Lost Air France Constellation found after 65 years

[Fly.Buy]

Sorry if this amazing story has already been covered but a quick search on the threads couldn't find it.

A couple of months back the Turkish Navy found a lost Air France Constellation F-BAZS which had crashed off the Turkish coast in 1953. Linked below is the video of the find, the aircraft is in remarkably good condition. To cut to the chase view from 3.07 onwards. Link below:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1MzDErXXGBs

ASN report link:
https://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=19530803-0

[canberra97]

Excellent video and the Turkish TV station really did a good job covering this unique story.

[Herod]

With this, and finding the "Enterprise", it's been a good year so far.

[canberra97]

With this, and finding the "Enterprise", it's been a good year so far.

May I ask what your referring to regarding finding the ''Enterprise''?

[dhavillandpilot]

I think he means the USS Lexington off Australia

[Herod]

Of course. Put it down to age (and carelessness). :ugh:

[canberra97]

Seeing that your ONLY 71yo I'll put it down to the latter then :-)

[Herod]

Thanks, I need all the compliments I can get. "I plan to live forever. So far, so good"

[Fareastdriver]

"I plan to live forever. So far, so good"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yDrLZTgs08

[Herod]

Thanks for that; it did a middle-aged man a lot of good. 38 years ago!!

[Fly.Buy]

Lessons are learned from each crash and after this incident inflatable life rafts were introduced to aircraft. I understand that when the pilot made it to shore he sent a telegram to the company head office in Paris to tell them he had ditched the aircraft!

[tonytales]

Inflatable life rafts were around before World War Two, way before this crash. In fact the L-749 and L-1049 aircraft had raft compartments in the wing trailing edges to be utilized in the event of a ditching.

[Fly.Buy]

Inflatable life rafts were around before World War Two, way before this crash. In fact the L-749 and L-1049 aircraft had raft compartments in the wing trailing edges to be utilized in the event of a ditching.

Quite right too! perhaps I should have said 'obligatory' to carry life rafts.

It would appear that this particular Constellation didn't have any, similar to the A320 Hudson River crash the passengers had to stand on the wing before being rescued an hour later.

[eMACaRe]

Don't the emergency slides double up as life rafts��

[DaveReidUK]

It would appear that this particular Constellation didn't have any, similar to the A320 Hudson River crash the passengers had to stand on the wing before being rescued an hour later.

Not so.

According to the NTSB, around 64 of US1549's passengers were rescued from two of the aircraft's four slide/rafts.

[Fly.Buy]

Perhaps I have it wrong then, my recollection of the US air flight on the Hudson River was of the passengers standing on the wings and eventually being recused by the river ferrries.

I wasn't saying that the A320 didn't have life rafts (of course it did) but I'm drawing on the correlation with the Constellation incident of the passengers standing on the wings awaiting rescue.

airbus hudson river rescue

[DaveReidUK]

Perhaps I have it wrong then, my recollection of the US air flight on the Hudson River was of the passengers standing on the wings and eventually being recused by the river ferrries.

I wasn't saying that the A320 didn't have life rafts (of course it did) but I'm drawing on the correlation with the Constellation incident of the passengers standing on the wings awaiting rescue.

Apologies, I'd thought you were implying that the A320, like the Connie, didn't have rafts. You are correct in that a substantial number of the US Airways pax got out onto the wing - presumably the two other slide/rafts couldn't be deployed because the rear doors were awash.

Interestingly, in the case of the Air France ditching, the report states that many of the pax, who were all wearing lifejackets, attempted to swim to the shore or the nearby lighthouse, having been ordered to get clear of the aircraft because of a fuel leak, with four of them drowning in the process.

A few, unwilling to enter the water including a mother and baby, remained on the wing. The mother, baby, three other passengers and a stewardess were rescued by the lighthouse-keeper in a rowing boat and the remainder, including those in the water, by two other boats.

[Chris Scott]

It's worth bearing in mind that slide-rafts simply didn't exist at the time. Any rafts would have been stored separately, and I don't know if the Connie even had slides. (Perhaps someone will comment.) Even in the 1960s and 70s, on long-haul aircraft like the VC10 and B707 the rafts were separate from the escape slides.

(BTW, on the VC10 and BAC 1-11, it was also necessary to deploy the slides manually by dropping them from the ceiling and attaching them to lugs in the door-frames. IIRC, later-model B707s had them mounted in the doors and pre-attached to the door frames by a girt bar. But they did not double as rafts. I can't remember at what stage the automatic deployment of slides as the door opens became the norm on narrow-body aircraft, but all wide-bodies had that manual/automatic system from the start.)

Accessing an inflatable dinghy - perhaps lowering it from the ceiling - and deploying it was quite a performance. Stowage in the wing T/E might be a mixed blessing, tonytales?

Re the aforementioned A320 Hudson ditching (which I believe the investigation defined semantically as a forced landing on water), most of the full-load of passengers had to take to the wings because, as Dave implies, the rear slide-rafts could not be deployed, the two rear doors being partly submerged due to a nose-up attitude. That would have led to about half the pax being forced to evacuate by the over-wing exits (two per side). The pairs of overwing exits each have a rearward slide that, IIRC, is not convertible into a raft. But there may have been other factors.

[As an aside, this thread caught my attention particularly because later in that same month I was passenger on a L749A of SAA from Lusaka to London. One of the many sectors was Athens/Ciampino, but I don't remember if we were aware of the AF accident.]

[tonytales]

The Connies had an escape rope stowed overhead at the main passenger door. Open the door, pull rope down from stowage and out the door. Tarzan and Jane then grasp rope and slide down. Ditto the Douglas prop liners.
By sixties, the Electra and I seem to remember Connies too were fitted with a non-inflatable slide. First two escapees, hopefully brawny types who were also brave and not afraid of any flames around would slide down the still existing rope, then grasp ends of limp slide which had been tossed out door and hold it taut while other passengers slid down. I don't know if this was ever accomplished - it is asking a bit much from untrained pax to hold the slide taut having just survived a bad incident and maybe, as I said, fire or smoke. In retrospect, we really did not do very well for the pax and crew on the old piston prop liners.
While the Constellation had rafts in the wings (but on Supers also some in the coatcloset, the DC-6/DC-7 aircraft had the rafts stowed in overhead bins and in coat-closets. Speaking as one who has been tasked with lifting (with another mechanic) a 25-man raft into the overhead bin, I cannot picture Flight Attendants and px getting them out and down and carrying them to the over-wing exits, pushing them out and inflating them in a pitching, sinking aircraft.

[evansb]

Thank you tonytales for your piston-era portrayal. T'was enlightening.

[Chris Scott]

Thank you tonytales for your piston-era portrayal. T'was enlightening.

I'd like to second that. I was a decade behind tonytales, and never operated or worked on a long-haul piston. But I did have to be conversant with the rafts and slides available on first and second-generation jets in the 1970s. It's fair to assume that the escape equipment on our long-haul jets would have been as good or better than that on an L749A Connie in the 1950s.

Not sure what happens these days, but our long-haul crews had to do what was euphemistically called a "wet-ditching drill" every few years at the Crawley indoor swimming pool (near Gatwick). We deployed one or two rafts from the pool side and, among other things, practised hauling (actually bouncing) swimmers into them from flat-calm, cool water in daylight.

In the early 1970s we operated VC10s and B707-320s on long-haul, and several types of BAC 1-11 on short-haul. My previous post relied on memory, but I've now retrieved a copy of the company's Safety & Survival reference book for us crews. Not sure if the subject has been covered before, but - as our equipment was typical of narrow-body jets in the 1960s and 70s - it may be of interest also in a wider context. A successful ditching would have been only the first tricky hurdle.

To give a more complete picture of the emergency equipment, I've decided to cover slides and ropes as well, although the slides are irrelevant to the ditching case.

LIFE RAFTS (long-haul aircraft only)
Our B707s and VC10s carried double-chamber, self-inflating life-rafts stowed in the cabin ceiling in positions suitable for their deployment from the main and over-wing exits. We used a mixture of RFD and Air Cruiser types; the former being self-righting with its distinctive canopy and the latter being usable either way up. Both were designed to support 26 adults, but could accommodate more.
In each stowage was an accompanying EMERGENCY PACK, containing the food and equipment, which had to be handled separately until it could be placed in the inflated raft.
There were also, of course, LIFE COTS for infants, stowed in the ceilings and/or hat-racks.

SLIDES
Our B707s, being later models of the type, were newer than our VC10s, and had inflatable slides mounted on each of the 4 main doors. For flight, a strap extending from the slide was attached by a crew member to a floor-mounted ring inside the door. When the door was opened the slide would "drop into position" without inflating. There was an inflation handle on the slide, which had to be operated manually.
The VC10s were early models from 1964/5, and the inflatable slides were stowed in the ceiling above the 4 main doors. In a pre-planned emergency landing, their packs could be lowered and anchored into position by each door in advance. After the door was opened, a crew member would push the pack out. As it fell, it was designed to inflate automatically, but there was a lanyard at the top to activate the nitrogen (inflation) bottle manually if it didn't. Failing all that, the slide could be used un-inflated if at least two strong, athletic people were available to jump out (using a rope if necessary - see below) and hold handles on either side of the bottom of the slide. We used to practise that once in a blue-moon, using a rope that was provided at each exit. Once on the ground you had to use handles on the sides of the slide to pull its base firmly out from the aircraft, lean outwards and brace yourself before each person jumped.
The different types of BAC 1-11 were all delivered between 1965 and about 1970, and all of them had a ventral staircase at the single aft door. The Dash-200s had a non-inflatable nylon slide mounted in a stowage above each forward door. The 501s had a similar one mounted above the forward R/H door only, air-stairs serving the L/H door. The 509s had an inflatable slide mounted on the forward R/H door, similar to our B707s (see above), and air-stairs on the forward L/H door.

ESCAPE ROPES
Our B707s had a rope at each of the 4 over-wing exits, plus 2 in the cockpit. After a ditching, the over-wing ropes were extended and attached to a lug on each wing.
The VC10s had a rope at each of the 4 main doors and each of the 4 over-wing exits, plus 2 in the cockpit.
The BAC 1-11-200s had a rope at each forward door and each of the 2 over-wing exits, plus 2 in the cockpit. (The over-wing ropes were not included in our emergency drills.)
The Dash-500s had one at the forward R/H door and 2 in the cockpit, but none over-wing.

[rolling20]

Not so.

According to the NTSB, around 64 of US1549's passengers were rescued from two of the aircraft's four slide/rafts.

A humorous take on the Hudson ditching.

[Fly.Buy]

Rolling20 -That's funny! not too dissimilar to the Titanic...

Another similar water ditching in the middle of a large city was back in 1963 involving a Aeroflot Tupolev 124, again fortunately all on board survived, cause of the crash was fuel starvation. I understand that a tug boat tied some rope around the structure of the windscreen and towed the aircraft to shore. Link below
???? ?? ???? / ???????????.Ru (http://www.pravoslavie.ru/63542.html)