The Great Ongoing Aviation Thread (general and other)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
6803

Since USAF doesn’t have any F/A-18s or EA-18s, how does the Navy doing something contrary to decades of Navy standard “keep things simple”?

In the Navy world, Pilots fly & NFOs navigate, bomb, gather intel, chase subs, control air intercepts, do EW attack, etc. I can’t do your job; I’m untrained for it. And likewise you’re untrained for mine. So how 'bout you do your job and I’ll do mine? The mere fact you’re sitting in an airplane doesn’t mean you have any reason to try to steer it.

If anything, USAF’s historical cultural approach is the more immature / irresponsible.

6804

Oddly enough that’s almost word for word what they told me on my last flight up to Portland for work.

6805

It does if the primary pilot is dead. That’s a real concern in a military plane.

6806

For military pilots, probably 99% of all reasons the pilot can’t fly the plane is because it is unflyable. Not because the plane is fine and the pilot is gorked.

So hurry up and jump out before the fully intact pilot initiates the ejection for everyone including you.

6807

That seems like a high number. Even airlines use 2 pilots for emergencies and there have been a fair number of incidences that required a 2nd pilot to bring the plane home. None of them involved being shot at.

6808

Granted. But all of them involved older pilots.

Switching to the big picture:
The mere fact we can identify a potential problem (e.g. military pilot incapacitation) and a potential solution (e.g. flight controls for non-pilot crew and training to use them in benign-enough situations) does not mean that it makes any sense to implement that remedy.

You are very good at assuming that if a remediation can be identified it must be implemented. That is very naïve and overlooks lots and lots of reasons why not to.

6809

Should be ‘Cornfield Fighter’, but anyway…

6810

Remember last month the union voted to reject an offer which had been accepted by union leadership–so they might do it again.

6811

It is pretty much the standard union playbook that union leadership eventually gets a deal with management, says to them, “I don’t know if this’ll fly with the members, but we’ll try”. The membership knows their role and duly rejects the deal. Union leadership goes back to management and says “We warned you; you’ll have to sweeten the pot. The rank and file are in an ugly mood.”

So management pulls the last cookie out of their wallet that they’d been saving for exactly this scenario, adds it into the deal, labor leadership accepts it, the rank and file votes it up, and everyone goes away with saved face.

Bottom line: It’s all Kabuki; there’s (probably) no uncertainty or drama there.

6812

As I was reading your post I thought, ‘This sounds like Kabuki.’ Then I read the last line. :laughing:

6813

The flight crew has been declared dead. It’s unclear from the article if they were found in or near the plane of if they are missing & presumed dead.

6814

I stumbled across an interesting video describing the mobile lounges that were part of the original design of Dulles Airport. I actually flew into Dulles in 1982 when those were still used to carry passengers from planes to the terminal. My last time there, about 20 years ago, the lounges were still in use, but rather than take you directly to your plane, they were just shuttling people between the main and satellite terminals.

6815

There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots…

I didn’t know the name Chuck Coleman, but apparently he trained many of the actors in Top Gun: Maverick.

I can’t tell what’s happening in the video (you can’t see the actual crash, BTW). The problems start at roughly 3:50. The plane does a few aileron rolls, and then seems to go into a tumble. Not sure if it was meant to be part of the act, but it goes on too long and by the time he recovers, there’s not enough altitude to pull out.

Maybe our resident pilots can tell if there was likely some failure in the craft, piloting error, or what.

6816

Hmm. Don’t know. It looked like he was going for a lamcevak type manoeuvre which is a sort of forward tumble, ran out of energy and fell out of it.

I don’t know if it’s just the camera perspective but he didn’t seem to have much energy for the whole routine, it didn’t look as snappy as I’d expect an Extra routine to be. I see the airport is fairly high elevation and I’m guessing it would be hot so I’m wondering if he got caught out by a high density altitude giving him marginal performance?

All of that is pure speculation of course. And to drive that home, I once witnessed a very nearly fatal incident in a Sukhoi 31. The pilot was snap rolling on a 45° angle towards the ground and recovered from the last roll inverted then pulled hard to clear the ground by about 50 feet. If he had crashed it might have looked like pilot error, but what actually happened was an oil line broke in the cockpit and sprayed him in the face. He couldn’t see so stopped rolling, pulled, and hoped.

6817

You can see a lamcevak here. https://youtu.be/X3GYAmDI5Gc?t=189&si=rEiT7MfAn84wqmVB

6818

About 30 years ago there was something similar in Rome Da Vinci airport. You get on a bus that drives out to the plane and then it rises up on scissors to dock with the door. Very cool.
Unless you’re on the 3rd leg of a stupid itineray and it’s been 30 hours since you last slept. In which case they’re very freaky and you spend years thinking you hallucinated it.

6819

@Richard_Pearse is the (former) airshow pilot, not me.

I saw the same overall lack of aircraft energy in the routine and agree that density altitude was probably a factor. Compared to the routines of the airshow airplanes of the 1960s it was plenty high energy. Compared to what you expect to see these days from any model of Extra, it was noticeably weak.

Agree w an attempted Lomcovák - Wikipedia. Which has been loosely described as “Force the airplane to tumble, then hang on until it does something you recognize, then recover from that maneuver, whatever it turns out to be.” A bit of hyperbole, but not too far off.

Starting from a climbing series of snap-rolls as he did is a pretty common way to scrub off the speed and get the gyro forces built up then transition into the forward tumble. In this case the plane makes an awkward double-tumble with a negative G jerk in the middle that just feels wrong, does a sort of inverted half-turn spin, which burns up altitude, then the recovery starts. But by the time he’s got the nose pointed towards the velocity vector which is nearly vertical downwards, and is fully under control, there simply isn’t enough altitude to finish the recovery, nor speed to pull more Gs to tighten the turn radius enough. So the ground gets there before he achieves level flight.

He (probably) had the altitude and energy for the double-tumble, or the half-turn spin, but not both. I don’t think that was a deliberate attempt, it was just the way the airplane happened to flop around the sky that day. I will suggest that at higher density altitudes the inertial forces are the same, but the restorative aero-forces are less. And the flight controls are somewhat less effective. Such that a more violent maneuver than usual might be expected.

Bottom line IMO: He had the bad luck to have the uncontrolled part of the maneuver end up with a flat inverted spin/fall, meaning he had to turn 270 degrees in the vertical plane to achieve level upright flight. And due to falling in planform orientation, his actual speed was very low as he started the recovery. Low speed = low ability to pull Gs and turn in that vertical plane.

On a final re-watching I notice that just before the airplane disappears behind the parked plane in the foreground, an unexpected and unhelpful right roll develops. Perhaps an accelerated stall as he makes a last-ditch instinctive pull?

Bad news all around. And probably much more a matter of bad luck than bad skill.


I’ve told this story before, but when I was an FO I used to often fly with a Captain who’d been lead of a 3-ship Extra formation act that toured back in the 1990s / 2000s. Damn but this guy could fly. They had a lot of fun and were paid stupid-level money by their big corporate sponsor.

I asked him why he/they quit. His answer was simple. “You either quit after you’ve really scared yourself a few times, or you’ll keep doing it until you kill yourself.”

I’m not suggesting Coleman had gotten past that “not scared anymore” point since I don’t follow the airshow game at all and don’t know who the current big (or small) names are, but for sure it’s a story of luck running out. Which amounts to the same idea my Captain was talking about.

6820

Now that is a world-class Lomcovák.

6821

A Lomcovák (or incorrectly spelled Lomcevak )

Also incorrectly spelled “Lamcevak” :person_facepalming:

6822

I admit I had to look it up.