cwatters & Mechta:
Do you mean, first stall and then dive? Or is it, one has to imagine an “up-side-down stall”, against a positive buoancy, which means, “stalling” towards the ground, and not a dive?
To me it’s very hard to cope with overimposed static and dynamic forces at the same time, especially, if there is no constant level or reference, neither for one nor for the other.
Let’s look, what the photographs and the video could tell.
First we can see the ship passing by in what should be the downwind leg of the pattern, in a rather normal attitude.
Then we see the ship in the final approach, may be some 400 meters out, but with an overly nose-down attitude in respect to the glide path (and with the mooring line hanging down).
Last we see it arriving over the airfield, one ship-length inside the primeter fence, and with the same nose-down orientation as before.
That suggests, that the approach was made all the time nose-down. Why could it be?
The load-distribution of the airlander is: cockpit and cabin in the front, projected payload in the mid – and the fuel tanks in the aft! And then we know, it just made a 1h 40’ flight, feeding the 4X350 hp drives. That must have made it lighter and lighter at the rear end.
At the begin of the video and before starting the dive, we see the ship in this very situation. Nose down by 15 deg, GS less than 5 kt, no vertical speed visible. And the drives are running, providing a little forward and a very little downward momentum.
In the very next moment it gets out of control – but I can see no initial situation to develop a stall.
It seems more, it has to work to come down than to stay aloft.
Last edited by minimum clean; 2nd Sep 2016 at 06:33.
Reason: poor language/orthorgraphy