Brasilia critical engine
One of the benefits of a discussion forum such as this, is that it gets people sharing thoughts and ideas that may help prevent a similar type of accident occurring in the future.
We don’t know the facts prior to the accident, what we do know is the end result.
For my money it looks like a loss of control situation (for whatever reason) soon after rotation, where the a/c deviated dramatically to the left and never cleared the airport boundary. The subsequent crash appears to be a high speed impact.
Something that occurs to me in all this, is not so much whether the a/c will still climb after takeoff , if the configuration, power levers or condition levers are mishandled or there is some sort of catastrophic failure or failure of the auto- feathering system, it’s why they(the crew) appear to have lost control?
In a former life when I flew the Bras, the #1 engine (left) is the critical engine should it fail.
In over 6000 hours on type, twice I experienced a situation when the #1 engine was simulated to fail (by setting flight idle) after V1 and the speed is allowed to get a little slow, the a/c required not only full opposite rudder but also full opposite aileron to check the yaw and roll to the left. (and even then the a/c continued to deviate from centreline)
The situation was remedied by reducing the power on the live engine to reduce the asymmetric yaw.
The point I am trying to make is, at low speeds and high torque setting on the live engine, when the critical engine has failed, it is possible to run into controllability issues if you weren’t careful with speed control when conducting training at low weights (with fwd C of G) and relatively low speeds.
I am not postulating as to the reasons for this terrible accident, but simply sharing some experiences and thoughts which help keep us all safe!
Last edited by ace from space; 24th Mar 2010 at 23:54.