PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - BREAKING NEWS: airliner missing within Egyptian FIR
Old 5th Nov 2015, 14:24
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BrandonSoMD
 
Join Date: Jul 2013
Location: Southern Maryland
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We've seen here the reports of pilots "not hearing" a tailstrike.
I'm a flight test engineer. We did abused-takeoff tests a few years ago on a 707-class aircraft, where we inadvertently struck the tail, requiring skin repairs. We saw the high pitch on takeoff but did not know we'd struck the tail until we landed several hours later. The noise and vibration at full throttle masked any sound of scraping.

It was a relatively light skin scrape, so my experience might not be representative of a strike doing enough damage to potentially cause subsequent structural failure of a rib or stringer. That would require a longer-duration scrape which the pilot would probably note as a hesitation in pitch rotation, even if it was not heard.
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