CRJ down in Sweden
 

In the early hours local radio is reporting freight plane between Oslo and Tromsö has come down in northern Sweden. A crash site has been located. Swedish registered a/c. Is Westair still flying freight in Norway with CRJs? Could be way off, not so familiar with who his doing what these days.

some links
 

A CRJ-200

Plane crashed in northern Sweden after issuing a distress call | Stuff.co.nz

https://twitter.com/flightradar24/st...534720/photo/1

Svenskt postflyg störtat i fjällen | Nyheter | Aftonbladet

What a harsh location for trouble! A friend and I flew it last summer, magnificent beauty, but not somewhere you want to have to put down! While thinking of the crew, think of the job ahead for the search and rescue crews too...

Crash site located
 

Crash site located on a mountain plateau by Norwegian Air Force F-16 between northwest corner of Lake Akkajaure (in Sweden) and the Norwegian border. "It is an obvious crash site with a diameter of 50 meters." says Daniel Lindblad, an official spokesperson for the Swedish Sjöräddningen (SAR).
Norskt postplan störtade i Sverige | Västerbottens-Kuriren

Looks like something dramatic happened. The LKP according to Flightradar24 is at FL330, there was a brief mayday, and then nothing. Let's hope the flight recorders survived.

The recovery operations may be difficult since it is mountainous terrain and the temperature is around -30C and predicted to remain so for a few days.

From local media in Norway:
- Aircraft lost altitude very quickly
- Crash site 9 km from Norwegian border
- 15 by 20 m crater, wreckage within 50 m radius, no large pieces
- Spanish and French crew
- Mayday just before 23:30z picked up at BOO
- Crash site found at 02:15z by RNoAF F16
- No longer a rescue mission

I'll add it's cold in the area, below -30C this morning. This is only about 60 km (due west) from the RNoAF C130 crash at Mt. Kebnekaise a few years ago.

West Atlantic press release
 

the aircraft was flying at FL330 along T65 route

jacdec.de has a story of it
http://www.jacdec.de/WP/wp-content/u..._ACC1small.png

It will be interesting to see what they carried in the cargo holds.

That will take some time since it carried parcels from the Norwegian Postal service and you do not have to specify content when sending domestic parcels. Probably have to contact all the senders. Some of the senders may even be unknown for unregistered parcels.

Crash site at 1000 masl, aerial view from Swedish TV.
http://i64.tinypic.com/mrdyr.jpg
http://i68.tinypic.com/2s0n1j4.jpg
Poliskälla: ?Planet har störtat rätt ner i backen? - Nyheter | SVT.se

From the pictures, that went in near vertical, high-energy. Possible elevator/rudder failure?

From Dagens Nyheter, a Swedish paper.

Norskt postplan störtade i Sverige - DN.SE

My translation:

Rescue work is hard because the accident site can be accessed only via helikopter or snow mobile.
The postal flight, flying on behalf of Norwegian Postal Service, was loaded with 4500 kgs of letters and parcels. According to the rescue team first accessing the site, the plane was completely destroyed by the impact.

Unlikely to have anything to do with weather as the information provided here puts them at FL330 when they declared mayday.

CP

Information about the accident unfolding:

Räddningsledaren: ?De kunde inte göra någonting? | Nyheter | Aftonbladet

My translation:
It has gone down really fast. From 33 000 feet they fell with a speed of about 9 000 feet per minute.

And also:

My translation:

The plane did not crash into a mountain, but the impact site indicates a nose down attitude.
- According to radar from the Army, they did a slight turn to the right before the crash, otherwise it was straight down. The impact crater is 15 metres deep and 20 metres wide. That is a very big hole, says Anders Lännholm. (Comment: Anders is SAR chief.)

Clear skies and light winds at the time of the accident. Doubt weather has anything to do with this one.

Maybe we shouldn't blame the crew, until we know what happened and probably not even then.
Night freight pilots tend not to amass hours as quickly as the rest of us, but they had five and eight years experience with the company presumably flying in the area.
It would seem that something catastrophic happened at High altitude and resulted in a near vertical impact. Quite likely a crew with twenty thousand hours each could have done nothing about it either.
RIP guys, and condolences to family and friends.

Very true.

Doesn't matter how many hours you have in your logbook, only the next one's important. If you train people sufficiently, they can have enough experience, even with very few hours. Look at Air Force pilots, flying Fast Jets. Cruising the airways is a discipline, but it ain't difficult!

If only 'experience' protected the 'experienced'?! But it doesn't does it!

I think this might be West Atlantics first accident.

Thoughts to the crew members families, and to their colleagues too. This will be a tough time ahead.

Stay strong.

9000ft rate of descent is going some. A tangle with weather and stall? At FL330: probably not but then again, Air France managed it. Looks like an elevator failure to me, or maybe a trim runaway and break up. Three thousand hours each is plenty if the crews are decent, I don't believe that they were to blame. Now the plane. Must be elderly, or it wouldn't be flying freight. I'm sure the investigators will be all over the maintenance records. It's not just helicopters that hang by a bolt you know.

I worry, sometimes, at the responses that come from some ppruners. Often, they criticise the professionalism or qualifications of those unable to defend themselves, when in reality, their response speaks more for their own lack of experience or professionalism.
Why are some people so hasty to damn others with so little information?


2 colleagues, whom some of us may have met, and many have not, are no longer with us. This should be a moment of reflection for every single one of us. There are likely less than a handful of people at this time who know anything of what happened, and two of them can no longer tell us.

As for experience, and first job?
2 pilots who have each about 3000hrs, and between 4 and 7 years flying experience in freight Ops, with their company. In other branches of commercial flying, they would likely have between 4000 and 6000 hrs total time each. It has already been mentioned that the nature of our business tends to mean lower hours with similar number of sectors when compared to our peers.
I would be inclined to suggest that these two colleagues are more likely to be quite well experienced, when compared to others.
Sadly, aviation is rather blunt in its understanding of people's qualities; never mind the quality, feel the width! Unfortunately, Hours count higher than all other aspects of experience, which is a very sloppy approach to assessing a person's ability. A trap that a number of our 'colleagues' have already fallen into within this thread.
Is this a sort of keyboard Tourette's? Take a moment before hitting enter.

The facts are few at this time, but speculation is rife. However, there is probably scope for very informative discussion, without trashing people that we hardly know.

I am bit surprised - at 2:15z it must have been completely dark, even Moon didn't help much. F-16 is a fast jet so my respect to the pilot who can find such a small trace at night. After crash fire maybe?

Infra-red detection on the F-16 perhaps ? Crash site would have been warmer than the surrounding snow after impact/fire ?

Yeah, they've got pretty impressive IR/night vision. Plus location is probably almost exactly at last known radar contact? The first description of the site was also released well before daylight.

IR video
 

Video captured by the F16 has been released:
Norske F-16 fant flyet - se video fra havaristedet - NRK Nordland - Lokale nyheter, TV og radio

Helo at the scene is Norwegian Air Ambulance.

Definitely too early to conclude with what happened. But as mentioned, the small crash area tells us that it was a nose down impact probably. T-tails(as the MD-80) have had problems with the jackscrew and the horizontal stabilizer earlier. This AC had 38 000 hours, and from 1993. Anybody know if the CRJ have any history with jackscrew fatigue?

Picture of the airplane in question, and a location.

http://gfx.nrk.no//SOwf0w-SW7Q7MgJXf...f6ARiioEE0AVPQ

This is above the Arctic Circle. Weather is probably -30C or more, most likely windy, making the chill really hard. This area has no roads due to the mountain terrain so you really need snow mobiles or helis to get there. The hours of daylight are very low, and the sun won't rise above the horizon at this latitude.

Another picture of the airplane, from Flightradar24 twitter:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CYLExVeWEAATpG7.jpg

Right off the top of my head, in 2 minutes I came up with 4 widely different scenarios that equally fit the known facts at this moment. Based on previous events with a similar profile - extreme dive from cruise altitude.

And I've probably missed a couple - aviation is pretty good at coming up with "new" holes in the cheese,, that we've never run across before.

I don't list them, because someone is sure to start "fixating" on one or the other - with 80%+ odds of being wrong. Which is a poor way to maintain credibility.

I expect additional information will be forthcoming, which will eliminate some of those scenarios, and point more strongly to others.

I hope they can recover the data from the CVR & FDR. It looks some impact that. :sad:

That the crew were able to get out a (brief) mayday call eliminates certain scenarios too.

Regrettably PPRUNE at its very worst again. Maybe the mods will take a look at the Flyer forums where the Top Man closed the last two fatal accident threads due to this sort of inappropriate garbage.

My thoughts as well - that looks more like a meteor crater than an aircraft crash. Twenty year old recorders might not be up to it :uhoh:

While 9000fpm is fast its not THAT fast (its less than 100knots), and doesn't seem to be consistent with the speed of impact implied by the photos of the crash site. Since the crash site photo is "real" and the 9000fpm is a report and subject to being wrong for various reasons, based on the VERY limited info we have now i might be tempted to suggest they came down a LOT faster than that...

I Agree
Looks to be closer to Mach 1 and 70 to 80 degrees ND.
Not pleasant to contemplate.

Interresting IR imagery indeed. Looks like a very high speed almost vertical impact. As others have mentioned this might have far exceeded the flight recorder design envelope. A pretty strange and dramatic one.

The maximum rate of descent was closer to 30,000fpm.

If the figures quoted above are to be believed then my initial thought is an accident similar to this.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alas...nes_Flight_261

As an ex. 200 pilot, an incident that a colleague had, comes to mind..Thrust reverser cowl separated from the engine in flight, and hit the tail on the way out..Damage, but landed safely..


We do not know what happened to this aircraft, but they will find out..
My deepest sympathies to the friends and families..


Fly Safe..

Looks like the ultimate vertical impact as the scatter is symmetrical. I doubt very much that this was any type of pilot error or bad weather. The big first two questions are, are the FDR and CVR readable and is there any sign of some part of the tail in a different location to the impact site??

Locating the "four corners" of the accident will be a first priority, to determine inflight breakup possibility.

Parts of the black boxes have been found!

What parts, are not specified, but it seems they too were smashed to smithereens in the crash.

Delar av svarta lådan hittad - Nyheter | SVT.se

My translation:

We have found certain parts but no complete units. It will take days to find them, says Nicolas Seger.

The goal is to finish the investigation within twelve months, says Nicolas Seger.

(Comment: Nicolas Seger is heading the investigation for Haverikommissionen, the Swedish equivalent to AAIB/NTSB/BEA)