The Great Ongoing Aviation Thread (general and other)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1621

Quoting myself from a few posts ago for context …

The NTSB has released their preliminary report which will probably be real close to their final report. NTSB has recently “improved” their accident search system a bunch and it’s not as easy to link to reports as it was.

This might link to the right report. Or it may be a volatile search results link that won’t work for you; I don’t know which. It also won’t display it directly; only save it to your computer. Sheesh they make this hard!

How to get this NTSB report the new-fangled way if my link is broken

Start here at NTSB CAROL Search. Enter “01/13/2021” as the from & to date range. Once you’ve identified the record you want, click the PDF symbol to get the report.

Anyhow, once you see the report it’s clear this guy lacked the skill to fly in IMC. It’s even unclear whether he had an instrument rating or not.

Assuming he was properly flying instrument procedures (the report is silent on this major issue) he also attempted an approach when the conditions were so far below minimums that it was not sensible to even try; it was a no-chance-of-success decision. Commercial flights can’t attempt approaches when the reported weather is below the approach published minimums. Non-commercial flights can legally give it a try, but it ain’t smart except in very specific circumstances nothing like what was going on that day.

The guy duly got way off course on the approach, decided to go around, and lost control during the climbing turn away from the runway. Almost certainly spatial disorientation.

An even more alarming possibility is the guy wasn’t even trying to fly an instrument approach. Instead perhaps he’d scud run across town at ~150 feet AGL maintaining sight of the ground directly below while trying to find the airport visually out ahead of him.

If so, his stooging around put him well off to the left side of the runway centerline, then a couple miles short of the airport, while it was still invisible in the fog, he saw something he recognized as near the airport, made a hard turn to chase towards where he expected the runway to appear, finally realized that wasn’t going to work, and then started his fateful go-around, only to become disoriented & lose control.

If this latter scenario is what really happened, the first good decision he made all day (going around) was also his last.

1622

Late add: For the pilots, here’s the Airnav page of the destination field (KCUB) showing, among other things, the no-hope RNAV approach to Rwy 13 he might have been trying.

It’s not like there were no other viable low-weather capable airports nearby. KCAE was just 6 miles away. With a full-up Cat III ILS. Not that he could have flown that approach legally, but that means big runway, high quality ILS signal to and beyond touchdown, stupid bright lighting, and all the helpful stuff that leads to living to tell the tale after you got in over your head but also had the presence of mind to recognize that fact.

1623

This I don’t get. I can fly a moving map GPS right down to the runway +/- a foot. I’ve done this with on old handheld Garmin. In fact, I was having problems finding a grass strip once so I put in a 1 mile final turn point so I could cue up on it. Granted that was in good visibility but the field just blended into the surrounding farm fields. The point is that I could easily line up with the field without ever having seen it in the pattern.

And I once got caught in a driving rain at night and really needed to get down because a thunderstorm was on my ass and it was developing around me. I couldn’t see the runway lights at altitude and I had them turned all the way up. Between the GPS and the strobe lights it wasn’t that big a deal and I’m not instrument rated. I had the landing lights turned off because the rain was making it hard to see anything. The hardest part was bleeding off airspeed. I crossed the threshold in the red. I had to cross control it with the engine at idle to bleed off air speed. That part was a whole lot trickier than following the GPS.

With an ipad that would have been much easier. Garmin software extends the runways out and you can zoom in to your heart’s content. And you could overlay the altitude and artificial horizon if the panel instruments took a dump.

1624

We have no idea what equipment he had in his airplane. We have no idea what his skills are. You’re right that with really good tools this isn’t that difficult. Did he have those tools?

I actually wrote that first part totally assuming he was flying the approach procedure. After I’d finished that part of the post I tumbled to my second theory: that the guy was scud running and didn’t have, or didn’t use, any kind of a nav helper. Just peering out the windshield into the fog hoping to see buildings or bridges or rivers he recognized from prior arrivals.

I now think, just based on his ground track, that’s the far more likely scenario.

1625

That makes sense but good God… If you’re flying over 100 mph in the fog hoping it parts like the Red Sea that’s solidly in the Darwin Award category for any aviation skill level.

I know towers will allow for some RVR fudging for a commercial flight but that’s 2 highly trained people watching the numbers as they descend. If you’re on your own then the only person watching over your shoulder is your own common sense.

1626

How do you make an F-104 more dangerous to fly? Take away the runway.

for those who don’t know, THIS is an F-104. You don’t have to know anything about aircraft to see that it has almost no wing area. to get the landing speed down to 170 mph that had to add blown flaps. that mean air is bled off the engine and blown over the flaps to give it lift. It took up a LOT of runway taking off and landing. It had a high crash rate because of this.

So what happens if the Ruskies bomb your airfield? Not a problem, you attach a rocket on this already difficult plane to fly and launch it without a runway.

Was there a sign-up sheet on-base that said “looking for bat-shit-crazy pilots with no next of kin. Debriefs include change of underwear and free shots of tequila”.

1627

I’d fly one. (TBH, I’d rather fly a T-38. But I’m not choosy.)

1628

ZLL was aimed at the one-way one-time nuclear missions of WWIII in Europe. The point was to create individual survivable dispersed takeoff points. Whether your home runway would still be useable 2 hours later didn’t matter since you weren’t really expected to be coming back anyhow.

But yeah, in general the F-104 was quite the handful both in an absolute sense and relatively compared to the vastly less capable machines they replaced. I had the hots for those as a kid, and touched a few static displays at air shows. But the closest I ever got to them in USAF was seeing them on a post near the main gate. Still exceedingly cool.

Amazing to me that Italy flew some of theirs for ~15 years after I’d gotten out and ~30 years after USAF parked their last one.

1629

Yes, but they weren’t flying them until they hit 170 mph. it was a non-throttled rocket motor with a plane stuck to it. they would have had to wing level the plane with ruder prior to reaching takeoff speed.

Germany lost 1/3 of their f-104 planes to accidents. Strapping a rocket to that plane just seems like dumb chasing dumber.

1630

AFAIK they’re still flying them privately. The last time I saw a pair of them was at Sun & Fun. They have a very distinctive sound when they start up.

1631

I suspect they were/are these guys:
https://www.starfighters.net/

The engine is a J79, same as the F4 and a few other, much more rare, airplanes. Which always had a distinctive howl even before you add in the weird noises the BLC adds once airborne.

1632

Probably. I thought they were privately owned but I don’t see any listed anywhere.

Yes, they sounded like a wounded moose. I don’t remember the F-4’s sounding like that but they were really loud flying over.

Never got to hear a B-58 starting or flying.

1633

Me neither. But it would have been an awesome noise. :smiley:

Growing up in SoCal we got to go to a LOT of interesting airshows. I never saw an XB-70 fly, but I have walked around one of the two ever built at Edwards annual open house/airshow while the XB-70 test program was still ongoing. That thing doing a flyby would also have been a helluva noise.

1634

I was grocery shopping at Krogers today and cut through the toy aisle which I never do. I certainly never look at the toys. Today I glanced at them and saw a Matchbox “Sky Busters” airplane that stopped me in my tracks. It was a Rutan Boomerang. There are like a handful of people in my city who would recognize it. Yes, I bought it.

1635

File footage of F-104s appeared in this original Star Trek episode, as it happens. Appropriate that they would use Starfighters:

1636

F-104 ‘war story’ goodness during DACT with early F-15s in this Ubisoft forum thread. Just amazing performance from that design at that time.

Like the Me-163 that @Magiver talked about upthread. A problem there was the initial armament of the 30mm Mk-108 cannon, while having a lot of power in its explosive shell, had absolutely garbage muzzle velocity from its comparatively short barrel… Not even 1800 feet per second. Just too short of a meaningful engagement range, especially given the ludicrous closing velocity possible from a 500 knot plus fighter. 13,000 ft/min climb rate, LOL. Though sitting in front of a tank of >90% Hydrogen Peroxide was definitely not LOL worthy. Basically a manned SAM, like the zero-length launch F-104s also mentioned upthread. I wouldn’t mind seeing a remade -163, with something like a small turbine driving it. Like the BD-5 tried to be.

Beriev sure came up with some interesting flying boats, didn’t they?

1637

Great find. Interesting we in the F-16 community used the same kinds of tactics against the F-15 A/B/C/D 10 years later. They out-radared and out-missiled us; we had to out-sneak and out-smart & out-maneuver them.

Developing an accurate tactical picture of opposing fighters through the paper-towel-tube view of fighter radar is always a bitch. They have to juggle a lot of balls and drop zero of them. If we could rope-a-dope enough that one ball got dropped, that guy would survive to clean their clocks. And if they dropped multiple balls, or better yet never got their story straight before we were right in their shit, well … as Patton said: it was a shambles. For them.

1638

I certainly enjoyed reading it. Not that flightsims are in any way, shape, or form Real Life, but I was impressed negatively by how much of a pig the F-104 was compared to the Tomcat or Hornet I was used to using. So out turning an Eagle is really something. It was really impressive reading how those guys used their brains to predict the bad guys’ preconceptions, and then plot to take advantage of them.

In other news, the NTSB kindly let us know that pilot error caused the Kobe Bryant crash. Kobe Bryant Helicopter Crash: NTSB Says Pilot Had 'Spatial Disorientation' : NPR

Though LOL at this tidbit from the hearing:

There was no evidence, said NTSB investigator Dujuan Sevillian, that the client, helicopter operator Island Express or the air charter broker placed pressure on pilot.

Yeah. Sure, NTSB. Because that never happens.

1639

Old (early-'70s) FAA safety poster: ‘Get-there-itis/May someday bite us.’

1640

You see Spock in later episodes using an E6-B aviation circular slide rule to calculate “something”. They must have taken this from the pilot of the F-104 and reverse engineered it so they could calculate the gravitational cross-wave component of a black hole.