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To: Bobby777
the engines just fell off by themselves ... happens all the time

Remember the Electra? Beautiful plane. Wings broke off, though. Those planes were pulled from service.

89 posted on 08/27/2004 2:46:36 PM PDT by RightWhale (Withdraw from the 1967 UN Outer Space Treaty and establish property rights)
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To: RightWhale

sure, the Brits had the problem with the Comet where the fuselage cracked near a window. that still doesn't explain 587, as this is not a widely reported problem of that model.


96 posted on 08/27/2004 2:52:16 PM PDT by Bobby777
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To: RightWhale
Remember the Electra? Beautiful plane. Wings broke off, though. Those planes were pulled from service.

That was a wierd problem with engine propellor imballance, if I remember right. Electra was the basis for the P-3 Orion.

An Electra accident that I saw a presentation over was really interesting. It was a charter flight, well after they had the wing/engine thing fixed.

They proved that it was caused by the fuel filler cover not being fastened correctly. The filler was on the leading edge of the wing root, just slightly low. On the ground, it just hung down, and looked almost closed.

On takeoff roll, stayed down and closed with the slip stream, but as soon as you pulled angle-of-attack, it popped up and open and acted like a small spoiler. That wasn't particularly a big problem, except the disturbed air bounced the horizontal, which in turn bounced the whole airplane. Bad enough that in the accident re-creation video that I saw, flight crew would have been thrown out of their seats without seat belts.

In the accident, the crew apparently was concerned about the old wing problem, and reduced power. It's a long story, but in the end, they flew into rising terrain at night because of disorientation.

During the re-creation, the test pilot crew almost did the same thing, however the flight engineer got their attention about their predicament (in daylight) and they stopped the test.

107 posted on 08/27/2004 3:01:53 PM PDT by narby (Doesn't Kerry look like a cadaver?)
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