I was wondering if there’s anything about his installation of the engine that could affect its reliability. Was there more vibration, less cooling, anything like that? It does seem unusual that a non-standard installation would have this rare failure.
That’s a good question. For all practical purposes he’s built a plane from scratch that uses parts off another plane. About the only thing that’s truly original is the center fuselage and maybe the main gears. The wings and tail section had to be rebuilt to withstand the vast increases in speed. The entire front end is completely new. The turbine engine is turning a monstrous 5 bladed prop.
The engine is close to the bottom of things I’d worry about. I’d be concerned about structural failure.
[Gift link]
So far this year, close calls involving commercial airlines have been happening, on average, multiple times a week, according to a Times analysis of internal F.A.A. records, as well as thousands of pages of federal safety reports and interviews with more than 50 current and former pilots, air traffic controllers and federal officials.
The incidents often occur at or near airports and are the result of human error, the agency’s internal records show. Mistakes by air traffic controllers — stretched thin by a nationwide staffing shortage — have been one major factor.
The close calls have involved all major U.S. airlines and have happened nationwide.
Some have made headlines, including one in San Diego on Aug. 11, when a private plane almost landed on top of a Southwest flight. But most, including a close call between two planes in Phoenix four days earlier, have not been disclosed to the public.
A discomfiting read for sure.
ISTM the real crisis is in ATC. They can’t keep doing more with less forever. Humans will break. Or quit or develop an addiction. Leaving even fewer to do the work. The Feds need to get their staffing numbers up no matter how much it costs.
I don’t mean to suggest that pilots aren’t also doing dumb shit at the usual rate. But by and large the current staff of the majors and the bizjets aren’t being worked to death. The RJs are a mixed bag in terms of overwork, but always have been.
The mass exodus of old farts like myself and their replacement with so many newbies has been, is, and will be, a mixed bag of less experience, but also less complacency and deafness and difficulties sleeping. Probably less drinking too.
Preliminary report on the MiG.
My browser hates that link & refuses to display it. Or the one at ntsb.gov. But I was able to right-click and save-as locally from the ntsb search results page. Which left me with a readable pdf. Others may not have a problem, but now we know.
For anyone else having trouble with the link, start here https://data.ntsb.gov/carol-main-public/basic-search Then enter “CEN23FA361” in the “NTSB#” input box & submit. The results at the bottom include a link to a pdf. That’s what I could not display but could save.
Short version, the engine was quitting. The backseat pilot punched them out while the frontseater was trying to save the airplane / resolve the engine issue & lost track of where they were versus the ground. Close call.
Well, it’s tough to maneuver a plane if you’re not in it.
I perhaps wasn’t clear.
As I read it (and yes this is very much preliminary and subject to my own interpretation biases) the frontseater was task-saturated and tunnel-visioned and would have unwittingly ridden the thing into the ground and been killed. The backseater saved both of them by having enough SA to see where they were, and more importantly weren’t, going. And punch them both out before they got there.
Sadly, I doubt NTSB will spend any more effort to do a more thorough post-mortem. There’s not much accident prevention value in this one. So the prelim report may be the only one that ever gets written.
It’s their duty to ensure the remaining privately owned Mi-23’s are safe for Democracy.
You’re probably right, the PIC was likely driven to save the plane and not thinking far enough ahead. I’m not sure what kind of visibility the back seat pilot had but testing the ejection seat out at low altitude isn’t a big motivator.
I’d have loved to be a fly on the wall for the conversations that followed this event. Was it, “Thanks. I lost SA and you recognized that and saved us both.” or, “What the hell were you thinking? Another few seconds and I would have solved the problem. Thanks for destroying the plane.”
I was thinking the exact same thing.
Procedure for low altitude engine issues in twin engine fighter-like planes I’ve flown are roughly
- Get pointed away from the ground.
- Keep flying the plane while looking into resolving the bad engine. Maybe it will run but not in AB. Maybe it’ll run at reduced thrust. Maybe it’ll run at idle. Maybe it needs to be shut down. Not many more choices in a fighter & no carb heat or alternate fuel tanks to fiddle with.
- Do the right thing to the bad engine from your troubleshooting.
- Go land someplace on the good engine.
- Jump out as soon as any of the above become impossible / inadvisable.
Contrast that with the engine anomaly or failure procedure for the single engine fighter I’ve flown:
- Zoom = slam wings level and 30-45 degree climb right now.
- Jettison stores.
- If by the apex of the zoom the engine is running normally enough to maintain flight, keep flying, but climb above 10,000AGL and get overhead a suitable airport while remaining at that altitude. Then fly an engine-failed pattern even though the engine is still running. If thrust deteriorates excessively or quits entirely on the way to the airport, eject immediately.
- If by the apex of the zoom the engine is not running normally enough to maintain flight, eject before the descent begins.
It seems the front seater did almost none of the latter procedure and was more or less following the former. He rolled out of the bank, then climbed a bit, but did not zoom, and instead was thinking of a semi-forced urgent landing as if the MiG was a lightplane or a two-engine jet. Oops if so.
Now there is a real pilot’s procedure book for MiG-23s which will have real procedures as written by the manufacturer and as amended by whichever air force’s version he bought. So my outlines may not match approved MiG-23 practice. But I’m going to bet I’m not far off what his book said was the least-bad thing to do when faced with a very ugly situation.
You’re leaving out the responsibility of the pilot to keep the people on the ground safe as well as the passenger. In this case it means planning ahead by entering and exiting the air show pattern with an “out”.
If the plane has zero/zero ejection seats then there’s a lot more wiggle room bringing it down in controlled flight.
On a complete side note I noticed the Mig23 has a folding lower vertical fin. I kept looking at pictures them trying to figure out what was different and it was the fin. With the gear down it’s folded. With the gear up it’s extended.
In the years that I’ve been participating in aviation threads here I’ve noticed your opinion can often be distilled down to this:
“If pilots would just stop making mistakes and do things correctly every single time, everything would be fine.”
So on behalf of all pilots: Thanks, thanks a bunch.
There’s nothing in that report about them exiting the air show pattern improperly. They had an engine problem in an exotic aircraft and very little time do anything about it. They were lucky to survive and lucky nobody on the ground was hurt. We could say perhaps MiG-23s shouldn’t be flown in civilian airspace, even at airshows. But based on that brief report I don’t yet see a reason to throw too much criticism at the pilots.
As for the flight manual… When I did a ride in a MiG-15 I got to read the airplane flight manual. It appeared to have been translated from Russian to Chinese to Polish and finally English. Actually laughed a few times. That being said, as dicy as the 23 is known to be, I am curious what the book says.
Not really.
If the jet is mostly uncontrollable (which include plenty of steering but not much power) and you’re surrounded by city/ suburbia, trying to aim it is mostly a mug’s game. Once you leave it could go nearly anywhere in a couple-to-several mile radius. Out in the countryside your odds are better whether you’re aiming or not.
USAF policy was explicitly to ignore those concerns; turn away from downtown if possible and jump while you still had the chance.
The narrative in the NTSB report is interesting in a less-than-good way. The airport is on the east side of the town, with mostly agricultural rural to north, east, and south, but suburbia and contiguous small towns immediately to the west = WSW-WNW ish, for about 5-8 miles solid. The one good runway is 5/23, so rural / low density town outskirts off both ends at least for a couple miles.
Per the report narrative they took off on 23 then turned right = directly over or around town to make a right hand traffic pattern for another pass over the same runway. Recovering from that pass the plan had been to make a left hand pattern over relative ruralia (but close to the big Detroit International airport DTW) then land on 23. The low pass went fine but as they started their climb-out and left turn the engine started acting up.
I’m having trouble reconciling the impact location close aboard to the airport on a more or less downwind ground track with the supposed timeline of events and my impression of reasonable turn radii. They were simultaneously farther along what am I thinking their ground track would have been, and also waay tight to the airport for any kind of controlled landing. Even the very short aux runway the frontseater said he was aiming for would have required a 135-degree left turn to align. Not gonna happen that tight, even with wings full forward. The fact he said he was aiming for a very short runway sort of belies the “lightplane - force it on the ground on any airstrip” mentality which is a category error in a fast jet. Likewise getting that tight to the airport.
Then again, he’s in the airshow biz and knows his plane’s manuevering characteristics, while I definitely am not / do not.
There are a couple of tidbits of cellphone video online that show the jet level to slightly descending at altitudes around 500 to 1000 feet and at no great speed, below 150KIAS I’d say. The engine is not generating obvious smoke although the one short vid with original audio sounds about like an idling turbojet going overhead. There are two large puffs of smoke from the ejection set motors as they fire, but otherwise there’s nothing visually amiss with the airplane until they leave it.
Also remember that “zero zero” is about airspeed and altitude, not about sink rate. The seat is zero-zero capable at zero sink rate, and only at zero sink rate. The seats and the terminology was originally designed around the problems of the early 1960s when engines or hydraulics failed during takeoffs & landings a lot and folks were dying in droves.
The minimum recommended altitude for the ACES-II “zero zero” seat in the F-16 was 10,000 AGL, and 15,000 AGL in uncontrolled flight. You’d sure use it lower than that if you had to, including down close to the ground, but intentionally descending from above those limits to below those limits without punching out at the boundary altitude was a mistake your Boss would not approve of. From those altitudes you would have some time in the parachute to address parachute problems, which are commonplace in ejections. Folks jumping out at low altitude even with a neutral to upward vector have no time to deal with that noise. Everything works well enough or you are crippled / dead.
The idea of steering the airplane between the school and the orphanage and jumping out at treetop level never really worked. A fighter with no engine or one at idle has a horrendous sink rate. Even with fully forward swing wings.
Those two pilots had a decent but short ride in their chutes. More sink or less altitude could easily have changed that outcome.
I can’t tell from the video what the altitude is so it’s hard to say how much altitude/control they had to work with. If they lose all engine power I would imagine there is not enough elevator to keep the nose down because of the weight differential. It would mean a very high approach speed. It’s not like they had a 50 mile lake bed to set it down on .
Yeah. You’re not going to survive a no-engine off airport landing. I have no idea what sort of backup hydraulics a MiG-23 has, but absent hydraulics you won’t be able to control the airplane at all. It’s a dart and you’re a passenger on a dart.
With engine near / at idle so with electrics and hydraulics you could land on a prepared surface. Assuming you started from the right distance / altitude away. You’d have good control left and right but little to none fore and aft. You’d have to descend steeply enough to maintain flying speed and have enough energy = excess airspeed to round out at the bottom. Then it’s just a matter of playing when you raise the nose to stop the descent rate and become committed to bleeding speed to stop the VVI. Ideally you run out of altitude and excess speed while there’s a runway under you with enough out ahead of you to wheel-brake yourself to a stop.
The flight manual procedure in the F-16 for a dead engine (we had backup hydraulics and electrics for a few minutes) started with “Arrive over the numbers of your intended runway at 10,000 feet at 300 knots with gear and flaps retracted. With any less energy, bail out now before it gets worse.” Then you’d make one ~30-45 degree banked descending 360 degree spiral and be on the ground. Your average VVI was well north of 5000 FPM.
The MiG-23 having the wings forward would fly at slower speeds. But it was a very draggy beast and probably still had a darn steep approach angle at low or idle thrust.
I don’t want this guy flying any plane I’m in:
But if I don’t get to work I’ll be late and get in trouble. And if I can’t park I can’t get to work. 
Looks more like he’s trying to leave work. So no excuse.
In a funny coincidence, the unstaffed pay stations at my usual airport parking (run by the city) are very failure prone. More in the “It’s dead, Jim” mode than the “It just charged my card $100 but won’t let me out” mode. This lot is used by passengers and employees alike. I’ve seen some fun overly aggressive and antsy events caused by malfunctions, but I never saw a gate being axe-murdered. Yet.
One of my rules for many many years is if I get out of my car in uniform I pull on a windbreaker first so I look innocuous and unidentifiable. Don’t buy gas, go into a groc store, or stop at a takeout without your disguise. Just in case. You’ll be judged guilty by a viral social media clip and fired that afternoon, with your eventual vindication being a year later. Maybe.
Folks in that line of work live in exceedingly fragile glass houses surrounded by a sleeping mob with bricks. Do NOT wake the mob. One of the many background stressors I’ll be glad to slough off soon.