a couple of weeks I asked to move courses over to Computer Science course as I hated the analogue electronics that we were forced to do. They refused.
The reason? The local council had mandated a one-way process (you joined the course, you couldn't transfer) because they were getting funding from Central Government for every student in the "IT Course" but not on computer science.
After failing the electronics section of the course I went back to re-do the first year but gave it up after a term. I'd been getting distinctions on the computer side of things..
Not that I'm bitter or anything.
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"Actually, I hadn't come across the Swiss Cheese thing until reading this article, and it looks like a useful thing for a number of applications."
Could have been summed up equally effectively in a single sentence, along the lines of "whenever an air crash happens it's almost never the result of a single failure* but rather an unfortunate coincidence of all involved safeguards failing at the same time"...
*yeah okay that crash involving the horizontal stabilizer actuator nut stripping out its threads due to inadequate greasing was pretty much a single point of failure.
quote "*yeah okay that crash involving the horizontal stabilizer actuator nut stripping out its threads due to inadequate greasing was pretty much a single point of failure."
But it was'nt
The book for the plane said grease every 5000hrs (or whatever it was) , manglement put that back by another 1000 hrs to save money, grease monkey forgets to do it, inspector does'nt check its done, nor checks the nut for play.
And I flew on one of those Frontier MD80's just after that accident..... Nice views of Mt St Helens/Mt Hood as we came into Portland though
Deflection of 5 metres on a wing nearly 30 metres long does not to my mind make 90 degrees.
Deflection of 10 metres full down to full up might be getting on for 90 degrees total flex, if for instance flexing outboard of engine only.
Wings are profiled - they thin towards the tip - think of it a bit like a kids drawing of a bird in flight.
I was flying across the atlantic in 1970 long before they had decent weather warnings and we hit a thunderstorm and free-fell 3000 feet before the wings seemed to do that. The plane smelt a bit funny after that. I was allowed on the flight deck a few hours later and the co-pilot was still shaking.