Posted on 07/19/2017 3:38:14 PM PDT by KeyLargo
Jury awards millions to pilots flying improperly packed airplane with USMC MRAPs
By USMC Life| July 13th, 2017|Featured, News|11 Comments
A Cook County jury has returned a verdict in favor of the families of three of seven crew members who perished in the dramatic crash of a National Airlines 747 cargo airplane in Bagram, Afghanistan on April 29, 2013. The crash itself was captured on a dashcam video that went viral over the internet shortly after the accident occurred.
(Excerpt) Read more at usmclife.com ...
I meant 24 tons of M-ATVs there...
The question, of course, is whether the reporter got it from the verdict, not whether the jurors got it from the newspaper.
I noticed that. If the crew took off so overloaded knowingly it would be their responsibility. The crew is also responsible to see that the load is properly secure. What is the basis for this lawsuit? Doesn’t make sense.
Don’t fall for a newspaper’s poor understanding of the issue. It went through an internal bulkhead.
That was a journalist’s description. Journalists are addicted to hyperbole and don’t know that much about English or about reality. In court there will be an actual presentation of facts, not journalistic foot-in-mouth syndrome.
You can tell it’s obvious load shift in the video. The plane moved very unnaturally with the tail dropping drastically.
Give it full power, full flap, and pitch the nose down and pray is about all you can do.
Some loadmaster really goofed.
I have military experience, but don’t know how these things work in the civilian world. I don’t doubt companies cut corners, and sometimes dangerously.
But...I don’t get this.
One of my jobs in the USN was to calculate the weight of the plane...empty weight, plus fuel load, plus external stores...and I would write it on a board and show it to the pilot. The pilot, who I believe did the same calculations, would view it, and if our calculations matched, would give a thumbs up. I would then relay that weight to the catapult team, who dialed in the force of the catapult launch.
That process made sense to me, and the aircrew (pilot) took responsibility for taking off with the appropriate load...it was his call at the end of the day.
I just don’t understand how this worked for this crew. I could see if the thing was overloaded by a few tons, but...66 tons? It sounds suicidal.
Now, perhaps the plane was rated to carry that 66 extra tons, but perhaps not in the form of big, metal machines, strapped down. Maybe they were rated to carry that 66 additional tons in boxed cargo. I don’t know.
Something is missing here. I readily admit it could be my reading comprehension, but I did read it a few times.
When I first saw this video, there was no doubt in my mind, right off the bat, there was some kind of load shift. It was unmistakable to me, even though I had never seen a plane experience that.
I just knew. Nothing else could really explain that, just the way it fell out of the sky.
Technically, a stall happens when an aircraft exceeds the the max angle of attack for their flight parameters.
(Warning: Apology, FReeper post ahead that has too much information and is not witty)
A stall can be achieved when the aircraft is flying nose straight down. . .I’ve seen it while teaching spins.
Students flying the T-37 are instructed on how to recover from a spin/stall.
For the T-37 (and many other aircraft) recovery from a spin/stall requires pushing the control stick forward to move the nose of the jet to drop down to the vertical to break the stall. Sometimes a student gets a little intense when all he sees is a canopy full of dirt coming up to meet him and the student abruptly yanks the stick back and generates a new stall and spin.
Like I said, it is not the tail sinking that causes the stall.
Flying a loop the tail goes “down” while nose goes up, no big deal, as long as you are flying fast enough and not exceeding max angle of attack.
In the video, the load shift apparently moved the payload too far aft (the CG to moved too far aft) and the aircraft didn’t have enough elevator authority to push the nose forward to less than the max angle of attack. Disaster.
FReeper pompous post complete. Cheers.
;-)
That they overloaded it by 66 tons??????????
If you read carefully you will see that it is not the weight of the vehicles but the number of tie downs available on the aircraft that is at issue.
The smaller vehicle required 60 restraints.
The problem as I understand it is that there were not enough hard points on the aircraft for attaching restraints to more than one vehicle.
Obviously, the crew would know the lifting ability of their aircraft. But loading and restraining a load is another matter.
The load master should always fly with the cargo as a matter of course. If you load the plane you are responsible for the lives of those that fly on it. If you don’t have the confidence to fly on the plane that you loaded don’t let it fly.
Mr Moon, “otherwise they could have flown out of it.”
Not really, aft CG like in this case the aircraft does not have enough elevator authority to push the nose down.
In that situation, I imagine the pilot went full power and pushed the control column full forward but the elevator just didn’t have enough authority.
There was one loadmaster back in the sixties who was threatened with a court martial by a pilot if he did not sign off on a load. The pilot was in a big hurry and did not want the loadmaster to take the time to do it right. The pilot took off, the load shifted, and the C-130 crashed and burned killing all on board. The loadmaster faced a hearing, and was cleared because he refused to sign off on an improperly secured load. The now deceased pilot got someone else to sign off.
A colleague died in a plane crash out of CLT when the Beech 1900 where he was a passenger experience a shifting load on takeoff . Plane went nose up, fell on the runway.
“Journalists are addicted to hyperbole and don’t know that much about English or about reality.”
And they don’t know a thing about flying. Nothing. Zip. Nada. They can’t tell you why an aircraft flies or know what a stall is.
Journalists are idiots.
Damn, they never stood a chance at that angle, height, and airspeed
That was kind of what I was thinking, it wasn’t the gross weight, but how it was loaded. Makes a little more sense.
Yes. I am sure there was a point they crossed where they knew they were dead men flying.
Not pompous at all, Hulka...
Not really, aft CG like in this case the aircraft does not have enough elevator authority to push the nose down.
In that situation, I imagine the pilot went full power and pushed the control column full forward but the elevator just didn’t have enough authority.
...
Investigators calculated the CG and found it within limits. Debris was found on the runway that showed the hydraulics were destroyed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Airlines_Flight_102#Investigation
The number of straps doesn’t tell one much one needs to
know the working load limits of the straps and attaching points.
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