Lost Air France Constellation found after 65 years
 

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:

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

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

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''?

I think he means the USS Lexington off Australia

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

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

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

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

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!

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.

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

Not so.

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

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

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.

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.]

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.

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