Wake Turbulence caused this?

[747FOCAL]

There is no way that a 747 8 miles away caused an aircraft like this to more than shudder. If Wake Turbulence could be responsible for this kind of incident it would have happened many times in the past 30 years. Amazing that the data recorder is damaged don't you think? :)

[RatherBeFlying]

Other possibilities include material failure, flutter and control run-away. Aerodynamic pieces flying off if not due to material defect would be flutter or overload, but it's going to be amazing that a well-proven type maintained by a top airline fell prey to flutter or attachment failure.
Bet the NTSB is looking real hard for those attachment bolts and fittings.

Or maybe the control system fed an overload into the rudder???? There have been 737 accidents attributed to rudder hard-overs, but the crew did not report control problems until after the rattles.

While the fin was coming loose, I am guessing the rudder would be getting major inputs from the yaw damper or other components of the flight control system to stay straight and that would be adding oscillating loads to the fin attachment. Varying yaw could also have bank effects and the divergence would build.

[PPRuNe Pop]

There is no point in starting another thread on this subject - there is one already running. It just wastes bandwidth. So this one gets closed!


PPRuNe Pop
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