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747 Crash At Brussels

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747 Crash At Brussels

Old 23rd Jun 2008, 06:59
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Interesting Ignition O/R,

By chance I met Hoot's roommate while J/S-ing to SAN, and asked him about the old slat C/B rumour to trim the aircraft (then selecting flps 2 in high speed cruise; which was a popular story told in 727 training circles on what not to do.) He was adamant that Hoot never did any such thing, that it was "a story invented by people who wanted to protect Boeing's precious airplane." For my fellow armchair aviators, Whoot (sp?) was the Captain on a B727 jet upset that lost control in cruise due to an asymmetrical leading edge device deploying (by itself?) in cruise. A lot of people didn't believe the crew's story: that the slat just popped out, and none of those guys ever flew again.

But I didn't know the log book pages had been found vindicating Gibson. The longer you've been in Aviation, the more you learn what a grand old game it really is!

That starter is more serious than it might appear. What if it opens without lube one time, gets you started and then you need it to restart the engine below 250 kts? (and you need the engine to stay in the air.) Birds? Volcanic Ash? Heavy rain? MCT overtemp on the other side?

You're hatin it, mate.

Ask the L-1011 guys at Eastern how important it is to restart one you've just shut down. "40X Glider" it used to be marked on the S/O's panel in heavy black pen. I asked what's that mean? The s/o says "this was the one."

Meaning "the one" that almost ditched short of MIA because they could only get one out of three running again as they glided down dead stick (the one, incidentally, they had just precautionary shut down due to high oil temp/low oil pressure.)

So yeah, crappy mtc can make you loose faith in the brand-new airplane book way to fly it. Only the PIC knows for sure at Brussels, and as "Benthere" so vividly puts it you find yourself at the end of a long mahogany table with no ashtrays in front of all the Monday Morning Quarterbacks smug in the knowledge that at least you're still alive.

The Air France-Concord and Valuejet in Florida were on fire aloft and didn't fare so well. Neither did the Air Canada MD-80 that had a lav fire. Neither did the Halifax SwissAir MD-11. Neither did the South African or Indian 747's. Reports of flame or fire are things I never want to hear from the tower or cabin crew. How do you know they aren't understating or misinterpreting what they are seeing? In my opinion, you frequently should consider the possibility that it's bad. How do you know that the "engine flame" report from ATC is not from a fuel tank leak or a fire hose of fuel coming from a ruptured fitting on the pylon engine fuel valve? You don't. It's probably just fire from compressor stalls but I can't fault the captain in this situation for deciding otherwise.

If you suspect you're on fire, play it safe and get on the ground asap. The 10 page smoke and fire checklists we used to have were a joke. If you weren't on your way to Hawaii, who's going to spend over a half hour reintroducing power to buses that have already cooked themselves in order to isolate the guilty components?

Some of the horechit training we had to endure.....
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Old 23rd Jun 2008, 08:35
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Gupp Gupp Gupp,

I don't see why you feel it's necessary to wildly exaggerate or mischaracterize the procedure I outlined that you clearly have no experience with.

Did I say anything about blowing tires? No. If you were a captain who taxis you would know that by wreck I mean scuffing the center of each tire tread in the tight turn. This does not "Blow" the tire. It simply reduces the time between it's next recap. Also, if you will re-read my posts you will discover the earlier basis of the conversation was taking care of the airframe by not stopping in turns so as to not put stresses on the airframe. And clearly we were discussing avoiding a broken window while at the same time being cognizant that it was a real risk. You, however, weren't even aware it was a risk, if you will recall, and challenged me by asking if it's ever happened, and if I've personally witnessed it. A pilot doesn't have to witness damage to know how to avoid it. Right? We can learn from the insights and experiences of others. Some of us can.

It is disingenuous of you to suggest that anybody following an approved procedure is "intentionally" trying to damage something. It's apparent to me that you just don't understand that the modern book was still being written while I was flying the 200F. We invented the GPWS terrain escape maneuver, for example, that all airlines now follow. We were not trying to damage the airframe into mountains before that..... that procedure, along with many others was penned in blood from dead colleagues who weren't aware of the hazards of third world atc. The evolution of FAR's and accepted industry procedures is an on-going effort.

You're a co-pilot aren't you? Or a Captain upgrade in his first year?

Not an assumption. Just a question.

Cheers

Last edited by pacplyer; 23rd Jun 2008 at 10:26.
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Old 23rd Jun 2008, 10:25
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CAL LAX rejected below V1

411A,

According to the ntsb report here for CAL 603, of March 1, 1978:

http://www.airdisaster.com/reports/ntsb/AAR79-01.pdf

V1 was 156 kts, but the capt on (on page 39 of the NTSB findings) rejected below that at 152 kts. He did everything correctly the board found. The aircraft was accellerating and reached about V1+3 it appears from the graph. They comment that they believe it would have flown even with three blown tires.

Regards,

pac
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Old 23rd Jun 2008, 13:49
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Did I say anything about blowing tires? No. If you were a captain who taxis you would know that by wreck I mean scuffing the center of each tire tread in the tight turn. This does not "Blow" the tire.
Blowing tires, wrecking tires, whatever. I have to wonder if you're not ssg...the banned intrepid poster who keeps coming back under another name: ssg, onepercenter, tankdriver45, and now pacplyer. Sounds like the same guy.

If you do a 90 degree turn with differential brakes and power, the corner windscreen will likely crack...

...I didn't crack a window, but our check captain did during acceptance tests. Of course this also wrecks a set of tires too, but during a war or a profitable charter who cares. The dollar margin mitigated it...

...I just know that when we pushed two up on one side and jammed the opposite brakes with full tiller the thing would turn in way less a radius than your book number and we were concerned about cracking the window and scrubbing the mission.
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Old 23rd Jun 2008, 18:07
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The Continental DC-10 overrun at LAX:

The PNF was required to apply forward pressure on the control column during a rejected take-off to ensure good nosewheel contact.

I remember being told that the PNF on the Continental DC-10 was a big chap and that he stuffed the control column fully forward into the instrument panel. The horizontal stabiliser was the same wingspan as a DC-3 and it was thought that the above action lifted the back end up and rendered the brakes somewhat ineffective in the initial (vital) few seconds.

By the way, I flew the DC-10 for the better part of 8 years with 7 of those in the left seat.
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Old 24th Jun 2008, 01:37
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Guppy,

Very tellingly, you will not answer the question: Are you a transport captain on a heavy?

You are definitely not captain material imho. To be this petty and paranoid and and take quotes of mine out of the context of the paragraph they were is not admirable. No, I am not some secret enemy of yours you seem to have made during your condescending posts to others in the past. This is what I mean about your inability to focus on the debate topic and not take things personally. Subjects such as V1 should rise or fall on their own merits. We should be able to detach ourselves from the argument at hand and examine the subject of heavy jets electing to chance an overrun independent of the individual airmen behind the screen names.

Please do not take snippets of my posts out of context. Here is the whole paragraph in which the meaning is one of prolonging the airframe:

Complete Quote by pacplyer:

She's a tough old bird, but there's little chance she won't break up at those huge weights off the overrun. The fuselage bends quite a bit in turns on normal taxiways so we used to make gentle ones and pull straight ahead after turning to untwist the airframe stress. If you do a 90 degree turn with differential brakes and power, the corner windscreen will likely crack. The 200's loaded a lot heavier than the 100 was (the power to weight is less on the 200F.) Nasa picked the 100 to ferry the shuttle because the empty weight is lower even thought the early JT9D engines were smaller thrust.


Still isn’t clear to you now? O.K., I’ll try to spell it out. You no doubt, have an engineer fuel burn procedure for older 100 airframes where the S/O burns down to about 21.5 on the outboard tanks before he switches to inboards and lastly dumps the wing tip tanks before descent. Right? Do you know why this done? Do you think the titanium spar is going to crack and you will fall out of the sky if he forgets and doesn’t switch to inboards on time? No. This fuel burn procedure, developed at my airline, like the “pull one plane length ahead after the turn” taxi procedure is to reduce the long term accumulative metal stresses on the airframe. Doing a rare tight turn to keep from sending the heavies behind you from re-diverting or ditching is not going to damage a newer -200F airframe. This is this part of the concept of airmanship that I’m talking about in which it seems is completely absent in some pilots today. I would expect some crappy airline like Adam Air to close the airport because his nosegear steering failed and he doesn't have enough common sense to use differential brakes and power to clear the only usable runway after landing at a place that has no tugs (1999 I think,) but I would expect a more professional pilot to make a better choice if he is able to do so.

I apologize if I was being ambiguous.

Regards,

pacific plyer
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Old 24th Jun 2008, 01:42
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Cool

Hi,

Sorry to be out of topic .. but it's any news about the 747 crash at Brussels available for the general public ?

Regards.
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Old 24th Jun 2008, 02:51
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Doing a rare tight turn to keep from sending the heavies behind you from re-diverting or ditching is not going to damage a newer -200F airframe.
Such as cracking windows, as your company experienced, and as you've described you feared might happen while you did your turns?

You introduced that material and then tried to deny it. If you intend to operate unprofessionally and foolishly, own up to it and be done.
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Old 24th Jun 2008, 03:06
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This is just like watching a train wreck.
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Old 24th Jun 2008, 04:26
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guppy,

We were the launch customer on the -200F. No one had any experience operating it before then except test pilots at Edwards.

But O.K., O.K., you win!

In the process of building the biggest cargo operation in the world at the time, we had to change some tires and windows!!!!

Happy?

(Egads, this is worse than riding with the FAA!)
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Old 24th Jun 2008, 13:55
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I think riding with the Fed's was easy and less BS than this thread.
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Old 25th Jun 2008, 05:49
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Pac and Guppy, why don't you just sort yourselves out through PMs. This thread is going offtopic beyond belief.
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Old 25th Jun 2008, 05:56
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Off topic? It was off topic after the first post. The airplane went off the end. It broke up. End of story.

In the interim, we've had wild speculation ranging from secret government operations to terrorism, flocks of birds, overloaded cargo, fatigued crews, government lies and coverups regarding performance, you name it. Off topic? Anything but the Brussels mishap is on topic, so far. Seems we're doing just fine.
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Old 25th Jun 2008, 06:16
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How convenient then that this forum is called "Rumours & News"
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Old 23rd Jul 2008, 19:30
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Belgian Cockpit Association report on 02/20...

Interesting to read that Belgian pilots consider this rwy to be less safe than 25L/25R and request authorities to only require its use on exceptional conditions, e.g. with strong winds from North or South.
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Old 23rd Jul 2008, 20:03
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Interesting conclusion you make there (with a lot of bias), but the way I read it is that they recommend to use the ICAO wind regulations to select the runway in use, which means 5kts tail 15kts cross (vs. 7kts and 20kts now), so if there's wind coming from the S or N they still recommend to use 20/02. What is true is that 20/02 is shorter (700m), has a small gradient (about 1%). But landing with a moderate northerly wind will always be safer on 02 than to use 07L.

Last edited by tttoon; 23rd Jul 2008 at 20:07. Reason: rephrasing
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Old 22nd Dec 2008, 17:55
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Bird Strike nr3

Acording to the Belgian press this evening, the investigation board has conluded to the ingestion of a prey bird by engine nr 3, about 4 sec after V1 followed by another couple of seconds before decision was made to abort with the known consequences.

Biological debris was found in the engine and DNA probes were even able to determine the species and breed of the poor animal.

Good landings all,

L
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Old 22nd Dec 2008, 18:25
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With that sort of delay in making the decision, and on that RW ,the wonder is that it only "nearly" went on the railway tracks.

No truth in the rumour the GPWS was shouting T. . RAIN T. . RAIN

I'll get my coat
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Old 23rd Dec 2008, 09:35
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Acording to the Belgian press this evening, the investigation board has conluded to the ingestion of a prey bird by engine nr 3, about 4 sec after V1 followed by another couple of seconds before decision was made to abort with the known consequences.
I am not a 747 pilot, but is V1 not the mark where you go anyway and do not abort?
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Old 23rd Dec 2008, 10:04
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V1 is a decision speed.Before it you can stop.After V1 you have to continue.
Having said that some bright spark will probably contradict my statement.:
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