I have been to Canada for festivals with others. I know we drove the balloon there & then flew at the festival. I know there was whatever necessary paperirk from Transport Canada in the vehicle (that Customs had no interest in seeing) but don’t know the specifics of what was in it.
I also know that there have been America’s Challenge / Gordon Bennett gas balloon races from ABQ, NM that have flown into Canada. Again, I don’t know any of the regulatory details of that crossing.
Could be a no-name airlines freighter. It’d be very hard to notice 3 or 6" ID numbers on a 747 a mile away. Could also be some variation of sneaky pete stuff. Special forces, CIA, various illegal skullduggery like the prison flights, etc., etc.
It’s been decades ago, but I was a passenger on a float plane that flew from Minnesota to just across the border to southern Ontario. We touched down on a lake near the border to do some quick paperwork, then continued. I don’t recall the size of the numbers on the plane, but it was recognizable without them. The border officer had some of the details filled put before we pulled up to the dock.
Registration markings are under the jurisdiction of the state of registry. So whatever marking the FAA defines needs to be applied to aircraft on the N-registry. Whatever Transport Canada defines needs to be on aircraft on the C-registry, and so on.
International Air travel agreements are in place to accept the airworthiness and operational standards of other countries, and when nothing is in place the ICAO standard regulations are the default minima.
It’s complicated. But an aircraft operating out of one country doesn’t need to change its markings to fly into another country. If sold and operated in another country, all local regulations have to be applied.
After a bit of digging, US registration marks are governed by 14CFR45 Subpart C which runs from 14CFR45.21 to 45.29. The meat is 45.29 which, summarizing mightily, says “12 inches high” except for various exceptions that allow for 3 or 2 inch tall letters/numbers. Gory details here: eCFR :: 14 CFR Part 45 Subpart C – Nationality and Registration Marks (FAR Part 45 Subpart C).
I recall as a young kid that back in the 1950s the standards required markings about 4 feet tall across the underside of the wings. By the early 1960s those were no longer required.
And amazingly enough, these fussy details of the size of markings and the various exceptions and grandfathers and whatnot are sooo important that an amendment to this snippet of regs was issued just last month. As if the FAA didn’t have other larger fish to fry.
Nope. Ouch. That’s gonna cost a stupid amount of money.
Big airplanes don’t have crosswind limits. Instead they have “manufacturer’s maximum demonstrated crosswind component”. Which means the factory test pilots once successfully landed in X knots of wind, but you’re (legally) welcome to try your hand at more. Good luck Col Yeager; we’re all counting on you.
Typically the operating company will include a limit in their company supplement to the same effect, at which point exceeding it becomes cause for a declared emergency even if nothing interesting ends up happening.
Gotta wonder a bit about the thought process that tries that three times, rather than going elsewhere after 1 failed attempt. Lots of ways to get trapped in that situation, but all of them amount to having failed to use superior judgment somewhere upstream, now requiring superior skill (and luck) at the bitter end.
How about limits on the maximum angle between gear and runway at touchdown? Decrabbing to the extent possible seems advisable, but surely there’s some limit.
There’s a better quality video here, but watch out for the loud, obnoxious music.
Obviously there’s some physical limit beyond which stuff will break. And in @mnemosyne’s department, some standard for how much side load they have to be designed to withstand with what safety factor.
For the pilots’ POV, there’s not really a good way to assess that angle in real time. Pretending for a moment the wind is completely steady, then crab angle is a function of crosswind component and airspeed. Simple right triangle vector math.
But yeah, the idea is decrab as much as possible without lowering a wing excessively. But if you carry the amount of decrab past the amount of compensating roll, you start sliding laterally across the runway. Touching down with much lateral velocity built up is unhealthy too.
And as we noticed from the wild gyrations during the approach, high winds are very much not steady state. Chaotic high amplitude gusts in all 3 dimensions is more like it.
Looking at the second higher res vid, ISTM they started the decrabbing process early, which set up getting all those roll excursions going. It’s very nervous flying sideways towards a runway and it’s easy to get antsy and try to align the fuselage w the runway at 300 feet or 400 feet. In light winds that works OK. In mongo winds it works … badly.
They ended up in the worst of both worlds, where the fact the gear wasn’t close to the runway let them build up a lot of roll. Enough that the gear was no longer the lowest hanging part of the airplane. If you do all that flailing down at 40 to 20 feet, the gear will impact the runway before you have time to get a wing that low. You may still drag something or blow tires, but good bet it’ll be something cheaper than an engine.
My department only so far as I know where the paperwork starts; I’ve never had much exposure to the loads and aerodynamic discipline in any applied sense.
The basic regulations for transport category aircraft and structural loading and limits and all that are in 14 CFR subpart C.
“Flight Manœuvre and Gust Conditions”, starting at 25.331 Symmetric Maneuvering Conditions is probably where to start on questions of limits from an airworthiness perspective.
All the math and whatnot that goes into compliance to those regulations add up to generating the approved operating envelope and limitations that would end up in the Airplane Flight Manual (and maintenance manuals, etc). Operators are free to be more restrictive, but not less without substantiation and further approvals.
I mostly glaze over these standards; while I did well in related courses at school, anything I ever knew has long since evaporated from my brain.
It was probably a 747-8. Bigger/lower hanging engines. I knew of at least 1 carrier that limited the angle the pilots could dip the wings to 10 degrees in the pattern or it was an automatic go-around.
If you’re not used to wearing all the straps and paraphernalia, there’s a lot of ways to get something entangled in the ejection handle(s). Could be that, or could be they pulled the handle deliberately, but mistakenly.
The ACES II takes a rather firm tug on the crotch handle to initiate ejection, but it’s not very long-throw (1/2 -3/4" IIRC). If something did get snagged and the passenger jerked on it to free it, Kaboom.
They should. Perhaps they also should disarm the seat by removing some key initiator(s) per the maintenance manual. As you well know, accident chains start and build momentum on shoulds that didn’t.
The ACES-II is different from earlier seats in that normally the seat isn’t pinned to safe it. There’s a ~3" lever near your left thigh that moves through a ~90 degree arc between safe and arm positions. Think an overgrown version of the safety on any common pistol or rifle.
There are additional pins, but those are used by maintenance for maintenance. A jet on the normal flightliine is safed with the lever. I do not know USN special procedures for a static display, nor whether there were any such procedures at the time.
I vaguely recall something about the S3 seat in that iincident not being pinned, just lever-safed. And somehow through X number of guests in and out of the seat, safe got flipped to arm. Then came the inevitable oops when someone tangled something in the short throw ejection trigger handle.
The cockpit preflight on the F-16 began with step 1: stick your head very cautiously slightly over the canopy rail just enough to see the lever in safe mode. Everything else came after that.
You armed the seat just before brake release to taxi and disarmed just after brakes parked before shutdown.
