Many years ago, one of the Canadian admirals had a little sign on his desk saying “A collision at sea can ruin your whole day.”
Here’s the second video mentioned, I think. It’s hard to tell the bank angles but they get very high sometimes and it appears to be 90° at the mishap. Naively this would seem to be too much, but then can’t such a plane do a barrel roll? Would this steep bank have worked out OK at higher altitude?
Most of the maneuvering except the last crash at the very end seems to be 45 degrees bank or less.
The point with flying is that wings do the lifting. Tilt the aircraft 45 degrees, and the vertical lift component is much smaller. Tilt it 90 degrees, and there’s no vertical lift. You can see that in several of the 45-degree turns, the nose of the aircraft is tilted upward in the turn to use the engines to gain extra upward thrust. (Standard pilot training - before beginning a turn, pull the nose up a bit to ensure you maintain altitude during the turn) It’s very evident in the last turn where they crash that once the aircraft is tilted 90 degrees, it’s falling sideways toward the ground as it turns.
There’s an additional risk - if the aircraft is close to stall speed, the inside wing in the turn is going slower and will stall first. This means the outside (top) wing is still generating lift while the inside (bottom) is not, to pull the top wing over and flip the aircraft upside down into a spin. To add to the risk, the stall speed goes up (stall at a faster speed) when the aircraft is heavily banked.
Spinning when the ground is close by is a no-win maneuver. It can take quite a bit of fall to recover.
I am not a pilot nor do I know anything at all about how planes work so this will probably be a very naive question but would it have been possibly to roll the plane right (relative to the direction of travel) to flatten it out and stabilize the craft by allowing the wings to create lift. The wiki article talks about part of the reason for his drastic maneuver was to avoid restricted airspace.
Some people might take comfort in the fact that no matter how badly they mess up at work, they will probably never mess up as badly as the four person crew of this B-1B that did a belly landing at Diego Garcia after the crew deliberately pulled the circuit breaker on the gear down alarm, then “forgot” to lower the landing gear!
$8 million of damage. Oh and the irony was that the B1-B was called “Oh, Hard Luck!”
The Fairchild B-52 mishap is a standard “accelerated stall” accident.
At any given speed you can only pull so many Gs = turn so tightly in any plane of motion. In a car if you try to turn more tightly than the traction conditions permit, you’ll slide out the outside of the turn. In an airplane you’ll stall and lose lift.
As a separate matter airplanes turn by banking. So once banked, some fraction of lift is aimed horizontally towards the center of the turn to pull the airplane around the curve, while some other portion is still aimed vertically to offset gravity. The vector sum of the two is total lift, which is limited by the stall limit at your particular speed.
The B52 driver misjudged the turn to align with the desired track for his fly-over and saw he was about to overfly the bomb dump. Which is totally verboten. So he cranked it over and pulled, trying to square the corner. No different than inadvertently drifting wide in a sweeping curve on a car then abruptly trying to yank it back onto the desired line.
The extra bank means he’ll start to descend unless he pulls more to create more vertical component of lift. Meantime the extra yank takes the wings over the critical angle and pretty abruptly lift is disrupted, control is compromised and gravity takes over. And he “skids out of the turn” and into the ground.
This whole thing almost certainly started way too close to the ground to have recovered from. Or to have ejected successfully from once it became obvious they were screwed. At the first hint of incipient trouble the recovery would have been to stop pulling, roll wings level, then gently adjust nose up just enough to miss the terrain. If there’s room to do so.
They went from fine to screwed in just a couple of seconds; identifying and recovering after he started the overpull is real unlikely even before we consider the guy’s mental state and attitude to flying.
Low altitude maneuvering is full of traps like this, where the point of no return is pretty innocuous looking. It’s only later that you recognize you just killed yourself and now there’s nothing to do but wait for the ground to arrive.
Thank you for that explanation.
This is why we have checklists for some activities; piloting is a prime example. When things go hairy, and there are multiple distractions, it’s easy to forget something obvious but critical, like “gear down”. It’s also easy to lose track and assume “the other guy did this already or he would have said something”. You’d be amazed how many “forgot gear down” crashes happen. Fortunately, that’s the cheapest one to repair and most often survivable. (Recall an incident where a smaller twin had engine trouble, put down on a local highway, and forgot gear down. Forget the make, about 6 or 8 seat twin IIRC, but it had skid strips on the bottom, so some minor repairs and a pair of new props was most of the damage. )
(As a prime example, the Air France crash over the south Atlantic - one pilot was pulling back on his stick, the other was pushing forward, neither mentioned that detail, and they rode that miscommunication down 40,000 feet, and then another 6,000 to the sea bottom. )
Thanks LSLguy - another important detail in a turn is that stall speed goes up with G-force. Pulling an appreciable fraction of G in a turn is the equivalent of overloading the aircraft weight-wise in terms of how well the wing flies and when it stops flying.
Plus remember that playing games near ground level is usually done a lot closer to straight-and-level stall speed, not at the nice safe cruise speed in the 500mph range.
Saying stall speed goes up with G force is exactly the same as saying that at any given speed one can only pull a certain number of Gs. It’s like “F=ma”; you can manipulate any one of the three variables onto the left side of the equation and the right side will follow along accordingly.
In low performance airplanes the standard pedagogy is “Stall speed goes up with bank angle. Which is equivalent to G-force assuming level flight.”
In high performance airplanes, or even in aerobatic instruction in lightplanes, the standard pedagogy is “G’s available are proportional to speed, period. Up to corner speed, above which G’s available are also enough to rip the wings off.”
Having grown up in the aerobatic / high performance tradition, even when I was a civilian student pilot, I’m persuaded the latter is the “better” way to think of it. Even in low performance airplanes doing low performance maneuvers.
In big jets in the instrument traffic pattern we’re often driving around at speeds where the max G available before stall is ~1.7G and hence level flight in even 50 degrees of bank is flat impossible. Fully slowed and configured on final it’s even worse; 30 degrees is real marginal. You can roll; you *can’t *pull. And pulling is the only thing that moves the nose and changes your vector.
Keeping your mind right that it’s pulling, not slowing, that takes you over the edge is key. Folks crash when they get that backwards.
IMO the FAA “standard pedagogy” is flat-ass dangerous. I don’t mean to snarl at you; you just raised one of my pet peeves. 
So, a certain amount of “blame the dead guy”?
(Incidentally, his family thought so; you can see in the comments here his daughter not being too happy about it .
As the saying goes “Aviation is not inherently dangerous. But it is terribly unforgiving of incapacity, carelessness, or neglect.”
He goofed. Whether that was the culmination of a career of bad habits and bad decisions or a one-off is immaterial & I made (and make) no comment on that point.
The aircraft’s behavior was completely as expected for the control inputs made. Any extenuating circumstances are at least a few seconds (if not years) upstream of there.
Mother Nature and physics enforce strict liability in these cases. Humans can blame as they so choose.
Sorry, I forgot to add the relevant bit in my post. Of course, you are right, being the expert in aviation here.
But, I do recall reading that the base in question had had an active shooting incident a few days prior and then TPTB decide that the display should occur to raise morale.
The family basically states that when this accident occurred, in such public circumstance, they ganged up on the pilot, and made what was one error seem like a propensity for dangerous and reckless flying.
According to Bob Hoover he lost out on testing the Bell X-1 because he buzzed a local control tower near the airfield he operated out of. He flew the chase plane for the record breaking event.
The early days of aviation were probably more Top Gun than you think.
I doubt the CVR (or a transcript) was ever officially released. I’m almost 100% certain the animated presentation was never officially released, and I am 100% certain the full hi-def video of the C-17 mishap (which shows the impact) was never officially released. I know the full video is on YouTube. I’m sure if you search hard enough, you can probably find the CVR audio, or at least a transcript. Once was enough for me.
The pilot was the one who wanted to thread the needle; the gunner very clearly says “Nope” when asked if he thought they could make it through. Pilot says “Oh, ye of little faith”, goes for it, and finds out the hard way that his obstacle clearance judgement was incorrect. I think I heard they were both grounded, which sucks for the gunner… but in a crew aircraft, you live and die as a crew.
That’s the basic stall recovery method - level the wings, nose down and add power as required to accelerate out of the stall, then gradually pull the nose back up to arrest the descent. The problem is you need altitude to trade for airspeed; in a large aircraft like a B-52, you may need several thousand feet to recover. When you put a large aircraft into an accelerated stall only a few hundred feet above the ground, there’s pretty much only one way it’s going to end.
An additional complication in that mishap is that the B-52 does not have ailerons. It uses spoilersfor roll control, which bank the aircraft by reducing the lift of one wing. When the wings of a spoilers-only aircraft are stalled, there is little-to-no roll control.
The crew walked away from the aircraft (literally - they used an escape rope from the upper escape hatch to egress the aircraft), and the aircraft was repaired and usable again. That’s a lot better than what could have been.
There were many factors that led up to that incident; the B-1 community learned some hard lessons from it.
I can’t imagine what it must be like to be related to Bud Holland, and have to live with the aftermath of what happened.
Having said that…
Unfortunately, it was well-known for a long time in the B-52 community that Bud Holland was a rule breaker. The mishap at Fairchild was far from his first error in judgement. His leadership knew about his rule-breaking, and by letting it continue unchecked, encouraged him to continue to violate flight safety rules.
Yes maybe, but I believe that the co-pilots were both “let go” from the air force, so whatever lessons were learnt, it was the end of their careers.
In this Wiki entry I see no photo of the star player, Holland himself.
This is either what-do-expect-it’s-Wiki, or the fruit of some bizarre Wiki edit battle or other lawfare by Holland family.
I’ll try to fix it later.
In a word, no. In the event of a stall situation leveling the wings using the wing ailerons accelerates the stall. That’s because the increased angle of the aileron near stall speed disrupts enough airflow over the wing to cause a loss of lift. In the event of a stall the proper procedure is to correct with rudder. This is the 3rd axis of control discovered by the Wright Brothers.
In a large airplane this add a tremendous amount of stress to the vertical tail structure. It’s possible topull the tail off doing this although most rudders are speed limited in order to prevent this.
The plane doesn’t care where the restricted airspace is. It will however, respond to the laws of physics.
My dad flew cargo planes in the Air Force for years, and did a bit of instructing too, it seems. My uncle told me about something my dad used to do with pilots he was training. They’d be in the middle of the pre-landing checklist, and when it got to to the point of putting the gear down my dad would do something to distract them. He’d let them continue the approach, and just before landing he’d tell them to go around[sup]*[/sup]; then he’d tell them that they were just about to land with the gear up.
I’m of two minds about such a thing. I’m not generally a fan of adversarial teaching methods like that. I wouldn’t be surprised if it works, though; stuff like that can make an impression that you don’t forget. On my first ever lesson, nervous as hell, the right-side window popped open just after takeoff. I don’t know if my instructor did it or if it just happened. I checked it extra carefully on every flight after, and probably still would.
One other thing my uncle pointed out. After distracting during the checklist and leaving the gear up, my dad damn well had to remember it. If he forgot to order the go around and a C-141 landed gear up, I’m sure he’d have heard about it from someone.
- A go-around is just what it sounds like. When lining up to land, you also have a plan for what to do if you can’t. You fly to a certain altitude, head for a certain radio beacon, until the controllers can bring you around to try again. Pilots practice them.
A friend of a friend was an air force pilot and lost control of his fighter, resulting him having to eject and the loss of the jet. Although they found he wasn’t at fault, he was grounded for a number of years.
An instructor friend of mine was giving me a biennial flight review just before a long flight. I hadn’t flown in a year. He had the forethought to see a scenario that would cause me problems and created the situation. Damn if it didn’t occur in the flight. I recognized it immediately and changed my course of action. It was a real lesson in situational awareness.
I suppose everyone learns differently but that really stuck with me.