Tu 134 crashed in Russia

[barit1]

I was recently struck by how quickly the accident report of Northwest 2 was issued in 1938. It involved a brand-new Lockheed Super Electra that lost the upper parts of its vertical stabilizers near Bozeman, MT, due to flutter, and crashed in a flat spin. The investigators were confronted with the proverbial smoking hole, yet the final report was presented to the Bureau of Air Commerce only 19 days after the accident.

Coincidentally I found this BAC report 36 years ago when I was writing a type study on the L-14. NWA was the launch customer but KLM was close behind. KLM's Dr. Albert Plesman liked the ship, but he perceived a mild flutter when riding in the aft cabin. He insisted on mass balanced rudders, where the NWA ships had plain hinged ones.

Plesman thus was soon vindicated, and the surviving NWA ships were retrofitted.

[WHBM]

Originally Posted by surplus1

Sorry to be so uninformed but would someone please explain to me what a "navigator" is on a Russian airliner. Where does he sit, what are his qualifications/training, what is his authority with relation to the Captain? What exactly does he do? Why is this person necessary at all?

They do rather what you would expect. It's a junior position in progression (in Russian "pilot second class") and they do all the routing and position fixing, both pre-flight and as you are going along.

This aircraft (65691 apparently, dating from 1981) was a classic "glass nose" Tu134A where the pilots sit on either side of the flight deck, and there is a rather claustrophobic tunnel between them, and a couple of steps down, into the equally claustrophobic navigators station which is right in the nose where the radome would otherwise be. It was a standard Soviet approach on many larger types. All the navigation kit, including modern kit like GPS units, is installed down there.

File:Tu-134A in Ulyanovsk Aircraft Museum.JPG - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Later Tu134, especially those exported, had a different approach with a conventional radome, and the nav sat on a jump seat behind the pilots. The tunnel to the glass nose is covered by a small curtain on the flight deck - on at least one occasion a hijack was thwarted after the perpetrator had forcibly got the pikots attention by the nav suddenly springing out from behind the curtain and grabbing him, in best Boys' Own story style.