Babale
September 30, 2026, 1:32pm
7
To quote some relevant commentary from LSLGuy in the other thread:
Losing 17,400 feet in 2 minutes is a lot faster than even a maximum performance emergency descent in that aircraft type: 737-MAX 8. Even if we make allowances for the worst case granularity of the data, that’s still a lot. Which also suggests they significantly exceeded the airplane’s operating envelope. Good thing it didn’t start shedding parts. Or if it did, they were not major ones.
And yeah, depending on how much more info comes out soon, this might be a good candidate for its own thread.
Yikes. That’s about 90% of the one and only rudder missing. Which suggests some part of the attempted crash was a rudder dance. Or maybe the rudder is the first thing to flutter once you’re past Mach 1.
I’m pleased to see no obvious deformation of the horizontal tails. Which suggests that despite a massive overspeed, whoever managed the dive recovery did a good job keeping the Gs within reason.
Once they get done reviewing the FDR, I wonder whether they’ll find over-Gs significant enough to render the jet not economically inspectable / repairable? We’ll see. And probably fairly soon.
Even scarier. So even though they stopped the terrorist pilot the plane was very close to unflyable? What a tragedy that would be - stopping the hijacker only to find the plane too badly damaged to land… Very glad this didn’t happen.