The Pomona airport is named “Brackett Field”. The dragstrip facility is right off the east end of the runway. A Google Maps search is real informative.
The alignments are such that nobody would confuse the dragstrip for the runway. But anyone in the traffic pattern to land westbound (the usual prevailing winds) who suffered a loss of power would be real likely to land short somewhere on the dragstrip grounds.
Which on any other Monday would have been a giant expanse of empty concrete, not a sea of cars & RVs side by side.
I just got Buzzed by what I’m pretty sure was a C-5 Galaxy. I’m sittin’ on the couch, and hear a distant rumbling. It gets louder, quail and little birdies start to scurry around.
Holy Shit! Like an earthquake, passes directly over my house! The quail are ducking for cover now! I run to the sliding glass door, and its about 1000 yards south, maybe 600 feet off the ground, doing a low-speed pass.
Pretty cool, but … Why?
Did a slow climb to clear the “mountain” to the south of my house, turned west and disappeared behind it.
I grew up near an Air Force base that had two squadrons of C-141s, but C-5s would land their occasionally. A friend of mine pointed out that the sound was different. The C-5 was lower-pitch, and not as piercing a sound. Probably a higher bypass ratio than the -141.
Just because the plane that buzzed Gato’s place was loud doesn’t mean it was the biggest plane in the Air Force.
If anybody remembers the original models of the C-5, the engines sounded like a wood chipper going by. It was very distinct. They have newer engines on them now that are much quieter.
In fact, they’re the same engines as on a 757, just the military version. Only twice as many of them.
I’ve seen 757s climb out almost vertically after rolling down 2000 feet of runway. The C-17s we would get would do the same thing before the mains passed the end of the numbers. And they can land just as quickly (I understand that can deploy the thrust reversers in flight?). Amazing aircraft.
I asked a C-17 pilot about this at Oshkosh and he said that was basically done at idle. Not like the DC-8’s that could reverse the inner 2 engines with thrust.
But those enormous blown flaps allow it to drop like a rock.
A cargo plane operating for DHL crashed in Vilnius shortly before it was to land
No word yet on the cause, but as it flew from the DHL Leipzig hub there is a lot of speculation in the German media that there might be a connection with the incendiary bombs found in DHL parcels
You have to admit that as terrorist attacks go, it’s a humdinger.
With so many people flying, and the massive amount of cargo being shipped by air, I don’t know how Security can catch all of the devices. If this was a Russian attack, will Russia be declared a terrorist state? By whom? And what would that accomplish?
The Air Nat’l Guard fly’s C-130’s around here, but never that low or right over my place. And of course, they ain’t jets. There is a Naval Air Station not too awful far away, but I’ve never seen anything like a C-5 or C-17 before.
The commercial pilots can wade in on the video but it looked like a normal powered approach and not a steeper approach due to loss of power. If it was a Russian attack it could have been done by changing the glide slope signal transmitted to the plane but unless it was fogged in that wouldn’t work.
The descent rate picks up a little from about 2-300 feet down to where we lose sight. But not hugely so. Prior to that point I agree the descent angle looks typical. Clearly visibility (heh) was not a factor, nor was ceiling, since we can see them from the camera’s vantage point.
If they did have a raging fire onboard you’d expect them to have said something to somebody along the way. Maybe a simple matter of two exhausted pilots who screwed up a visual approach at the end of a long shift and crunched in short of the runway.
A deep sea exploration company that teased a possible clue into Amelia Earhart’s disappearance now says that the underwater image it released earlier this year doesn’t show the wreckage of her aircraft as it had hoped, but a coincidentally plane-shaped natural rock formation.
To be fair, the rock formation in the sonar image is plane-shaped.
“Talk about the cruelest formation ever created by nature,” he said. “It’s almost like somebody did set those rocks out in this nice little pattern of her plane, just to mess with somebody out there looking for her.”
Most excellent suggestion.