Ah, gotcha. I can see why relayed coordinates would make a lot of sense, but after watching those videos of cars getting smashed by the retardant why a guy on the ground with a radio probably likes having the last say.
I’m under playing it when I say that is effing nuts. It looks like they came out of heavy smoke or clouds and didn’t have a clear ground reference on approach. Maybe the optics aren’t what they appear in the video but that didn’t look like an approved drop.
As far as making an approach it would make sense to grid the area out on a map and assign artificial way points in advance. Easy to program into any moving map display. The person doing the navigating can literally point to it on the GPS and hit “Got To”. The software gives the terrain altitude to avoid.
But at the end of the day it has to be a well planned visual approach. There is little room for error on a 200 mph flight at extreme low altitudes.
Yes, it’s hand flown but modern moving map displays give a pilot 3 dimensional placement of their plane to within feet. I would expect the secondary pilot to fly off a programmed moving map as a navigator to get them to the beginning of the run while the Primary pilot watches the approach visually.
Flying a specific line on a map is only part of the process. The crew has to manage the energy of the plane which the mass and speed. They have to descend to the beginning of the run while slowing 500,000 lbs of plane in a maneuver that increases the speed. It looks like something from aerobatic air show but there’s a lot more to it.
I think you might have some of the smaller tankers cowboy things a bit, but pretty sure the VLATs are not doing any unapproved runs, if for no other reason than they have to return to their distant base to reload. Watching those guys operate on the the fires I’ve watched down here, they do about 1 drop an hour.
Note that the spotter led that DC-10 in, so that would be two unapproved planes working in tandem. Reality is that they were under the direction of the airborne controller working circles a few thousand feet up and providing coordination the whole time. They know they’re the only aircraft cleared into the drop area so they just need to have visibility as they hit their entry altitude and heading. I suspect in this video they are crossing the smoke line somewhat perpendicularly, so the angle of the video makes it look worse than it is.
If you look at this video, you can see that these DC-10s are old-school. No synthetic vision or moving maps here. Steam gauges all the way.
Just to be clear, I was referring to the altitude of the DC-10. The spotter plane appears higher. The altitude and smoke/clouds could be a trick of the camera.
My old flight instructor was a water bomber pilot, flying modified B-25 Mitchells, as I recall. She told me some harrowing stories. Consider:
When making an approach over a ridge in a heavily laden bomber, two things can happen: you can wind up in an updraft, or you can find yourself sinking with the air if it’s flowing down the ridge. You have to compenste fast. I imagine in a jet woth spool up delays this could get hairy.
Once you are over the fire, you are in rising air. But when you come out the other side, you could be in sinking air.
In the B-25 at least, releasing the load would cause the aircraft to pitch up strongly. So they would release the load and immediately push as hard as they could on the yoke to keep the nose down. But if you are doing that and hit a column of descending air on the other side, you had to really be on your toes.
Water bombing is incredibly dangerous. A Cl-215 crashed in Greece just a couple of months ago - the second water bomber crash there in two years. A CL-415 crashed in Italy last year. And in December a 737-based water bomber crashed in Australia. Another bomber crashed in Portugal last year. And that was just the first page of Google.
One of the videos said they operate under part 137 (agriculture) so flying below 500 ft would be OK. And they said approaches were made with landing flap settings so figure 140 knot speeds.
Makes me want to watch Always again.
I thought of that, too!
Why TZ-98T touched down so far onto the runway remains unclear, and questions have equally been raised as to why additional braking measures were not implemented by the pilots, notably the aircraft’s spoilers. As @thenewarea51 indicates, Il-76s also feature a reverse thrust capability — designed to deflect airflow from aircraft engines upward and forward when landing, thus minimizing the distance needed to stop — although this functionality wasn’t implemented.
Here’s an example of the actual crash video:
Damned shame they had to overprint it with words that obstructed the part worth seeing, rather than obstructing the sky nobody cares about. Morons.
It’s not clear to me whether or not reverse thrust was used; Il-76 reversers deploy laterally and wouldn’t be super-obvious in that not-so-great vid. Maybe I see them, maybe I don’t; can’t quite tell.
But the real stopping power comes from spoilers and wheel brakes. Spoilers very clearly were not deployed. Which in turn greatly limits wheel braking effectiveness. They also landed long, and my guess is quite fast. Being an airlifter, the Il-76 approach speed is not fast.
Yet another unstabilized approach that should have ended in a go-around, not a touchdown. Oh well.
Hmm. Sabotage, maybe?
Video on X without the lettering.
Never say “never”, but IMO it’s far more likely it was simply an extremely badly done approach and landing. That airplane was just given to the Malians recently, having previously “belonged” to Wagner, whatever that might have meant in the shadowy mercenary underworld. And is the only IL-76 they have (well, had now).
Was the pilot flying a Malian making his first landing, with a Wagner guy in the right seat “instructing” but with not much common language? Had they been awake 24 hours at the time of the approach? Was somebody trying to show off a high-performance approach to a short landing and overdid it but was too stupid or prideful to admit he’d screwed it up irretrievably?
An issue that sometimes arises in screwed up approaches or landings is autospoilers. I do not know for certain that Il-76s have them, but assuming they do …
Most big jets have a system where somewhere in the approach you arm the spoilers for auto-deployment. And upon touchdown they deploy immediately, which has the effect of suppressing most tendency to bounce, and quickly gets the weight off the wings and onto the wheels so the brakes have some traction to work with. But …
In a screwed up approach where the pilots are high, fast, and mentally behind, perhaps they didn’t arm them. Like a gear-up landing it seems impossible. But yet they happen. Unlike gear up landings, I’ve never known of a (Western) design that had any sort of alarm for unarmed auto-spoilers. So if forgotten, the first wakeup call is after touchdown when something expected doesn’t happen. Which, if everyone is puckered looking out the front at the too-short runway, may itself go unnoticed. Noticing something odd occurring is orders of magnitude easier for a busy human mind than noticing something that, oddly, did not occur.
At least in US airline practice, there’s commonly a standard call-out made by the pilot monitoring immediately after touchdown to state that the spoilers did or did not deploy. Precisely to focus somebody’s attention on that topic at the moment of truth. And it’s called out either way, so the absence of a call is itself an anomaly that should (might?) wake up the pilot flying to check for themselves. It’s one of the rather few “all is normal” calls made during very highly dynamic moments of flight. Precisely because of the major importance of spoiler deployment to achieve anything resembling normal braking and landing distance performance.
Another issue that sometimes occurs is related to the various criteria for triggering auto spoilers. Commonly it’s some combo of gear compressed, signaling actual touchdown, throttles at idle signaling intent to not go around, and maybe a couple of other parameters, such as wheel spin-up to a certain speed.
There have been situations where combos of fast soft landings, the airplane still half flying just barely touching the ground, multiple wheels needing to signal on-the-ground simultaneously, etc. where the triggering parameter combination doesn’t occur or occurs real late. One of the best ways to drag the tail in a 737 is to land like that.
In the case of the IL-76 mishap I doubt it was that parameter-based non-trigger, because by the time they went off the end of the runway they’d almost certainly have met triggering conditions, whatever they were. And the spoilers never deployed before we lost sight of the plane in the dust.
So I conclude (tentatively) that autospoilers were never armed, or failed to deploy due to malfunction. But given the rest of the shitty workmanship to land that fast and long, “pilot forgot” seems far more likely than “untimely malfunction” on this one particular approach.
I suppose a third possibility is the autospoilers were known to be inop before they departed wherever they came from. But this fact was forgotten in the heat of their battle from way behind the airplane. I’ve certainly flown flights with either inop auto spoilers or inop autobrakes. Not all that uncommon. And we talk about it and its consequences before departure, but by the time of arrival it’s easy to fall into the rut of normal operations and have that slip your mind until reminded by an idiot light or a crewmate. Oops.
As always, accidents don’t happen when one minor-ish mistake is made. They happen when a couple of minor-ish mistakes are made coupled with a major one.
I doubt any useful investigation will be made public.
Another word for that is Russian maintenance. LSL is right as usual. Major aircraft accidents are usually a series of events that collectively add up to a failure.
Mali will probably rethink their airport layout and add an EMAS system to slow aircraft down that run off the runway.
I wonder if the pilot had enough steering/brakes available to ground loop it…
Got it, thanks, fellas.
Assholes lasing aircraft in Boston.
Helicopter crash last month. (Looks like a Eurocopter EC-135.)
Bad reporting:
The report obtained by CBS Miami states the helicopter was built in 2019 and its engines were rebuilt seven years ago. The last time the helicopter was inspected in May.
I had some challenge getting the report to download, but this ought to be the link to the actual NTSB Prelim Report. At least on my browser (Edge on Win10) clicking the link results in a blank page, but doing a [Save as] on the link results in a normal readable 2-page PDF.
The more complete story on inspections was the last 100-hour inspection was performed in late May, and the helo had flown ~24 hours up to the time of the mishap ~3 months later. So nothing remarkable there.
Convenient they landed on the fairly soft and frangible roof of a wood frame construction building. But we also see the value of designing seats & such for high-G vertical impacts. Most of the crew aboard got out OK. If / when NTSB ever releases a more complete report it’ll be interesting to see how the seriously injured and killed received their wounds. Probably collision with something small and penetrating, not a general over-G of their bodies.
Clicking the link automatically downloads in Safari, and opens it in Preview.
The helicopter was built in 1999, not 2019.