Barely controllable Tu-154 - another UA232
 

Takeoff:

Attempt to return:

Final:

Well done by he crew.....:ok::D:D

Hope there will be a report on what happend to this flight....

I wanna open this threat with my guess:....

CG too far aft and out of the envelope.... Just a guess....

holy crap.

Holy crap indeed!!!

How that didn't end in a ball of fire I can hardly believe.... :D

That deserves more than a few shots of vodka. Wow.

I dunno - the pitch seems to be the one thing that is pretty stable through most of the "flight" (or is that "fright?"). Rotation seems normal and smooth.

A textbook Dutch Roll - so a failed yaw damper? [nah, - never mind - Tu-154's anhedral supposedly eliminates need for YD)

Dutch roll - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Anyway - stupendous work by the crew to work around the instability and bring 'er home!
____

Edit: Chkalovsky Airport outside Moscow? (trying to translate the cyrillic)

Looks like a complete loss of flight controls, or a combination of hydraulic loss and stuck flight controls. My guess is they steer the aircraft with engine power.
No wheelbrakes upon landing.

BTW Dutch roll is only at high altitude.

Seems a little suspicious to me. If anything I would suspect a YD failure (not sure about how the 154 is equipped). If this had happened on my trusty 727 we'd simply disconnect the thing and land normally.

Some control locks still on ? In any case big applause to both the crew and Mr Tupolev for building good strong airplanes . Pity we miss flare and touch down on the video, I bet it did not touch down on the 2 mains at the same time .

Astounding oscillations on that "downwind" and besides the roll and extreme yaw, it looked to me like some large pitch down cycles as well. Can't help but wonder if the tails of certain composite material jetliners would have stayed on.

What ever the problems reguarding the cause.Well done for getting it down in one piece

Russian ab initio training? :E Those damn CTC guys set up new shop.... :}

Good job getting the bird on gnd!

I wonder if any of our Russian friends on Pprune can find out if that was a scheduled PAX flight...?

It was certainly heart stopping to watch..! Well done to the crew for getting it back on terra firma safely:ok:

Rumour control has it that it was a test flight after being in storage for 10 years. That is and I stress, just a rumour...

Comment from Youtube poster is: Loss of roll and pitch control.

Given that the airport looks like a bit of a parking lot, this sounds credible to me. In any case, the fact that they got it back on the ground and were able to taxi in is remarkable. Well done, lads! :ok:

2nd YT clip does seem to show a line up of stored 154s. If true, wonder why this one was being brought back into use.

Well done indeed to the crew - not a pleasant experience from the footage!

A nasty short period, undamped yaw roll situation.

Will be interesting to see what caused it. Kudos to the crew.

It was indeed a first test flight after being in storage for 10 years. It's a military airfield and an aircraft belonging to Russian Army, so you won't ever know why was it necessary to get this plane back in air after 10-year break...

Not to be too flippant - but I hope they were all wearing brown corduroy trousers! But to be serious for a minute great airmanship to get the thing down in one piece.

If you look at video no. 2, I see apparently no aileron movement, but a lot of rudder movement. If ailerons are locked, you can use rudder as a roll control, but it is only a secondary result.

Pitch cannot change so quickly unless you have some kind of pitch control (Trim only??). I flew the 727, and change of thrust gave no initially change of pitch. That was also a secondary result of speed change.

I have tried similar problem - simulated in a little piper - we froze the stick, and had only trim and rudder. It was possible to steer the aircraft, but the handling was exact like we see on this video.

Maybe we should test a frozen stick in the simulator and see how it will turn out?

Well – If I realize at control problem right after rotation or even during rotation, I might forget the gear, especially if I still have at positive rate.

Not so tatin. The Hawker Hunter would quite happily dutch roll on finals (big wing/small fin). In airliners generally though, you would be correct - it has been designed out.

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..

Not only a case of brown underpants, but they must have filled a few barf bags at the same time....amazing

Good Job!
 

Very good job. the last moments on final before it disappears below the tree line look like its curtains.

At around 33 sec into the video:

if you only look at the right outer wing you can see aileron movements.....

Very bizzare...

I observed the same smoke, but when I played the video again, I observed the same cloud in FRONT of the aircraft = It was a little cloud.

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...):ok:

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"...:eek: but had to be successful...

Well, yeah, they had no pitch and roll control according to the videos, so it looks like the guy was stepping on the rudder or using diff-thrust to swing the nose and make the plane pitch down.

Was there an aircraft malfunction confirmed ?

Well, actually, it looks like they were just trying to keep them. Bet they were covered in sweat when that was over. They definitely earned their pay. BIG attaboy to the crew.:ok:
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.

At 0:27 in the first video there is a red flash below the tail. I don't think it's a strobe light.

Congrats to the crew.

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

Some moments before flare and touchdown:

http://s003.radikal.ru/i204/1105/a3/eca06097dc8b.jpg

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.

For me, comparing with other Tu-154 images,
there is a full left ruder deflection.

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".

I feel the incident is a little strange:bored:
I did not see any firetrucks at any picture og video:confused:
It seems like braking were normal!

:confused::confused::confused: