Curators might dispute the definition of “many” and tell you that, because of variations in manufacturing, and the extant planes’ differing histories, the destruction of any given aircraft can be a significant loss to history.
There are times I’d like to see Germany the way my father did… through a Norden bombsight on a B-17F.
I saw the posting, I had to wait to find out that indeed the person I went to high school with that does old warbirds in Western NY was not involved nor were any of his birds.
my sympathy to the family and friends of the deceased, and prayers to those of the still living. Burns are hellish to recover from.
The audio from the crew referred to #4 engine. they wanted to return and “blow it out”.
I have no idea what that could mean. Running roughly? Bad magneto? No idea either about the aviation qualifications of the witness.
For those who’ve flown aircraft like this, how many engines can go bad with a (presumably) mild fuel load, and only 2,000 ish pounds of payload, and still maintain positive climb rate and remain above stall speed? Two? Three?!
Well, they needed - and received - fairly intense maintenance during their military service too.
Indeed, I’m not sure I could nominate any military aircraft as a valid exception.
If you believe what you read on Reddit (and I’m shaky in that one), the cause of the engine issues was that the plane was mistakenly fueled with Jet-A.
There is a concern going around on aviation boards, that the aircraft was mistakenly fuelled, at least partially, with Jet-A, and not the 115 octane aviation gasoline it should have been fuelled with. As there would be residual gasoline in the lines leading from the fuel tanks to the engines, it is conceivable the engines may have run normally up to, and through taking off. Only to experience successive engine failure as the Jet-A made up more and more of the fuel reaching the engines.
Death toll is now 7. I understand there is another critical patient.
Ninja’d, as you can see.
And this…
That makes more sense than losing the airplane from a single inboard engine failure.
Many years ago, my mother’s cousin, a private pilot, crashed his small plane on take off in Israel after the airport mistakenly filled his tanks with jet fuel instead of avgas. He and his passengers survived, but the plane was totaled.
While that’s certainly possible, planes like that tend to have a crew watching over it. It would take knowledge of the plane to fuel it.
Isn’t there a label by the fuel tank that says something like "115 OCTANE GASOLINE ONLY’?
There was on the B-17 I took a tour of. Lots of airplanes have that sort of cautionary labeling, but misfueling accidents still happen.
CBS news said the plane hit approach lights 1000 feet out and they still haven’t found the cockpit.
based on the videos it looks like the plane made a circle back back to runway 6 but was 600 ft down and 1000 feet to the right of the beginning of the runway. It hit the buildings in line with Hamilton Rd.
If he hit the landing instrument station then he was not lined up with the runway and may have been trying for the taxiway. At any rate, he was so close to the ground at that point that he could no longer turn left. He was probably on a 080 heading.
I doubt any airport fuel guy could possibly put Jet A into a WW2 aircraft with 4 large
round motors, besides I thought that the Hoover Nozzle made it impossible.
Absent any other information, this seems unlikely. This B-17 engine/fuel system schematic shows pumps feeding the carburetors, along with return lines going back to the tanks. This suggests that there is constant circulation of fuel through the lines to/from the engines; if this is correct, then whatever the fuel blend was in the tanks, it would have reached the engine within a few seconds after startup.
Even if this is wrong - if there was in fact no circulation of fuel to/from the engine - ISTM the tank blend still would have reached the engine fairly quickly. They were operating at a high power setting for a good five minutes before trouble was reported. The engines were rated at 895 kW each; at full output, I estimate they would each burn about 6.5 liters of fuel per minute. How big might the fuel line from the tank to the engine have been? 1.5cm ID, 3m long? That’s only 5.3 liters of fuel, so unless the fuel line is a lot fatter/longer, it would have been receiving the tank mixture in less than a minute after running up to takeoff power (this also disregards any lengthy startup/taxi time).
This YouTube video offers comments about the B-17 crash. Starting around the 1-minute mark is this quote: “[The NTSB] mentioned that they did sump the fuel from one of the remaining wing fuel tanks, and they found 100-octane fuel - the correct fuel for that aircraft.”
Note that “100-octane fuel” here means 100 LL*, the only type of Avgas in any sort of widespread use today. The B-17’s engines probably used 115-octane fuel back in the day, but they would have long since been adapted to use 100 LL.
- LL = “low lead” - which is rather misleading as it contains about 4 times the lead of leaded regular auto gas.