“Assuming this was not a Shohei Ohtani home run ball…”
Heh!
Short term disability should be interesting. “No really, I got hit by a meteor”. “I have pictures and everything”.
News
It’s a B747 cargo aircraft and looks pretty serious with the tail sheared off. Probably a good thing it wasn’t a passenger jet.
Another article on this, without pop-up ads:
Unfortunate phrasing:
“It also said the Boeing 747-481 cargo aircraft was wet leased from, and operated by, Turkish carrier Act Airlines. A wet lease is an arrangement where one airline provides the aircraft, crew, and insurance to another airline.”
Some source (I can’t find it now) says the main gear collapsed on one side after landing, causing the plane to veer off the runway. At that slow speed, the rudder doesn’t have much authority (correct me if I’m wrong), and the pilots likely had no time to try differential thrusting.
Also, sad to see another 747 gone (obviously, not as sad as the fact that two lives were lost).
A 747 has four main gear legs. If one collapsed ot wouldn’t necessarily cause that side of the plane to fall. I think this happened on landing, so the weight would be low after burning off fuel.
The rudder becomes less effective at low speeds, but there is differential braking and a steerable nose wheel. I don’t know if they would be enough to compensate for a landing gear failure on one side, if that is what happened.
I’m not sure how losing an outer gear affects the ability to steer. The inner main gears are under the fuselage. The engines hang pretty low so the second one of them touches the ground it’s going to drag the plane sideways. Even if the crew retracted the thrust reversers on the side of the disabled gear it would be huge mess and not something the crew would naturally do.
The question is why was there a truck where they could hit.
The BBC article says the gear collapsed, then the 747 veered off the runway, across the grass, through the airport perimeter cyclone fence, across an airport road that unluckily had a security patrol vehicle in the wrong place at the wrong time, then slid into the bay.
There’s no suggestion the ground vehicle was doing anything except being terminally unlucky.
Not for me, thanks!
I’d have to be sedated for 19 hrs of that flight.
Must have been fun sitting under that.
One of these days there’s going to be a real disaster involving lithium battery fires in carry-ons.
Airlines carry gear to try to manage a fire in something like a tablet or laptop. But that depends on a hefty dose of personal bravery from the person using the gear.
If the burning device is buried inside a large suitcase and the first anyone knows the whole suitcase is involved, it gets real problematic to deal with that much volume of burning stuff and getting to the actual source may well be impossible with the tools and training at hand.
The most likely culprit was a weather balloon:
Brian
As between ~20 hours nonstop and ~30 hours with connections, ISTM the nonstop is the easier way.
But yeah, going halfway around the planet is not a journey to undertake willy-nilly. Even in our modern comfy era.
ISWYDT.
Whoops:
[pet peeve on]
That is not “An American Airlines flight operated by SkyWest Airlines”. That is an American Eagle regional affiliate-branded flight operated by SkyWest Airlines".
A loss of intercom between cockpit and crew is one minor theme in the current MentourPilot video:
Considering the importance of quality reliable comms across the locked door, the current intercom systems are not really up to the full demands of the task.
Nor does the cockpit have video surveillance of the cabin & cargo areas. There are teeny exceptions, but given how easy modern vid cams are, those ought to be mandatory throughout those spaces.
The pilots can’t manage what they can’t understand for lack of valid input data.
Older plane (in terms of design, nevermind age of the specific airframe), older standards, older reliability metrics that maybe (I’m speculating) did not consider the level of reliability of a PA system that would be compatible with the newer closed-door regulations. The system would be perfectly acceptable without that door, which is how it was originally approved. To be clear, I’m just guessing at that but it’s a line of inquiry I’d start on an investigation.
Regulators try to avoid retrofit requirements and the industry lobbies hard against them. I feel EASA is more aggressive about new safety standards and more willing to impose new tech or standards on existing aircraft but I don’t think this is an area where there’s any difference across regulators.