Breaking news plane overshoots aklan runway
 

Plane undershoots Aklan runway, 26 hurt - INQUIRER.net, Philippine News for Filipinos

Zest Air.

A Chicom MA-60

Chicom MA60
 

Photos from Caticlan (Boracay)
 

The winds were very strong this AM...I heard 40-50 knts. Why the pilot didnt divert to Kalibo, especially after the first landing attempt is my question. The approach is low and somewhat dicey to start with, not even considering high winds. Luckily no one was hurt and its amazing the aircraft didnt catch fire. One other side note, the plane crashed into the Zest airways departure lounge not the main terminal. Hows that for irony. Heres some pics of the crash. (notice one of the first things they did was paint over the Zest logo on the tail)

http://gallery.me.com/kevgod/100060/_MG_0725/web.jpg
http://gallery.me.com/kevgod/100060/_MG_0739/web.jpg

no autopaint-on-crash? Opportunity knocks
 

Surely there's money to be made here. Someone should come up with company logos and names for aircraft that automatically fall off or rapidly turn to dust with anything more than, say, a 3G jerk. What could possibly go wrong?

looking at the background there seams to have been a strong wind there, posibly a tailwind if the plane has gone straight off...

No, they didn't land with a tailwind. They came in on Rwy 06, which runs right to left in that photo. It's just that when the plane hit the wall, it twisted around 180 degrees to face the opposite direction.

And yes, the wind was strong. A 40-meter tall hill at the departure end creates hellacious mechanical turbulence and windshear on the last few hundred feet of the approach. Plus the fact that a lot of pilots flying into Caticlan like to come in really low and land right on the numbers. It's almost like a game for them. That takes away the safety margin crossing 50' over the threshold would give you, especially in gusty conditions.

Check out this photo of an Asian Spirit (now Zestair) Dash-7:

http://www.philskies.net/forum/download/file.php?id=255

Note the bamboo barrier used to stop road traffic. The threshold is just beyond the perimeter fence on the left.

Not in the Philippines, my friend

Dumb question I know ... but was the MA 60 based (or patterned after) the Fokker F27 ? Looks a lot like it.

It's based on the AN-26 I believe.

Why dumb? There are very few dumb questions, mostly dumb answers....
Difficult to tell, and they probably won't tell us...

But you're probably right. Once you've decided on the specs, there are not that many answers. So they may have well decided Fokker got it right (a lot of them were built after all, including the Fairchild licence).
The alternatives would have been the HS748 (low wing) or a twin Dash-something variant (T-tail).

CJ

MA 60
 

MA 60 (Modern Ark 60), is a passenger derivative of the AN 26, with the rear cargo door - a-la for roll-on, roll-off freight - removed.

Supposedly very underpowered, as the AN 26. The Russians fixed the power problems, and incorporated a APU and a lot of enhancements for hot and high operations, and renamed the plane as AN 32, whereas the Chinese decided the AN 26 was good enough and rebranded the AN 26 and you have the MA 60

The thread http://www.pprune.org/south-asia-far...n-boracay.html has more information .. :ok:

ecureilx and NZFlyingKiwi,

Thanks!
Looks as if the probable "family tree" is F27 > AN24 > AN26 > MA60.
The AN24 was the civil predecessor of the AN26.

An amusing bit of trivia: practically all the pre-WWII Fokker airliners were high-wing. Maybe some of the "tradition" survived until the fifties?

CJ

They were all probably based on the Handley Page HPR-7 Herald. This was another great Brit aircraft that yet again was too late, too expensive and lacked competent marketing.

The Canadians got it right for this category of aircraft with the DHC-8.