Don’t you need Clarence clearance for that?
Just don’t start up with your White Zone shit again.
For as long as I can remember small planes have often spent long times lingering over my neighborhood flying in circles. (Here’s one from just now.) What I wonder is, why? It is this area around my house specifically, not wider parts of the area. It can’t be because if the repatively low population density so that it is more okay if they crash, because 1.) There are plenty of areas with similar density and, even better, there are plenty of wooded areas where nobody would be at risk. My hypothesis is that the triangle of roads make a good visual target for practicing pilots. Does that make sense? (The triangle is closed, that gap is an artifact in the rendering.) They always appear to come out of GMU.
A UPS MD-11 outbound for Honolulu just crashed at the UPS Worldport near Louisville. Video of the take off shows that the left engine was fully enveloped in flames. Looks like it barely got off the ground and clipped warehouses off the end of the runway.
It looks like the left engine and wing caught fire and the crew was trying to set it down. There’s a lot of UPS buildings South of the Air Hub. Not sure if the plane struck any of it.
Louisville to Honolulu, so filled with fuel.
The certification standards for three engine jets are kinda wonky. Relative to 2 or 4 engine jets they can be much more underpowered with one engine out.
And launching for SDF-HNL I’d bet they were close to max weight, either certificated-limited or performance-limited. Such that really good skill would be needed for a simple engine failure. And that’s before anything else starts going wrong, like a wing on fire screwing with slats, flaps, and ailerons.
The terrain around Louisville isn’t exactly mountainous, but neither is it flat. There are some high spots to avoid.
Here’s Juan Browne’s report: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3lXl9yfISM
It’s fairly clear the plane had a serious left engine fire during the takeoff roll. It barely got off the ground, then descended into buildings.
Great cite; thank you.
There is rising terrain not that far off the end of that runway. The Facebook video shows the aircraft on fire before breaking ground. The couple-few seconds of clarity there shows more pitch than I’d expect for an engine out scenario. If they were still sorting out what was going wrong as it was rotation time, it’d be typical to rotate to the normal all-engines pitch attitude for liftoff. If about then the thrust decays, you can end up in a mushing slowing situation, where you can’t accelerate with that much AOA on 2 engines, but you can’t stand to lower the nose or you’ll descend into the terrain. No matter what you do it ends badly.
Not that most engine fires continue to develop near-normal thrust. That looks like a lot more than the typical engine fire, suggesting a fuel leak external to the engine which was then ignited. Which fuel leak itself could cause engine failure and the loss of thrust.
In all, their day went from routine to shit to dead in about 20 seconds.
Two possible reasons I can think of.
- Stall practice. We always did it over a large golf course just in case of engine failure. I learned in a late 40s Aeronica Champ.
- Instrument training. The student has a hood on so can only see the instruments. You learn to make constant turns to a new or reverse heading. All the while you maintain altitude. Idea is to get you out of a low visibility situation without getting the aircraft in a dive or stall situation.
Back to the UPS crash.
Aviation fuel is a form of kerosene. It’s stable and the fumes are not volatile like gasoline or propane.
That’s why grades of kerosene are used in home heating boilers, diesel cars & big trucks, and planes. I have a kerosene forced air, torpedo heater in my shop. I don’t want propane or natural gas in my shop.
Did something in the cargo explode? Would that explain the massive fireball? The engine fire is obvious. The pilots never had a chance to use the fire suppression systems.
Though less volatile does not mean not flammable at all
Well, here’s a truly terrifying dash cam view of the crash at very close range.
But what I’m wondering is why they fly tens of miles from the airport to do their practice over my neighborhood specifically and have used the same spot for decades instead of literally anywhere else. That’s why I’m wondering if the pattern of roads makes a good visual guide.
When it comes to finding a good practice, area away from the airport is better, just because there’s less chance of interfering with arriving and departing traffic. In my experience as a student pilot, we typically picked an area that was very unlikely to be used as a route to or from airports in the region.
It could be traditional. Like, there are areas where FBOs typically take their students for practice. In helicopters, there was the Santa Clara River wash practice area, the ‘Movie Site’ practice area (Simi Valley), etc. Earlier, when I was training for fixed-wing, there was an area northwest of WJF for maneuvers.
Missed it by two minutes; deleted by moderator.
Thanks for pointing that out. Looks like they cleaned everything up and moved all that to the mega thread. Here’s a Threads link to that same video.
Note that there are a couple images also in that post, including what looks like a big piece of engine cowling left on or near the runway, something that had to have come off well before the actual crash since that wasn’t at the airport.
And while I hate to point a link to the dumpster fire formally known as Twitter, here’s an image of the entire engine core laying on the runway.
Nonsense.
Kerosene burns great when atomized. That’s exactly what happens inside your torpedo heater and inside airplanes’ engines. It’s hard to set a pool of kerosene on fire becuase it’s slow to evaporate. But taking a huge swimming pool’s worth of kerosene and suddenly spraying it into a 200 mph wind and across 1/4 mile of rough surface & buildings? It burns very nicely thank you very much. The engines provide a heat source to start the process and the rest is simple chain reaction.
The aircraft fire suppression systems can deal with a small fire that’s contained inside the engine cowling. Think discharging a small fire extinguisher under the hood of your car while in motion. That’s going to do zero for a fire that’s external to the engine cowling. Which this one was from the git-go.
Yes, and not just kerosene. Anything that can oxidize becomes explosive when sufficiently atomized and distributed through the air. For example, see explosions in grain elevators and textile mills.