Does crashing an end of service life airframe really cost that much? From the perspective of destroying the plane, I mean, not the operational costs of conducting the test crash.
I’m not entirely sure that the 727 was really at the end of its useful life - there are, after all, airplanes 50 and more years old still flying. More likely, it was getting too expensive to maintain or upgrade to current standards. Even if it was at the end of its airframe life, there would probably be some value in usable parts.
Regardless, there would, of course, be the cost of jet fuel, the testing equipment on board (some of which would almost certainly be damaged or destroyed), staff salaries… at least tens of thousands of dollars.
I thought most >50yo planes in service didn’t have pressurized hulls. I guess the real question would be, what’s the going price for a 727 of whatever age and number of landing cycles as the one crashed?
The fuel, instrumentation, salaries, etc, are the operational costs and while they’d be higher than any single automobile test crash I’d wouldn’t think they’d be as high as the testing for, say, any given model of vehicle.
I don’t know about the 727. The company I work for operate BAe146s which are a 30 year old design (we actually have numbers 2 and 3 off the production line along with more recent builds). They also used to operate B727 freighters but they’ve been retired. Anyway, one of them is being replaced by an Avro RJ and even though there is absolutely nothing wrong with the airframe being retired, it will be cut up and turned into scrap metal and parts because it’s worth more like that than as a complete airframe. Of course the B727 in the OP won’t even have much in the way of parts.
Well, it actually says the pilot ejected minutes before impact. I would also have assumed remote control, but it wouldn’t have been too hard to trim the plane for “controlled flight into terrain”, and then still have plenty of time to jump out the door. If anything went wrong, the pilot could head back to the controls for a go-around or real landing.
And presumably large chunks of wreckage could still be sold as scrap metal after the crash.
There might be some - the back half of the plane was largely intact when everything stopped moving, as usual, it was the front that got the worst treatment.
If the B727 isn’t pressurized - which, that low, it doesn’t have to be - you can get the doors open with no problem. You’re not going to get the F15 rocket chair ejection but yes, it is possible to leave a moving B727 once you get the door open. He might have left through an emergency hatch in the cockpit.
The pilot trimmed it for flight into terrain then exited the airplane. The close-in chase plane did, apparently, have some remote control capability for the final bit of the flight. So it was a combo of the two.
^This.