Yes, I may have looked at it the wrong way.
Anyone remember the C130 fire bomber that had its wings fold up during a pull-up after a bombing run? It also caught fire at the break points before impact.
There is a pearling company here (Paspaley Pearls) that uses Mallards to service the pearl farms, they will be looking at this with interest I would guess.
There is more discussion of the accident here.
Was it a Hurkey bird? I thought it was a WWII vintage bomber (A26?) I don’t have much time now or I would go search. Maybe later
I was thinking of this one, which is a C130.
I heard on the news that the plane was 50 years old. Admittedly, I don’t know much about aircraft, but that seems pretty old. On the video, it looks like the wing broke off right at the fuselage, or close to it.
I’d put my bet on metal fatigue.
The average age of the General Aviation fleet (the Cessna, Piper, Beechcraft, et al. you see flying around) is something like 30 or 35 years. Peak production was in the late-1970s, but there were a lot of airplanes made before then. There are a lot of 40 and 50 year old airplanes flying around. The first DC-3 flew 70 years ago, and there are still several in regular service. One operator says that when they can’t get the Pratt & Whitney radials rebuilt anymore, they’ll just put on turbines.
Aircraft are usually very well maintained. Unlike cars, it is often or usually cost effective to keep them up. When corrosion occurs or fatigue cracks are found, they are repaired. If a problem shows up in the same place in the same type of aircraft, Airworthiness Directives are issued so that the problem can be repaired or avoided in the rest of the type.
Certainly fatigue or corrosion may have been the cause of this crash. But I would have no problem going up in a decades-old aircraft.
Age could be an issue. Aircraft should have a maintenance schedule that catches and replaces aged items before they become a problem, but it can sometimes take an accident to highlight a particular problem. A good example is that all Tiger Moths now require a check of the wing spar for rotting wood every five years. This requirement was put in place after a Tiger Moth had a structural failure while performing aerobatics.
I would suggest that corrosion would be more likely than metal fatigue, but it could be either I suppose, or something else entirely.
The aircraft that I fly are subjected to a lot of sea spray and they sometimes find corrosion in a wing spar that needs to be repaired.
Malfunction propeller control will do that kind of damage.
Back in the day when the ARMY was first using the Mohawk, there was a rash of crashes that turned out to be propeller control failures and the propellers were going into full reverse pitch at takeoff power settings.
From what I have seen, to knock a Grumman Iron and Foundry works aircraft down, it would usually take something that bad.
Unless there was some CAT or other turbulence at that time, or something that could jerk the controls very violently, well, I personally will wonder about a structural failure due to fatigue or corrosion judging by what folks in the business have said about that operation and the type of care they usually take.
YMMV
Probable metal fatigue crack in the wing spar;
“This crack appears to extend through a majority of the spar at the location of the separation,” Rosenker said.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/12/21/miami.crash/index.html
Brian
Sounds like Paul Harvey may have been right.
Thanks for the link.
Floatplanes could fulfill most of these roles, though. I’m thinking of flying boats per se = hull-fuselage craft without floats (eg: Mallard, Albatross, Catalina). They’re older, larger, and less economical to run. One good crackup could be the tipping point to relegate them to firefighting duty and warbird meets.
There were crashes in near-succession of a C-130A (from the Fifties) and a WW2-era Privateer (the Navy B-24) in firefighting duty, both attributable to simple fatigue life. The US Forest Service ordered the grounding of all the old warbird tankers after that (by suspending contracts with their operaators).
Thanks for the update, N9IWP. It makes complete sense. It also pretty much has to mean the grounding (pending re-sparring, a major but doable operation) of the Mallard fleet (and Chalk’s), or at least the imposition of a strict inspection schedule.
Trivia: Chalk’s is the world’s oldest operating airline. The oldest continuously-operating *major * airline is KLM, however.
There are probably more float planes than seaplanes. Up here Beavers and Otters are especially popular, and there is a plethora of float-equipped Cessnas. Seaplanes like the Mallard seem to be more popular in the Caribbean.
As for economy, many of the older aircraft including the accident aircraft have been retrofitted with turbines. Not being turbine qualified (even in helicopters) nor multi-engine rated, I don’t know how much more economical they are than radial-engined aircraft. Airplanes are expensive to operate, no matter what engine you use. But it seems to me that if turbines were not cost effective they would not be used in place of radials. (Most of the DeHavillands I see up here still use radials, and I’ve never seen a Cessna 195 with a turbine.)
There aren’t many modern flying boats.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flying_boats_and_seaplanes
Ones that are semi recent (not a complete list)
Bombardier CL 415 (water bomber)
Dornier Seawings Seastar (cancelled, seeking investors)
Beriev Be-103 (only new multi-engine flying boat certified in US)
Beriev Be-112 and -200
Seawind 300C (was a kit, trying to become certified)
Pending there is the Centaur (been in development forever- looks like they made a UAV) www.centaurseaplane.com
and the Mermaid http://www.sportaircraftworks.com/mermainmain.html
There are also ultraulight flying boats like the SeaRay
Brian
Chaulks has voluntarily grounded its fleet to allow for inspection.
Brian
I would imagine the flying boat is more suited to warm-water regions, by virtue of the wear and tear on floats vs. fuselage, the ease of repair of floats, and the material stresses of cold weather operations and possible chunks of ice piercing your hull. But The RCAF is still using Albatrosses, last I heard (from a retired USCG pilot who flew them, too). I dunno, really.
Float planes have a little more flexibility where facilities are limited, too. If you’re flying to a lake in the middle of nowhere, you can beach the plane, kill the engine and walk to the front of the floats and hop off onto dry land. (Then we’d turn it around and pull it up on the beach as far as we could, and it was ready for when we were leaving.) From the pictures I’ve seen of the Grummans, it looks like that would be hard to do.
The place I worked was also certificating a right-side door modification for the Cessna 206. When you’re docking a float plane, you can’t always pick the most convenient approach or even which side of the plane will be at the dock. A stock 206 only has a left-side door for the front seats. With the mod you could approach the dock, cut the engine and get out on the right float as your momentum carried you to the dock.
All of the float-planes I’ve seen have been single engine, where as most of the sea-planes have been twins, that would be a compelling reason to have a sea-plane for some companies.
My understanding is that all scheduled-passengers-for-hire aircraft in the US have been required to be multi-engined since the 1930’s.
Link.
