I’m reminded of another similar event that happened to a DC-10 decades ago.
Back in the day, we all carried clipboards that held our sheaf of flight plan paperwork. Of course the airplanes had no provisions for where to put these things when you weren’t referring to the papers. It’s almost like the designers never talked to the operators.
Anyhow, it was commonplace at this carrier to store your clipboard between the seat and center console (“aisle stand” in the vernacular). An FO decided in cruise to raise his seat for whatever reason. Which snagged the clipboard and carried it upwards. Whereat the clip at the top caught under the flap handle and raised the flap handle out of the “up” detent. Whereat an idiosyncrasy of DC-10 control rigging caused residual tension in the control cables to pull the handle towards the first notch of flaps. Which on Douglas products deploys only the leading edge slats.
They were doing M.85 in the high 30s when the slats deployed. Grossly beyond the Mach and altitude ops limits for those devices. The ensuing gyrations over-Gd the airplane, hurt a bunch of people, and came within a hair’s breadth of ripping one or more slat segments off. Which might well have resulted in an uncontrollable airplane. Oops.
The lived to tell the tale, but there are a lot of things in the cockpit you don’t want to bump too hard accidentally. And especially unnoticed accidentally. Whack something with your elbow and you’ll know it. Whack the same thing with a clipboard and you may not.
In a fun coincidence given much of the recent topics of this thread, I’m posting from a MAX high over Texas. So far no plummeting. So far.
My dad had a smoke-tinted acrylic lapboard with his approach charts and whatnot in clips on both the right and the left sides. There was a holder for his stopwatch, and Velcro or other fabric strips on the bottom to keep it from sliding on his lap. In the Skyhawk and the Skylane, he had his rigid leather flight case behind the front seats, and he’d store the lapboard in there when not in use.
The sudden drop of a Boeing 787 that injured 50 people may have been caused by a flight attendant accidentally hitting a switch in the cockpit, report says
On a different note, when the 707 rolled 360 degrees in the historic demo flight for the military was there a risk of fuel starvation to the engines or was it a barrel roll that kept the fuel in place?
All I’ve always read has said that Tex Johnston barrel rolled the Dash 80 prototype. He himself in a recorded interview described it as a “nice 1 G roll”. (Timestamp 2:05 to 2:25 of this video )
Juan Brown on the blancolirio YouTube channel has an interesting breakdown on what’s currently known. It seems that Boeing has put out a memo to airlines reminding them to ensure the seat movement rocker switch cover is in good condition. My employer operates B787s and I’m yet to see anything from work but it may just be sent to the engineering types rather than the pilot group. https://youtu.be/cRF1YTVJ1Q4?si=LhmqMRHpc4gB3_6n
I saw Bob Hoover shut down both engines of his AeroCommander, do a loop (after placing a glass of water on the glareshield which did not spill), do a barrel roll then a 180 to align with the runway, drop his gear and land, and roll out to a stop with the nose of the plane right up against the podium, stage center in front of the crowd. Engines dead the whole time. All energy management.
Hey, I found the performance. I believe that was the one I saw, but it might have been a year or two different. The last loop in the video is deadstick and stays that way until the end. Awesome.
Even more impressive was the speed with whichh he could form up with a stricken aircraft at Reno. If you blow the engine in one of those warbirds, the usual result is a dead engine and windscreen full of oil. So Hoover would fly top cover over the races, and if a pilot called mayday and pulled up and out Hoover would be on his wingtip in a flash and talk him down to a landing. Race pilots always said it was comforting knowing Hoover was up there. In the beginning
I loved watching Bob Hoover. I once walked up to him and shook his hand at Oshkosh. He was just walking around enjoying the show. My friends (who taught me to fly) would not approach him. I didn’t understand until years later when I learned of the things he’d done in real life. They didn’t feel worthy enough to walk up to him like I did. And if I knew what I know now I wouldn’t have done it myself. But he was just as nice as could be to a mere mortal.
He probably saved the lives of many people because of his exploits
I’m actually wondering if there actually are more frequent events, or if they’re just being reported on more frequently because of the tangential relationship to the shitshow going on at Boeing.
I’m no longer in the habit of reading reports like the Transport Canada CADORS on a regular basis but various events, close calls, issues etc. do come up every day given the volume of aircraft flying around. I don’t know about the panel in the story, but many planes can be dispatched to normal service with missing access covers, there just might be a performance penalty to consider.
Nevermind the sheer quantity of Airworthiness Directives and advisory bulletins and notifications to operators etc every day or week.
Not all problems are PROBLEMS (safety related, impacting ability to continue safe flight and landing, etc) but the media doesn’t really have the means to assess these events. It’s not good that these things happen, but it’s also naive to assume they never do.
You can see the air start hose and a main gear in the picture so that makes it the access panel behind the left main gear. Can’t tell how it’s attached. It almost looks like DZUZ fitting but I’d expect flush fit bolts. If one of the forward attaching points fail then it’s exposed to 150 knot wind.
In my designs and repairs of similar panels they were almost always attached using camloc quarter-turn fasteners unless they were meant to be opened more often and therefore had a latch and hinge.
I’ve only ever seen dzus on interior components (cockpit panels) but that doesn’t mean much; I’d use catalog parts and wouldn’t always pay attention to the colloquial names.
Failure to secure camloc type fasteners is a very frequent maintenance error, frustratingly enough.
