@ hval - thanks for that in post 394.

@hval (#397) thought about uplift of fuel, not sure with only the distance to UAE would have been much to worry about. Also, the price of fuel saved, would surely have been lost on the trip to up to Bagram.

@ clear prop. Never mentioned anything about diplomatic cargo. There is enough in theatre hercs to move that sort of stuff up to Bagram and also enough aircraft leaving Bagram for stateside not to worry a freighter down at Bastian.

Just seems for the sake for a few gallons of fuel a plane ran the gauntlet of landing and departing an airfield that may not have been necessary.

It seems to me that we need to stop searching for 'reasons' for the leg to Bagram - it would not have been 'for fun', and we are unlikely to find out, I guess - military contract, military base. It could have been as simple as a crew change.

Extremely unlikely -- near impossible, given that it landed with that load.

BOAC: I agree, that is the point I tried to make originally, this is all routine stuff, see below comments.

Mr Angry:

Yes, if that were indeed the case these guys would be getting late into theirs, but because we don't have that information, there's no reason to assume that anything was unplanned about this routing or that they were anywhere near discretion. It could even be the case that they crew rested nearby before going empty to Bastion to get the cargo. It could be that they were waiting for confirmation of permits and that for operational reasons on the day maybe they had to get out of Bastion because they had a limited window there; and perhaps Bagram was a more viable option to park up and wait for this to happen. At this point they would effectively be "stuck" in Afghanistan until the territories to the south grant overflight. Look at the map, the only other option would be to go the long way round Iran via various places, including the likes of Syria -which is starting to get a little tenuous, but if that was the case it would mean two things - it would have to happen the next day; DWC would probably not be the next stop. If this scenario was correct then the fact DWC was the next stop suggests that they got the permits they needed, eventually and were able to continue the flight within their normal FDP. Again I emphasise the if!

Matelo: the definition of diplomatic or non-diplomatic cargo is not as black and white as one might expect. These are military vehicles being flown from a military airbase, it is up to the territory considering the permit application to decide whether they are "diplomatic" or not and it matters not one iota whether they are inside a civilian aircraft, or are unarmed or whatever. Going via Iran is virtually inconceivable, which only leaves Pakistan, and they can and do insist such loads are handled via diplomatic channels if they so wish.

Apologies for the "essay" on this subject, my reason for going into so much detail is not to speculate as to the actual scenario faced by this aircraft, but to illustrate that these situations are quite normal for this type of mission, in that part of the world. Compared with any other flight most other places on the globe, the processes and challenges are very different. Looking from the outside, it is easy to look at the routing in question and think there is something unusual about it, but there simply isn't anything worth wasting time looking at here, its just everyday Afghanistan ops.

Does anyone think that the following quote from the book, "The Plane Truth from an American Airlines Flight Attendant", by By Alicia Lutz Rolow, might be relevant?

http://i1343.photobucket.com/albums/...ps9b0412eb.jpg

Anyone know Cargo Matatu?

I'd like his opinion on the apparent loading method.

I am mere humble cargo ground grunt, and no longer "current" with tiedown but I am uncomfortable with what I see.

example: straps through steel chain-eyes without heavy-duty sleeves.

example: apparently insufficient fore-aft restraint

I wait to be flamed

fantom
 

The Aviation Herald refers to a statement by National Air Cargo that supposedly said "no cargo was added or removed", however the statement at National Air Cargo's website says nothing about cargo being removed or not.

ok boac, had another look and found post #192 is helpful - assuming it applies to a 744. i'd be interested to know how accurate it can be - within fractions of a % of MAC, or more approximate? i'd assumed it maybe technically tricky to be very accurate without precise external measurements.

The deck angle in the video appeared at least 30 degrees nose up when it stalled, maybe up to 40. At that point they had no way to survive the crash. We rolled into a steep bank to keep the nose down in the sim but they had no chance to recover at their pitch attitude and speed. Until they get the data cargo shift seems the most likely cause. Runaway trim is what we trained for so the pitch up would be more gradual than a cargo shift.

I often, in times and threads like these, wonder why people find it so hard to agree on what would be the 'Occam's Razor' case, and instead try to imply the most obscure, irrelevant without further investigation, and Hail Mary long shot possibilities.

Would a plain, straight forward cargo shift have this effect on an aircraft? I'd venture yes. It checks all the boxes without having to get intensely theoretical, philosophical, aeronautical, or hypothetical.

Could there be other reasons? Sure, but they require increasingly more complex chains of events and dont all lead to the exact same fatal outcome per se.

Is it that hard to accept the possibility that the load shifted on departure?

It certainly looks like a cargo shift on departure, but the aircraft is reported to have flown into and out of Bagram with the cargo stow apparently untouched, other than a check over.

Floor locks, pallet locks, tie downs get fatigued and can fail. I don't think the fact that the cargo already survived one departure, precludes any of the tie down devices from failing on subsequent departures.

The attitude of the aircraft can be determined by anyone who needs to do so, based on the geometry of the video. The video provides an adequate gnomon, the wing span, to ascertain the body length to span, and also using the wing span and aspect, to evaluate the height above the ground. Additionally, the frame rate is around 20FPS, or 50ms, and so time to traverse from TOC to impact can be ascertained. It is steep... and hits hard. As the tip vortex is also observed, an approximation of attitude to FPA is available which can be converted to angle of attack. Do the trig. The height above ground also gives the FOV of the video, and the distance from the observer. The acoustic signature of the post impact rapid fuel burning is evident on the video sound track, and that gives a good measure of the distance from impact of the observer, using the time delay and local speed of sound, neglect speed of light.

The fact that this aircraft had already operated a sector with the primary load in place makes it more curious as to causation. Report is going to be worth reading, WRT how the aircraft came to be in such a condition. The wing fuel loading would move the cg aft, but it is not a massive shift in the scheme of things, the B747's CG general envelope is only to 32% basic from memory, and out of trim case in the past have gone back past 44%, at higher weights, i.e., IU's much further along.

Teldo serious, #342

Doubt that there is enough evidence available to support your assumptions at this time. Unless you are picking up the rudder image pixel change from rudder aspect change, then that is s bit early to say. The wing drop to the right may be aerodynamic, it also may be controlled by the flight crew, it is not inappropriate in itself, in fact broadly follows TBC and AI guidance for departure form controlled flight. The rate of roll is near the aerodynamic limit for aileron only, it is not anywhere near the limit of the rudder secondary effect authority on roll rate. Generally, in large aircraft upsets, the roll off at TOC, if any, is not particularly pronounced, unfortunately there is a fair amount of data out there to support that opinion. As often as not, the aircraft maintains a relatively stable roll attitude. Why? the normal forces at the low speed case are not that high, and so the roll moments that may exist are not high, but the aircraft maintains a high inertial moment... not much roll.

[For Capt Bloggs..."at TOC"] Did the aircraft stall? very likely, as it evidently had a pitch up moment that was not able to be countered, and eventually the flight path has started to decay. At that stage the KIAS is low, well below normal Vs1g, as the aircraft is not maintaining a level flight path, even though it is accelerated by the pitch up rate. Assume a 0.2g pitch acceleration which is pretty agressive for a B747, as the aircraft goes through 45ANU, the stall speed is going to be below the level flight stall speed, (at 90ANU, it is only related to the pitch acceleration i.e., 0.2g... if the rate is 0g at 90ANU, the aircraft doesn't stall, and the flight path is purely dependent on thrust relative to mass.g...). Did the aircraft roll of due to stall, not necessarily. Would a crew response to roll the aircraft at TOC be appropriate, Absolutely. Will it help? depends on the situation, but it is better than assuming nothing will work. [For Capt Bloggs..."on the descent"] the aircraft is probably stalled, given the angle between the tip vortice and the aircraft longitudinal axis. Stall is related to IAS for a g loading, it is related to angle of attack, so g loading is a primary factor. 0g, zero "stall".

The crew are going from RPT pilots to test pilots in a few seconds, trying anything to maintain a reasonable attitude is not only the best choice, it pretty much is the only choice, unless you have a really good religion. The later attitude is consistent with a flight crew fighting to survive a catastrophic problem. The bank angle they have attained gets the nose down rapidly, but there is inadequate blue sky to effect any meaningful angle of attack reduction before impact. Less roll angle would not have resulted in the nose getting down as far as it did, and would have been ineffective as well. These guys tried hard, and should be respected for that. With more favorable conditions perhaps it would have been only a harrowing hanger story. On the day, they did what they had to in those last seconds, professionally.

fdr, don't leave us hanging. Tell us what you conclude from the video, instead of how to calculate it.

sidebar, take the time to do the calcs, and that makes the outcome more rewarding to you personally. It's just trig, 1:60 will suffice.

PS read the revision to my last post.

Whatever is the cause of the pitch up it has to be after getting airborne. Over rotation by crew or anything else will cause a tail strike in 747 unless that also happened. I did not read anything about it so far.

Ya joking, aren't ya? It pretty obvious from the top of the drop the thing is hardly moving forward at all, "flying" speed-wise. It's basically dropping like a fluttering leaf. Perhaps they had some small amount of roll control, but I doubt it. Very steep climb to a ballistic fall.

@G&T

Thank you for asking my opinion, for which I am duly flattered!

However, as I am not in possession of the facts it would be unqualified opinion only and I am not willing to speculate.

I.R.Pirate: "Would a plain, straight forward cargo shift have this effect on an aircraft?"

Yes. I have watched it with my own eyes some years ago in Angola on a C-130A. Not a pleasant experience and my reaction was exactly the same as the driver of the vehicle in the now infamous video. Cold. No emotion of any kind entered my being during the event. I think that bothered me for a long time afterward, more than the event itself. Difficult to describe and totally unbelievable unless you have experienced it yourself.

Just to agree with Cargo Matatu. The driver's reaction does not surprise me either; my uncle was the Secretary of the RAE and as a teenager I was in the "works" stand near the Black Sheds when the Breuget Atantique crashed at the Farnborough Air Show on the 20th September 1968; my reaction was no different.

Sim training should include aft CG shift during rotation....
 

This training should include the technique of an immediate turn if the increasing pitch angle cannot be countered with full forward stab and elevator...ideally, before the onset of the stick shaker/pusher.

The objective is to roll into a bank, sufficient bank angle to keep the nose down, while maintaining configuration, and accelerating in the turn.

Pilots who lack this vital knowledge will incorrectly maintain wings level and stall straight ahead. UA cargo DC8 at DET; Fine Air DC8 at MIA . . . :{

In a previous life as military Loadmaster, the most interesting tasking we had was aerial delivery of various cargoes, platforms and vehicles. The amount of plotting and calculations that went into getting vehicles cleared for air drop was intensive, and the flight testing was a tense affair, to say the least. It all had to with CG shift, and the possibility of a load getting lodged at a new position during delivery.

You only need a heavy vehicle to move a few yards and get stuck there, to ensure an unflyable aircraft.

During actual aerial delivery you could not help but be amazed when you saw how much pitch change took place in the second or two it took for a load to run across the floor and over the ramp on extraction.

If something ended up getting lodged beyond a certain point on the floor, with heavier vehicles and boats - you were dead. No questions.

By the time we see the airplane in the upper right corner of the dash cam, it's already too late. The airplane appears to be 1000' 3/4 distance down runway length (way too high), the airspeed is creeping way below V2, stick shaker is rattling, the guys have already run the stab full forward and they're both pushing the control wheels into the instrument panel. In this violent pitch-up, the airplane should have been rolled manually into a bank by 200 feet to have had any hope of survival for the guys. But, obviously they had no training and no knowledge of this last resort, life saving technique.

Wow. You can tell all that just from an external video. Makes you wonder why they bother with FDRs.

I remember being told that the cargo tie down points or tracks used for MAC Charters and those used on civilian cargo differed. If so, would they both be capable of taking the same loads?

Load Shift?
 

Any Chance it was just loaded incorrectly. One station back?

GlueBall
I think it is very unfair of you to indict the crew as yet for this crash. No details are out and you have already drawn conclusions on their professionalism. It is one thing to guess what might have happened and quite another to apportion blame purely on guess work. People have lost lives you cannot be so insensitive. Let the inquiry do the job of fact finding.

busTRE & vilas: The visual observations from the dash cam are self evident; an experienced transport category pilot can draw certain inferences about the probable sequence of events. A non pilot cannot.

This forum is for interested respondents to share opinions and observations without having to wait 18 months for an official probable cause to be published.

My point was to highlight an issue of deficient knowledge and lack of simulator training about CG shifts on cargo airplanes after rotation, with emphasis about the necessity of having to bank & turn to arrest an uncontrolled pitch-up. :ooh:

Whilst I can sympathise with posters not wanting to wade through 22 pages of posts, at least looking just a couple of pages back might avoid some repetitive speculation. That question has already been answered and repeated only a few posts back:

National Air Cargo confirmed their aircraft N949CA with 7 crew, 4 pilots, 2 mechanics and a load master - initial information had been 8 crew -crashed at Bagram. The airline later added, that the aircraft had been loaded with all cargo in Camp Bastion (Afghanistan, about 300nm southwest of Bagram), the cargo had been inspected at Camp Bastion, the aircraft subsequently positioned to Bagram for a refuelling stop with no difficulty, no cargo was added or removed, however, the cargo was again inspected before the aircraft departed for the leg to Dubai Al Maktoum.

GlueBall:

I second what vilas said. Any transport category pilot will tell you it's complete BS to deduce an aviator's training record and knowledge from a few seconds of pixelated video of their demise filmed from half a mile away. That's what the investigation team exist for.

While its informative and useful for the community to speculate a little about "maybe it was a load shift", or "if you study the wingtips really closely from the very beginning of the clip, their motion suggests almost Phugoid motion which might imply they had no direct control over the aircraft at all", while we can drop these things into conversation, there are too many variables for anyone to make any specific statements about this incident, I will wait for the report to come out for that! No offence meant.

Hi all,

Just a quick question for the experts:

If there was an aft load shift, and this happened during acceleration down the runway, is it not possible that a tailstrike occurred on rotation? And if I may ask a follow up question, is it possible that a particularly hard tailstrike could cause enough damage to components in the tail to either limit or cause total loss of pitch authority?

GlueBall
You are making too many assumptions about other people's experience, their training whether they are pilots or not. I am an experienced 747 captain and A300 to 320 captain but I shudder to draw such premature conclusions. Also don't think well trained people are not involved in accidents. Whether the situation was beyond human capability is yet to be decided and you are firing from the hip. Tommorow you get into a situation where it is possible to make wrong choices and you do and if everybody starts tirades against your training your experience and your capability without the facts I am sure you won't be ammused.

I think what he is saying is the roll solution to uncontrollable pitch up -could- have been employed sooner in the sequence, when airspeed was still available. The fact that speed degraded so far while wings level suggests the pilots did not (obviously), could not (must wait for fdr), or simply were not aware of, the rolling solution.

edit: changed -should- to -could- ... my apologies if that was taken the wrong way.

I was a B744 First Officer for almost 4 years doing sim every 3 months and I did not trained the high pitch upset recovery using roll. It was mention in the book but I had never trained.

I was also MD DC10 FO and we trained the high pitch recovery rolling the aircraft almost to 70' and letting the nose to come down until passing the horizon for leveling the wings again.

Fr8Dog: In relative terms, compared to the pitch-up realized in a DC-8, the 747 by comparison has minimal pitch up/down when the thrust levers are moved. I was speaking in comparative terms, and would not characterize the 747 having "a large increase in pitch-up from the thrust of the engines" by comparison.

I am only speaking from my experiences in having flown different aircraft (and still flying both the DC-8 and 747 concurrently, BTW, making the comparison all the more obvious, at least to me). Your perception may differ, as everyone seems to see things differently, which is certainly verified by this thread.

Not sure if anybody has posted this video yet, not sure if it really gives any added value.

However here it is for observation.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=6ca_1367498083

See post #294. It wasn't judged to be of any value then, either.

With regard to the stall recovery technique using bank.......

On 29th December 2000 a man burst into the flight deck of a 747-400 en-route to Nairobi. He grabbed the control column and pulled it back. The F/O, who was on his own on the flight deck was faced with a certain stall as the nose rose 20 degrees. As he still had control of the ailerons he banked the aircraft 90 degrees, allowing the nose to drop below the horizon before levelling the wings. By this time the captain and another passenger were subduing the intruder.

The reason that this is relevant to the Bagram incident is that the Nairobi aircraft lost 10,000ft during the recovery. I'm not sure that this technique would have much chance at low altitude.

Well, everyone's speculating anyway.

The aircraft certainly stalled, horrifying wing rock at the point of stall.

Either wing drop, or more likely IMHO the guys use bank to slice the nose.

Unfortunately, not nearly enough altitude to recover.

I reckon pallets secure, but cargo not. A heavy item slips its bonds and escapes stowage. A fairly light load needs only one vehicle to move rearwards to put C of G outside controlable limits.

Utterly tragic, some of our own have perished needlessly.

Let's learn some lessons so their lives are not lost in vain.

StopStart #348: "Those of us professionals that work" "The tie-down scheme is scientifically designed to provide fore, aft and vertical restraint off the load to, in this case, the pallet".

Aircrafts are also scientifically designed, but still accidents hapen. If the loading in pic @ #352 was made by using the best available science I now understand why Al Gore got his Nobel Prize.

I agree with Dimitris @ #353. A gentle amount of braking g`s and the straps become loose. Of course, @#352 is not the picture of this flight, but there is also the possibility that the cargo was strapped even worse.

Tunnel vision
 

Hi Dear Experts,

Never flown a 747-400F but deeply involved in aviation safety issues. Following the twenty plus pages of discussion on this sad event I’m really stunned that this topic is spinning around and around an initial preconception of „load shift” or C.G. problem thrown in for our attention by somebody at a very early stage. After this momentum everybody’s mind is focused on this scenario. It would worth a psychological study in itself. What about dozens of other possible causes: pilot incapacitation, severe flight control malfunctions? (If my memory serves me well there was a cargo DC-8 accident in the US where a blasted rock vedged the elevator in a nose up position on takeoff. A pilot in a nearby parking lot eyewitnessed the whole event and described roughly the same wing rocking stall sequence!)
I think this whole topic is a good example why professional investigators are trained thoroughly to be able to ignore preconceptions and start every investigation open-minded and with a blank sheet of paper.