Terrifying plane crash

You have to appreciate some of the related articles on wikipedia:

What the hell were people doing in planes before 9/11 lol?

 

Lesson from first 2 posts. NEVER fly on Aeroflot.

 

Definitely not on "bring your kid to work day"

 

In Soviet Russia, pilots don’t fly the planes, plane flies blind pilot.

 

Did William Langweische (sp.) write on this? This is in his wheelhouse and I never feel like I truly understand an air disaster until he writes it

 

Maybe it's just me, but I've noticed that very few plane crashes are described as "thrilling" or "exhilarating" or "relaxing" in the media. I suspect that they are all terrifying. I was on a plane that almost crashed in Atlanta when it lost lift in the wings, and that was very tense. The pilot learned at the last minute that he need to change his approach from the west side of the airport to the east, and after he made his u-turn, forgot to speed up the big L-1011 to compensate for the headwind. The plane slowed down to 147 mph, which is apparently below the wind stall speed for the plane. When he realized what happened, he sped up to 178 mph, but the wings did not regain lift smoothly. One wing would gain lift at a time, causing the other side to dip down. The oscillations got worse as we approached the airport, falling rapidly. We only survived because the pilot was able to touch the wheels down when the wings were level, and he didn't cartwheel the plane. That was terrifying, and not Delta's finest moment. (I bet the pilot won't do that again for a long time.)

 

Not sure why this is a story now, but, I would argue can you imagine being a passenger on any plane falling out of the sky?? Has to be the most horrific, powerless feeling any humans can have.

 

A "special aeronautical operation".

 

I could not get your link to play, but here is one of most gut wrenching audio tapes I have ever heard.

It is the actual ATC recording from Alaska Air 261, the final 4 minutes of life for the 88 people who lost their lives that day. It is really depressing and you hear it in the voices of ATC and other pilots who witnessed the events of that day, you hear the Skywest Captain's voice almost break communicating with ATC.

 

I wouldn't have known what had actually happened (the reason for the oscillations) except on the connecting flight from Atlanta, I happened to sit next to a test pilot in first class. After I described what I just went through, he explained why it happened the way it did.

 

If you haven’t heard it, look up the story of John Liotine. He was a mechanic for Alaska Air and an FAA whistleblower, who was already reporting his company for maintenance issues. In the midst of that, he had recommended that a Jack screw on this aircraft be replaced, and his boss deleted it from the notes. That was the part that later failed and caused the crash. AA put him on leave for being disruptive, and basically assailed him publicly. And when he sued for millions, they settled for 500k under the condition he leave the company.

After hearing that story, even if it was 20 years ago, you couldn’t pay me to fly them. Even if you set the safety piece aside, I wouldn’t give my money to a company with those values.

 

My part time job in high school and through 2 years of Jr college was working at the airport fueling and parking planes. I saw 3 or 4 crashes during those years. They are pretty exciting, especially if there is a problem and you know what is about to happen. 2 of the 4 crashes I witnessed were small single engine private planes. One was a Shawnee Airlines beach 99 that caught a wingtip in a crosswind and cartwheeled. The most exciting was a 4 engine DC4 cargo plane that had a landing gear that wouldn't come down. The pilot did an awesome job, he retracted the 2 landing gears that did come down and opted to land gearless on the grass infield. He feathered the props at the last second to save the engines and came in soft as heck in a few weeks they had the minor damage repaired and flew it out.

 

They did a TV show on that crash:

 

Files under: Threads to not open while sitting at gate A10 at ATL.

 

Agreed, and every bit of that story was true. However, years before that the FAA was notified of liklihood of failure due to lack of redundancy in the design without strict maintenance . This was well understood all the way back to the DC-9. The world simply was not that safety conscious back then.

One side note, of the roughly 1000 DC-9/MD80/90/B717 in service, 13 officially had their jack screws replaced in the wake of AA261. However, nearly 200 more were quietly replaced at the request of Douglas/Boeing. As late as 2015 an Air Force Boeing 717 experienced control surface problems during pre-flight checks and a damaged (nearly failed) jack screw was identified when the flight was cancelled.

Bad design for safety. Worse maintenance vs cost by air carriers and the US military.