Plane flies into Tower Milan
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BBC is now saying there was a problem at Linate
Full Link:
BBC News
The inquiry will probe why an emergency runway at the city's Linate airport was not available, forcing the pilot to seek an alternative landing when he got into difficulties.
BBC News
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It may seem to be difficult to fly into a building in vmc, but dont forget - florida was it ?
3 Flight crew didnt spot the autopilot had disconnected and the aircraft just flew into the ground because they were distracted by the faulty gear light.
So if a 67yr old pilot on his own has technical probs - it is quite possible that he was heads in !
3 Flight crew didnt spot the autopilot had disconnected and the aircraft just flew into the ground because they were distracted by the faulty gear light.
So if a 67yr old pilot on his own has technical probs - it is quite possible that he was heads in !
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From what I’ve heard on the radio this morning, there war no problems called for at all and that the initial reports of such calls were just made up. The local police in the mean while said that even though it seems like a tragic accident, something just doesn’t add up here.
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Radio News media here in OZ this afternoon reported "It now appears the pilot may have suffered a heart attack, causing him to lose control of his light aircraft"
Massive damage for such a lightie ?
Lanceair
Massive damage for such a lightie ?
Lanceair
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Just a thought.What if (and it's just an if), the guy had to get out of his seat to deal with the gear. Where is the crank handle? or the cranckeable entity in the Commander? What if he's lost it while fumbling in the back for instance?
I used to fly a Rockwell 114, admittedly some time ago now, but as I remember, there is no 'crank handle'. If the gear malfunctions, and it often does cos the Electro-hydraulic powerpack was notoriously unreliable, you dropped the gear by gravity. This was no problem with the main gear which are large heavy units and come down with a satisfying thump. The nosewheel however has to extend against the airflow which requires you to slow to 75kts and waggle the rudder, then, if you're lucky, the green light comes on. The emergency gear drop lever is, if my memory serves me right, near your right knee.
One of my unofficial start up checks used to be to listen for a 'mooing' sound from behind the seats when the master switch was switched on cos that meant the pump was working! I'm not going to get into theorising about the incident but thought the info might be useful. By the way, 75kts is the normal approach speed for an AC114 with flaps 20.
Spiney
One of my unofficial start up checks used to be to listen for a 'mooing' sound from behind the seats when the master switch was switched on cos that meant the pump was working! I'm not going to get into theorising about the incident but thought the info might be useful. By the way, 75kts is the normal approach speed for an AC114 with flaps 20.
Spiney
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Latest reports claim it to be a suicidal action, but without a terrorist background. Guy is said to have been in major financial problems.
What an ass to take other peoples lives for his own misery.
Sad.
CRJ
What an ass to take other peoples lives for his own misery.
Sad.
CRJ
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This is what they are saying in Oz tonight.....
look here
Milan plane pilot wanted to suicide
AFP - The pilot of the plane that crashed into Milan's tallest building, killing himself and two others, was a failed businessman who wanted to end his life, his son said in comments to a newspaper.
La Repubblica quoted Luigi Fasulo's son Marco and a friend, identified only as Franco, who both insisted the incident yesterday that immediately raised the spectre of a new September 11-type attack was a suicide.
"What do you mean an accident? It was a suicide, a suicide, I'm telling you. There were people who wanted to ruin him, to destroy him financially, so he committed suicide," Marco Fasulo said, without elaborating.
The friend Franco, meanwhile, recounted his last conversation with the pilot on Sunday.
"I am ruined, they used up everything I had, it's a group located here, they got more than a million dollars from me," the friend quoted Luigi as saying.
The aircraft, a light Piper Air Commander, crashed into the upper floors of the landmark, 30-storey Pirelli tower, Milan's tallest building in the city centre.
The other two dead were women employed in the tower.
After the initial scare of a new terrorist attack, Italian Interior Minister Claudio Scajola said later yesterday the crash was "probably an accident" amid reports that the pilot had sent a distress message to the control tower of Milan's Linate airport shortly before the crash.
'...a light Piper Air Commander...' bloody Australian journos
look here
Milan plane pilot wanted to suicide
AFP - The pilot of the plane that crashed into Milan's tallest building, killing himself and two others, was a failed businessman who wanted to end his life, his son said in comments to a newspaper.
La Repubblica quoted Luigi Fasulo's son Marco and a friend, identified only as Franco, who both insisted the incident yesterday that immediately raised the spectre of a new September 11-type attack was a suicide.
"What do you mean an accident? It was a suicide, a suicide, I'm telling you. There were people who wanted to ruin him, to destroy him financially, so he committed suicide," Marco Fasulo said, without elaborating.
The friend Franco, meanwhile, recounted his last conversation with the pilot on Sunday.
"I am ruined, they used up everything I had, it's a group located here, they got more than a million dollars from me," the friend quoted Luigi as saying.
The aircraft, a light Piper Air Commander, crashed into the upper floors of the landmark, 30-storey Pirelli tower, Milan's tallest building in the city centre.
The other two dead were women employed in the tower.
After the initial scare of a new terrorist attack, Italian Interior Minister Claudio Scajola said later yesterday the crash was "probably an accident" amid reports that the pilot had sent a distress message to the control tower of Milan's Linate airport shortly before the crash.
'...a light Piper Air Commander...' bloody Australian journos
Last edited by BelowTenThousand; 19th Apr 2002 at 10:29.
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CRJ you are out order making those comments about the poor guy!Nobody knows exactly what happened.If he did want to take himself out he is hardly going to call linate tower with gear problems!! Most probable cause was he got disorientated trying to lower the gear down using the emergency system.I have been in this position myself.The gear doesn,t lock down straight away,so give him a break untill the cause is established.
Pukka PPRuNer!!
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Hmmm....just theorising....
Perhaps damage would depend on:
1. A/C wieght and speed at impact? (Kinetic Energy = 0.5mass * velocity squared)
2. Amount of fuel (liquid high explosive
) being carried?
3. Strength of building at impact point? (eg concrete/steelpost or window)
4. Any other factors - wind speed/direction, local air pressure....etc.....etc......
.....Perhaps we should wait for the official inquiry....
1. A/C wieght and speed at impact? (Kinetic Energy = 0.5mass * velocity squared)
2. Amount of fuel (liquid high explosive
) being carried?3. Strength of building at impact point? (eg concrete/steelpost or window)
4. Any other factors - wind speed/direction, local air pressure....etc.....etc......
.....Perhaps we should wait for the official inquiry....
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Bigmouth - good query, but possibly misleading.
Aside from damage caused by fire, there doesn't seem to be so very much impact damage to the P building. It is visually quite consistent with the 200,000-400,000 ft pounds that a Rockwell single could deliver on square blow, vs the 200 - 400 million ft pounds from a heavy aircraft at roughly 100x the weight and 10x the velocity.
Reports state that the pilot used to fuel at Linate in Transit to get a break on Swiss fuel taxes, so quite possibly he was traveling light on fuel. Another hundred gallons would have made some difference in intensity of the fire, but not soooo much as thousands and thousands of gallons.
The big difference is that the Pirelli Building is a 'curtain wall' structure in which central reinforced concrete castings support the works, along with columns distributed about the floors. The outer covering is intentionally as 'light' as possible to minimize loading, In the 50's, when the P building was constructed, the engineers had more 'respect' for gravity, so they were generous in application of structural materials. You could remove ALL of the exterior glass walls and the building would still stand nicely....until rain ate the rebar.
By contrast, the WTC buildings really depended for their rigidity and structural integrity on the unique exterior wall of stainless steel girders and crossbrace structures now familiar to many as rubble. That design is/was inherently much more vulnerable to fatal damage from a massive external impact that cuts the structure. It was no coincidence that Governor Rockefeller & clan were in the STEEL business and not the concrete business. From a hundred years hindsight, history may be more inclined to treat the WTC's as a political boondoggle gone terribly wrong -- but that concept is not very PC at the moment.
Aside from damage caused by fire, there doesn't seem to be so very much impact damage to the P building. It is visually quite consistent with the 200,000-400,000 ft pounds that a Rockwell single could deliver on square blow, vs the 200 - 400 million ft pounds from a heavy aircraft at roughly 100x the weight and 10x the velocity.
Reports state that the pilot used to fuel at Linate in Transit to get a break on Swiss fuel taxes, so quite possibly he was traveling light on fuel. Another hundred gallons would have made some difference in intensity of the fire, but not soooo much as thousands and thousands of gallons.
The big difference is that the Pirelli Building is a 'curtain wall' structure in which central reinforced concrete castings support the works, along with columns distributed about the floors. The outer covering is intentionally as 'light' as possible to minimize loading, In the 50's, when the P building was constructed, the engineers had more 'respect' for gravity, so they were generous in application of structural materials. You could remove ALL of the exterior glass walls and the building would still stand nicely....until rain ate the rebar.
By contrast, the WTC buildings really depended for their rigidity and structural integrity on the unique exterior wall of stainless steel girders and crossbrace structures now familiar to many as rubble. That design is/was inherently much more vulnerable to fatal damage from a massive external impact that cuts the structure. It was no coincidence that Governor Rockefeller & clan were in the STEEL business and not the concrete business. From a hundred years hindsight, history may be more inclined to treat the WTC's as a political boondoggle gone terribly wrong -- but that concept is not very PC at the moment.
Last edited by arcniz; 20th Apr 2002 at 18:34.
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No quibble with what arcniz describes, except to add that there's a reason that towers like the WTC and such were not built using the structural concrete-curtain wall techniques of eg the Pirelli building, and it's quite simple - you can't build a building of 100 stories or more using that technique because
a) the weight gets so huge that there's very few foundations that will carry it, and
b) the compressive strength of reinforced concrete in the lower floors is not great enough to support the weight of the upper floors.
I'm sitting in a reinforced concrete-curtain wall building right now. It's only 6 stories tall. The floor deck between the ground floor and the first floor is 32" thick of solid concrete. You'll see plenty of reinforced concrete buildings around, but seldom more than about 25-30 stories. In some places - eg Lousiana - you just can't build that way, because in a couple of years your 30 storey building would be a 29 storey building, and so on.
llater,
llamas
a) the weight gets so huge that there's very few foundations that will carry it, and
b) the compressive strength of reinforced concrete in the lower floors is not great enough to support the weight of the upper floors.
I'm sitting in a reinforced concrete-curtain wall building right now. It's only 6 stories tall. The floor deck between the ground floor and the first floor is 32" thick of solid concrete. You'll see plenty of reinforced concrete buildings around, but seldom more than about 25-30 stories. In some places - eg Lousiana - you just can't build that way, because in a couple of years your 30 storey building would be a 29 storey building, and so on.
llater,
llamas
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LLAMAS - I mostly agree with your comments regarding height vs strength vs weight. The taller the building, the more it must deal with aircraft-like issues in both structure and aerodynamics.
There was a certain hubris in the WTC design - for example in regard to the the emphasis on open interior space with largely token columns supporting the cantilevered floors. This was possibly a choice of aestherics over structure.
One can look at the Transamerica building in SFO for a 3rd choice - using both internal and external bracing in a manner such that each is largely redundant to the other. I have heard that this 'over-engineering' was really not so much the choice of the designers as political cover required by the local building authorities, and that it really hurt financially, but the result is an extraordinarily strong, resilient 49-storey structure in a locality where earthquakes sometime knock over single story houses.
On reflection, I sincerely apologize for the harsh sound of my coments regarding the origins of the WTC buildings. I did not mean to suggest that anyone involved foresaw and ignored the possibility of the horrible events which have transpired since.
The WTC designs were conceived in a pre-D.B. Cooper era when man was about to walk on the moon and the principal perceived threat was instant vaporization from nuclear attack. The WTC buildings were a great work of art and an expression of human optimism in its finest form.
There was a certain hubris in the WTC design - for example in regard to the the emphasis on open interior space with largely token columns supporting the cantilevered floors. This was possibly a choice of aestherics over structure.
One can look at the Transamerica building in SFO for a 3rd choice - using both internal and external bracing in a manner such that each is largely redundant to the other. I have heard that this 'over-engineering' was really not so much the choice of the designers as political cover required by the local building authorities, and that it really hurt financially, but the result is an extraordinarily strong, resilient 49-storey structure in a locality where earthquakes sometime knock over single story houses.
On reflection, I sincerely apologize for the harsh sound of my coments regarding the origins of the WTC buildings. I did not mean to suggest that anyone involved foresaw and ignored the possibility of the horrible events which have transpired since.
The WTC designs were conceived in a pre-D.B. Cooper era when man was about to walk on the moon and the principal perceived threat was instant vaporization from nuclear attack. The WTC buildings were a great work of art and an expression of human optimism in its finest form.
Last edited by arcniz; 23rd Apr 2002 at 00:34.
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Here are just my two cents to the idea of committing suicide in an airplane. - Why should he fly to Milano to do this instead of flying into one of the many mountains surrounding Locarno?
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I don’t want to get out on a limb here, but what number of circumstances must occur all, at the same time for an airplane to hit a building in such a way all by coincidence? Although not outside of the realm of possibilities, this seems rather strange doesn’t it? Especially when listening to eyewitness accounts of the aircraft practically taking aim for it – though I do realize just how unreliable these accounts can be. The suicide notion was introduced by the pilot’s son which should be the best source of information concerning family issues the guy might have had. From what I could gather from the news, the Italian regional government of Lombardy has ruined Luigi Fasulo hence, should this indeed be a suicide, the government building in Milan and not somewhere in the alp’s. Notwithstanding the fact that the investigation is of course still in the midst of it, it seems more plausible to me than any other cause. Having said that, I’m am afraid that such acts may become the last stand for people who ran out of options, to stress their point one last time, generally suicidal or other.
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N380UA - From news reports the fellow had two sons..the older one told the press that his father never would suicidarse, the younger emotionally said to the press that it was obviously suicide because.. Neither would pre-qualify as reliable, under the circumstances.
Having earned my first pp brevet pushing Cubs around the peaks and valleys of CH, I have a personal sense of the close fraternity that exists among the small band of Swiss aviators. However desperate or miserable one might be, it would be hard to turn away from the Mitgleidschaft (sense of membership) that binds together this unique community. I do not understand the psychology of suicide, but the idea of renouncing what one holds most dear does not seem very appropriate on the way out.
The ingenious Swiss have developed some very sophisticated and civilized ways to do themselves in - heavy cream sauces, too much grappa, a few too many Brisago's. Aerial props are hardly necessary or appropriate.
FWIW, I believe he maybe just infarcted in the wrong place.
Midnight Blue - I agree.. he evidently flew to Linate and then
turned back toward downtown.. hardly necessary, if the intent were present before the fact.
Having earned my first pp brevet pushing Cubs around the peaks and valleys of CH, I have a personal sense of the close fraternity that exists among the small band of Swiss aviators. However desperate or miserable one might be, it would be hard to turn away from the Mitgleidschaft (sense of membership) that binds together this unique community. I do not understand the psychology of suicide, but the idea of renouncing what one holds most dear does not seem very appropriate on the way out.
The ingenious Swiss have developed some very sophisticated and civilized ways to do themselves in - heavy cream sauces, too much grappa, a few too many Brisago's. Aerial props are hardly necessary or appropriate.
FWIW, I believe he maybe just infarcted in the wrong place.
Midnight Blue - I agree.. he evidently flew to Linate and then
turned back toward downtown.. hardly necessary, if the intent were present before the fact.
Architecturally, the reason that the Pirelli is still one of the highest CONCRETE buildings in the world is that you can't build higher in massive concrete COS IT'S HEAVY! Local US politics is nothing at all. I still think that the hole looks big because most news photos crop in on the target - therefore it could be any skyscraper, there is no sense of scale. It's a smaller building than even one WTC tower, and the plane was smaller. So, if you don't see the context, you'll be fooled. Most floors of the building reopened yesterday.
PS: Psychologists, like my woman, generally agree that the relatives of suicides find it extremely hard to accept the fact of suicide. The suicide of a relative leaves a sense of guilt behind, whether it is justified or not. The reason is that we cannot accept that we will die - any other disease or accident or murder allows us to avoid this conflict.
PS: Psychologists, like my woman, generally agree that the relatives of suicides find it extremely hard to accept the fact of suicide. The suicide of a relative leaves a sense of guilt behind, whether it is justified or not. The reason is that we cannot accept that we will die - any other disease or accident or murder allows us to avoid this conflict.
Last edited by steamchicken; 24th Apr 2002 at 19:56.