Barely controllable Tu-154 - another UA232
Dog Tired
BTW Dutch roll is only at high altitude.
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In the first video you can see some form of explosion after lift-off. It's a slightly orange cloud that appears while the aircraft is on full thrust and a few hundred feet off the ground.
Maximum respect to the crew for getting it down in one piece..I think the message to all pilots who have a control malfunction is ,never , never give up..
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it is a regular SOP for initial test flights, be it a first flight of a new type or after a prolonged storage to leave the gear down. You want to keep things as simple as possible in case of a series of failures...
We used to practice to steer our cessna's with only power and using the doors during initial training (long ago...)
Did the frozen yoke thing in the sim. Great excercise to see the effect of your rudder and to get better rudder-feeling.
At Sabena, one simulator item on Airbus was to land the plane on the runway using rudder/thrust/trim if I remember correctly.(haven't flown the Airbus for 8 years now) it was "fun"...
but had to be successful...
We used to practice to steer our cessna's with only power and using the doors during initial training (long ago...)
Did the frozen yoke thing in the sim. Great excercise to see the effect of your rudder and to get better rudder-feeling.
At Sabena, one simulator item on Airbus was to land the plane on the runway using rudder/thrust/trim if I remember correctly.(haven't flown the Airbus for 8 years now) it was "fun"...
but had to be successful...
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undamped yaw roll situation.
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russian pilots do have balls!
The nose seems to be describing a figure 8 lying on its side. I didn't hear thrust variations on the overflight portion of the video.
Maybe the pitch damper gyro got connected to the yaw damper and vice-versa.
Had to be a maintenance foul up. If a test flight, they would have minimum crew. Do they use a FE on the TU-154? Might have been flopping around too bad to ambulate over to an offending piece of equipment and disable it.
Per Ardua ad Astraeus
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Vaguely reminiscent of the Boeing that got airborne in the UK with the ailerons reversed after maintenance. The 'wing-rocking' began well before the small 'flash'.
Actually, if you look at the same videographer's #4 video (not part of this series - a normally operating 154) there is a red strobe under the tail that flashes every so often.
The physical light unit can be seen sticking down aft of the flaps in this still image: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...lev_Tu-154.jpg
The physical light unit can be seen sticking down aft of the flaps in this still image: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...lev_Tu-154.jpg
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Left spoiler and aileron up. Wrong angle to be sure of rudder deflection (except it isn't hardover to the right). Is that a partial slat deployment ahead of the R main gear?
Would those parts stay out in the slipstream with a total loss of hydraulic pressure? Would the spoilers be part of manual control reversion in a hydraulic failure?
In a still photo, we can't tell if they are stuck that way or if the pilots were using them intentionally to correct that right bank.
No flaps, but that could be by choice. If the controls are wonky, who wants to deal with a potential split-flap deployment on top of everything else.
Would those parts stay out in the slipstream with a total loss of hydraulic pressure? Would the spoilers be part of manual control reversion in a hydraulic failure?
In a still photo, we can't tell if they are stuck that way or if the pilots were using them intentionally to correct that right bank.
No flaps, but that could be by choice. If the controls are wonky, who wants to deal with a potential split-flap deployment on top of everything else.
Last edited by pattern_is_full; 1st May 2011 at 17:25.
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While I'm still skeptical as to what actually happened. It almost seems as if the rudder wasn't receiving any control inputs/wasn't attached to its servos whatsoever, the photo before touchdown and video confirm they had ailerons/spoilerons working, and had some form of pitch control. Seems a rudder that is "fluttering" would give this sort of result. A friend had a similar thing happen to him in a Cessna 207 with the elevator trim tab. As he described it: "it shook the **** outta me".
