I find it hard to be sad that Frank Robbins died at 92 with such an accomplished life. Well done.
AvWeb 19-Nov 2022
Fire truck at Lima Peru airport drives onto active runway and was hit at 127 mph by an A320.taking off. 2 firefighters killed. No passengers killed.
Breaking news thread from earlier today:
Wiki already has an article on it, but it’s little more than a skeleton so far:
This happened Friday.
[Witness Ken Baxter] saw a plane breaking apart in the air…
"The thing that’s so disturbing about an airplane like this that comes apart in flight with a professional flight crew test pilots on board is that it’s obvious to me that the airplane was not performing to the level that’s expected of it in normal flight,” said [air safety expert John] Nance.
Cessnas just don’t break apart. [Of course they have, but it’s not something they’re known for.] From the image, it looks as if the starboard wing separated. I wonder what they were doing, or if they’d done any modifications (it doesn’t sound like it) to have a catastrophic failure?
I have never heard of a strut-braced Cessna wing ever failing. There might be one or two out there, but those wings are incredibly hard to break.
My guess is that we will find out one of several possibilities:
- There was recent maintenance, and somehow the struts were not attached properly, or
- The aircraft had been in some other accident in the past which caused wing damage that was not noticed, or
- There was extreme corrosion around the strut fittings for some strange reason.
#2 seems far-fetched, but it’s almost inconceivable that a strut-braced Cessna wing would just fail under normal conditions.
Yes but the struts are probably a single bolt at both ends. If the bolt fails or the attaching point cracks from failure (more likely) then the wing just falls off.
At least on the smaller Cessnas there are also two bolts where the wing spar attaches to the fuselage carry though structure. If either of those are missing it won’t go well once you get a little G on the airplane.
It’s not clear (to me) at this point whether the airplane came apart in relatively straight & level 1G flight or did some gyrations first then fell apart during the gyrations.
As an example of a possible different accident sequence, imagine they were fast, like up near vNE, and for whatever reason the elevator went full nose up. They could have simply over-Ged a perfectly healthy wing which duly folded in severe overload.
We shall see.
Since it came apart in the air I kinda expect a preliminary report that describes the failure. I suspect stress cracks in 1 of 4 attaching points.
Caravans actually have two struts on each side, individually attached. Each one is half a ‘C’ channel, and I think they are independently bolted to the airframe.
Another interesting thing about the Caravan struts is that they need their own anti-icing system (the only strut braced airplane with deicing for the struts, I think). So the struts may get more than their share of maintenance activities. That’s probably why they are ‘C’ channels - gotta take the strut apart to working on the deicing hardware.
I’m betting on the core cause being a strut issue - probably the attach points.
Link pictures if you have them. All i could find were 150’s. and they were 2 pieces inside a oval channel.
You can see details of the struts and attachments here:
Interestingly, that document calls out potential cracks in the strut attach fittings of the Cessna 208. It’ll be interesting to see if this was the cause.
Holy crap. Interesting arrangement. If one side fails I can image the other side would twist off.
I’m not sure. But if one cracked it would at the very least cause the other to carry double the load, and with a nice side helping of torque, as you say. One failure might cause the other one very shortly thereafter, especially in a gust or a pullup or something that increases the G load. Or maybe one was cracked for a long time, and the other finally failed due to repeated stress.
I’m not an engineer but the parallel attaching points look like they would help with torsional twist.
Meteorologist and pilot killed in North Carolina news helicopter crash
- The Robinson R44 helicopter crashed near Interstate 77 and Nations Ford Road at around 12:20 p.m., according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
- The helicopter belonged to local CBS news station WBTV, according to a statement released by the station Tuesday.
The newscaster I watched said the pilot circled a couple of times. I know the helo pilots think they’re flying a safer platform but It has me wondering if the auto-rotion training lacks the focus on maintaining descent. Is there a best glide airspeed in helicoptors?
The Washington Post 27 November 2022
Rescue effort underway to get pilot, passenger out of plane tangled in power lines in Maryland
- Nearly 90,000 homes and businesses are without power in Montgomery County, Pepco says
- Crews were planning and working late into the night on Sunday to rescue the occupants of a small airplane entangled in high voltage power lines north of Montgomery Village in Montgomery County, Md.
- The conditions of the occupants of the plane were unclear. County fire chief Scott Goldstein refused to specify the conditions, but said authorities were in cell phone contact with them.
They got 'em:
The pilot should enter the landing in his logbook as a Moodey in honor of NBC’s reporting of the event.
The old adage “We’ve never left one up there” may need adjustment.
This happened not far from me. My power flickered but that was it. They closed the schools yesterday. It will be interesting to hear how they flew into these lines since they are only 100 or so feet high.