Originally Posted by
Uplinker
RIP, what an awful situation to be in.
With fixed undercarriage, rather than floats, is it possible to ditch without the 'plane violently flipping nose down as soon as the main wheels touch the water?
There is much debate in many threads about ditching. In theory it is possible to ditch most aeroplanes in any configuration - if the stars, tea leaves and voodoo dolls are all in alignment.
In practice, so much depends on sea state. Beam on, a two metre wave can roll a ten metre boat doing six knots and designed to take stresses imposed by the sea. Head on it can sometimes break stuff on deck. I’ve seen strong stainless steel rails bent and a heavy canvas dodger completely demolished simply by a boat being knocked down at 8 knots. So, we can only speculate about what happens when a flimsy aluminium box or tube gets smacked by a wave at 60 knots.
Two metre waves are not considered all that rough. A fixed main gear could pitch an aircraft down right into the face of that two metre wave. Waves don’t always come at a constant angle, could be opposing swell or at 90 degrees to it etc. If the general sea state is two metres, it is likely that occasionally waves will reach three metres. So, while the advice about ditching parallel, on the back face blah blah is useful to know, it’s not always achievable. At speed, a wave could smash the windscreen, dump a couple of tonnes of water into the cockpit, knock out the crew. And so on…