Originally Posted by
rnzoli
When the airplane touched down, hitting the right wingtip in a slight right bank, the pilot, whose hands were possibly on the throttle at that time, may have inadvertenly moved the power levers forward. Especially if they weren't wearing shoulder harnesses.
I agree that it would be quite possible that the Pilot Flying ("Mac"), could have inadvertently moved the throttles forward. While it is just speculation on my part, I think the pilot had his hands full with the yoke and would have been standing on the left rudder pedal, making it quite awkward to handle the the throttles simultaneously. Additionally, the abrupt right turn would have thrown him to the left side of the cockpit, away from the throttles (shoulda used the harness). It seems that power was being held at a high level on both nos. 1 & 2 at the initial encounter with the approach lights, and no. 3 was operating but down on power. Of course, by that time, no. 4 was fully feathered. The relatively low time (B-17) co-pilot may have failed to react due to the lack of any sort of CRM and the likelihood that the Captain had already been stressed (upset) by the morning's activities, which included two balky engines, and a "flight engineer" unfamiliar with the sketchy procedure used to "blow out the mags".
Wow, talk about speculation on my part, that's a whole bunch of "possible", "could have", "I think", "seems", "may have" etc.
As you pointed out, a conscious decision to "go around" after all that had previously occurred on the flight makes no sense; yet, the power on three of the engines was up at impact. My question remains: "Why wasn't the power "chopped" when the airplane hit the approach lights?"
Oh, concerning the speculation on the B-17's tail wheel, it does have a locking tail wheel, like the DC-3/C-47. The NTSB Docket Report indicates that the locking mechanism was damaged sometime during the crash sequence.
Cheers,
Grog