I've got a technical question (this being the Tech Log forum) that I haven't seen addressed, even in the NTSB report.
What sequence of effects or factors led to AA587 then losing control and crashing after losing the vertical stabilizer?
Yeah, yeah. I know. "Duh! The tail fell off!" Except that aircraft (even large jets)
have lost their vertical stabilizers without subsequently crashing:
http://www.murdoconline.net/wordpres...52-no-vert.jpg
I'm figuring the probable effects were:
- abrupt shift to a nose-down cg with the loss of the stabilizer's weight from the tail.
- "snap yaw" in reaction to the loss of the rudder's yaw force in the opposite direction.
BTW - I
don't mean to imply that the AA crew could have saved the aircraft. They had little altitude or time and were in an already confusing situation. The crew of the B-52 pictured were test pilots intentionally trying to identify structural weaknesses. So they were at a safe altitude, and expecting (more or less) something to break.