Did an F-15 airplane successfully land with just one wing?
skeptics.stackexchange.com
skeptics.stackexchange.com
The part that amazes me though is that any human being can sit there and figure out that adding thrust or doing some other action helps or doesn't help when sitting in a chunk of steel that wants to hit the ground hard. I have total respect for folks who stay stone cold rational in the face of their imminent demise.
[1] http://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/news/FactSheets/FS-008...
Edit: had the same experience in a car once as well. Total focus on solving the problem. Terror comes after.
You reminded me of something that happened to me while driving a few years ago. I was on the highway in the far left lane going about 70mph. I was driving an Audi A4, which had much better (sensitive) handling than the pickup truck I was used to driving. There was a breakdown lane to the left of me (unusual for most highways) and I thought to myself, "if I suddenly needed to swerve out of the way for some reason, I could flick my wrist and get into the left breakdown lane to avoid whatever was happening in front of me".
Not more than a few seconds after having that thought, I saw the car in front of the car in front of me jump up onto the car in front of it. The car in front of me slammed on his brakes. I flicked my wrist to the left without thinking. Only when I passed (in the left breakdown lane) all the cars piled on top of each other did I realize just how closely I dodged a serious accident. If I had not visualized what I would do in such a scenario a few seconds earlier, I'm not sure if I would've done the same thing.
Unfortunately a lot of these rules only work if other drivers on the road are also following them (around here, in the Boston area, you'll be lucky to have 2 car lengths of space in front of you no matter your speed), so I've learned that simply being aware at all times (no phone, no distracting conversations, and holy hell no text messaging or emails) is the best thing anyone can do for improving their safety while behind the wheel.
Supposedly, people who think through how they would handle emergencies or other bad situations handle them much better than people who don't like to think about it. This is true even when it's a situation they hadn't actually planned through yet, because they have the mental habit of solving problems rationally rather than just pretending they won't happen.
I now leave a lot more space between me and the car in front, and I've trained myself to remember that traffic might stop dead at any time.
The plane was without engine for several minutes before I landed, yet that time was spent fully engrossed and completely focused on the problem. I had clarity of thought like nothing I've ever experienced.
No emotions — no fear, nothing — just stone cold rationality. Going through the checklist, Mayday call, considering options, etc. with swift and decisive precision.
Though I believe the extensive training certainly helped, to this day I'm amazed at the incredible stress response our body has evolved. Even though it happened many years ago, I still think about it a lot.
It'd be interesting to at least hear from the ones that totally freaked out and made it anyway.
As a skydiving instructor, I've had 3 parachute malfunctions that required cutting away & deploying my reserve. Each time something goes wrong, everything else goes out of focus: you have a problem to solve. You first assess the situation and work to regain control - as long as you have altitude, you have room to work & get creative. When you reach a certain "decision altitude" - or determine there's no way you'll be able to land the parachute safely - you make the decision that you'd do better with a different parachute. And you enact emergency procedures.
Beauty of it is, good training makes this automatic. It gives you a decision tree to work off of. IMO, the same sort of decision tree is an excellent thing to think about when crisis planning for companies. But that's another story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Transat_Flight_236
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/4288383.stm
More tales of derring-do that will be a thing of the past when everything is automated.
After a total hydraulic failure, the pilots still managed to land just using thrust difference between the two engines. I'm impressed anybody survived.
Dudes, wtf? Unless Canadian regulations differ from US ones, you're not even allowed to fly a single-seater in day VFR without a fuel gauge.
it explains why they flew without a fuel gauge. tl;dr - they knew the gauge was broken, but regs allowed the flight if the maintenance crew did a manual sounding of the tanks and the measured fuel was enough. they sounded and measured, but converted incorrectly between pounds and kilos. I think the pilots were severely disciplined for that failure.
Their disciplinary action was later overturned and "the pilots were awarded the first ever Fédération Aéronautique Internationale Diploma for Outstanding Airmanship."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-10#America...
[1] First Person, Season 2 "Leaving the Earth"
That said, I think TACA Flight 110 (737-300) was an impressive "miracle" glide landing too. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TACA_Flight_110
The few times someone has been pulled out of a plane due to decompression has been because they were stood right under the panel that failed( Ahola 243 ) or have been sat right on top of the cargo door that failed (aa96 and Turkish 981 ). I'd love to know how decompression unbolted a seat.
Situation would have been massive structural failure and exposure of the aircraft interior to the jetstream and fireball, which is more than an explosive decompression, but it is a referenced case.
Specific mentions begin at about 20 minutes into the following video based on NTSB reports:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lbny8XnAifY
There's some mention of passengers being hurled from the plane in the NTSB accident report that I can find, but I can't find full cites for the claims of the video:
http://www.ntsb.gov/doclib/reports/2000/AAR0003.pdf
There's the fact that most of the passengers suffered "severe" trauma (described as "internal decapitation" in the video), likely from sudden deceleration as the nose separated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Baghdad_DHL_attempted_shoo...
As an addendum, NASA has been doing research into autopilot control for this sort of scenario. They call it Propulsion Controlled Aircraft (PCA): http://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/news/FactSheets/FS-041...
Yet this guy still managed to dead stick land his crippled F-16 aircraft.
The A-10 is designed to fly with one engine, one tail, one elevator, and half of one wing missing.
[Update] For some reason, I can't reply to the X-15 comment, so I'll add the extra info here. The X-15 is dropped from a B-52. There are a set of rules to qualify for the record. An unpowered scramjet dropped from another plane isn't going to quality either.
This is a deliberate feature to slow down "discussions" that are actually unproductive back-n-forth arguments.
The X-15 isn't even a scramjet, it's a rocket with a bloke at strapped in.
Its not really that surprising -- survivability through sheer speed seems to have been largely abandoned in favor of focussing largely on stealth (see, B-2 Spirit vs. B-1 Lancer).
With the motivation for pouring money into moar speed gone, you stop getting moar speed.
SR-71 was really cool, except for the leaky fuel issue.
PS: You can also fly an F-15 sideways the stall speed simply goes through the roof.
So interesting aerodynamics and mad flying skills, not fancy electronics :-)
When people use the phrase "fly by wire" they usually mean a system where the control stick feeds a digital signal into a computer, which controls the hydraulic servos for the control surfaces directly. The F-15 doesn't have that. Instead, what it has is a system where the stick is connected mechanically to the hydraulic system. On top of that, two electronic systems (the Pitch/Roll Channel Assembly and Aileron Rudder Interconnect) can provide an additional variable control input to the hydraulic actuators, to even out the feel of the stick in varying flight conditions. It also provides inputs to improve the dynamic flight characteristics of the plane: http://www.f15sim.com/operation/f15_flight_control_system.ht... (see the paragraphs under "Control Augmentation System.")
So the F-15's control system provides additional electronic input to the control services to improve flight characteristics, but isn't totally in charge of the airplane in the same way as a true fly by wire system. For example, the electronics cannot move the control surfaces through their full range of motion, and are strictly reactive to the pilot's stick input.
Hilarious.
But then again it's a fighter jet, so maybe the "distraction level" is lower and too many warnings means eject.
This is a true story, known for years here in Israel.
The pilot, Zivi Nedivi, is a successful business man, has been running an hedge fund (AXION) and todays he's in charge at Cyalume [1][2].
This is the video with the pilot telling the story http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t739hAxWnxM
[1] http://cyalume.com/ [2] http://investor.cyalume.com/management.cfm
High speed aircraft can generate enough lift to fly just with the fuselage. Wings are really only needed for take-off and landing at low speeds.
You will notice that the F-15 pilot said he landed at high speed, 250 knots or so.
The F-14 Tomcat, F-111, and B-1 bomber have swing wings, which extend on take-off but retract for high-speed flight. The F-14’s wing sweep has a computer control mode so that the wing sweep angle can change dynamically while the plane is maneuvering.
There are lots of stories about airplanes missing wings.
One of my instructors in flight training was flying an F-11 Tiger, and lost both wings during a high-G maneuver. He said that he noticed that the controls got “mushy”. In a lot of jets, the horizontal tail surfaces can angle up or down independently and replace the “ailerons” normally on the wing outer edges. He reported a problem to the tower and did a fly-by. They told him his wings were gone. I don’t know if he landed or ejected.
There have been numerous documented incidents where planes have launched from carriers with the wings folded. I know of cases where this has happened with A-1 and F-4 type aircraft.
When I was in the Mediterranean, I saw an F-4 land on the carrier with an outer wing panel (beyond the fold line) hanging straight down after a collision with a Russian Bear bomber.
I also saw an A-6 land at Naples air facility with a missing outer wing panel as a result of a collision somewhere over the Med.
The F-15 video was pretty impressive. It really shows how much lift is generated by the fuselage, and how at some point, the wings don’t provide any lift but are just pure drag.
If you have enough thrust, you don’t need any wings at all. But then it’s not an “airplane” but a rocket.
Frankly, for the type of wars we're likely to fight in the foreseeable future, the most common mission would call for something like a cheap prop-driven plane with a ton of ordnance hardpoints. Take the flight surfaces off, stuff 3-4 of them into a C-17 and fly them to the theater of operations, go to work.
But the aviator community would hate it.
The role you're describing is currently filled - very well, I might add, by the A-10. It can fly low and slow (has a stall speed of right around 140mph), it's heavily armored and can carry massive amounts of armament. Not to mention an enormous gun that can decimate pretty much anything in its path.
They're slated for retirement soon, though. Long term, I think this role will eventually be filled by drones.
I was expecting someone to jump in with the dog-fight argument against using low & slow aircraft. Unlike in Vietnam, today's missiles are reliable and effective, so even a prop plane can engage and defeat a jet at extended ranges... as long as positive hostile ID can be made early enough.
Yes. Drones and long-range weapons delivery (either high energy or SCRAM-driven missiles). Fighter jets? Might as well call out the buggy whips and horse drawn carriages.
Obligatory A-10 shoutout: We still need something that can provide air-to-ground support to ground troops with a long dwell time, but high-speed cruise to fast deployment (shamelessly stolen from The Avengers: http://www.impdb.org/images/a/ae/Avengers2012CGI_2.jpg).
Of course, designing the same airframe to replace both the Harrier and the F-16 is a ridiculous notion and the F-35 suffers for it.
Sure there is some lag introduced if it is remotely operated, but then it has the benefit that without a pilot on the inside, it can preform maneuvers that would cause a human to black out. Plus you can have an unlimited number of copilots looking at radar/video looking out for other aircraft.
I don't believe that an autonomous computer program today is capable of deciding when to shoot missiles at people, when to shoot down another aircraft, or when to drop bombs on a building. I don't think a program, with no human input, no GPS, at night, in inclement weather, in the face of enemy sensor jamming, is even able to decide if it's reached its target accurately enough to then attack that target. I also don't think any computer program, even operating only in a simulation, can perfectly evaluate the acceptable level of collateral damage to civilians and infrastructure from its decisions -- to decide, for example, whether it should complete its mission of bombing an enemy unit if that unit enters a home or a hospital. I also don't think either of us is more informed and smarter than the US military and US congress, both of which have decided that there is still a future for manned aircraft for all these reasons.
I don't believe you really think otherwise either. "At this point", we don't even have autonomous cars that work in the real world. With all the best minds in AI working on the problem, with a working GPS and a paved road, our "Google cars" are still foiled by such simple things as a foggy morning blinding the LIDAR. It's going to be a long time before you replace the human pilot in an F15 or a B2.
That said, I imagine being controllable while missing a wing was a side effect of the performance goals addressed with the fuselage's lift, or the design goals addressed with the width of fuselage relative to the wingspan. Flightworthiness without a wing probably was not a goal, though we can assume that many features such as the one-way fuel valves that make it able to sustain inflicted damage were very important to its survivability in this case.
It sounds like the pilot adapted his tools and equipment, and successfully used them in a situation they were not designed for. If you develop some innovative software, it may not have worked without the specific compiler you used, but that isn't the same as saying the person who wrote the compiler wrote your software. It is difficult to tell from the story whether landing was something that very pilots could have done, or whether it was a more or less natural response to the feedback he was getting from the aircraft in the cockpit.
In the case of many of the incidents reported here, the scenarios have been recreated in flight simulators. In the case of UA-232 in particular, I don't believe any of the simulator pilots managed to exceed the performance of Alfred Haynes.
The official NTSB report is opaque on this but suggests simulator results weren't encouraging as far as training to avoid this type of accident:
The DC-10 simulator used in the study was programmed with the aerodynamic characteristics of the accident airplane that were validated by comparison with the actual flight recorder data. DC-10 rated pilots, consisting of line captains, training clerk airmen, and production test pilots were then asked to fly the accident airplane profile Their comments, observations, and performance were recorded and analyzed....
Overall, the results of this study showed that such a maneuver involved many unknown variables and was not trainable, and the degree of controllability during the approach and landing rendered a simulator training exercise virtually impossible.
It will be interesting to see if this site has any effect on Snopes.com
Actual announcement from a BA 747 flight:
[1] http://www.pink-floyd-lyrics.com/html/time-dark-lyrics.html
Edit for image leech removal. Not somewhere I can upload an image to my hosting, but google for "far side wings fall off" to view the comic - http://goo.gl/bnWsM4
Here's a link explaining the project: https://www.rockwellcollins.com/sitecore/content/Data/Succes...
And here's a youtube clip showing a demonstration of the system. A UAV has part of it's wing removed mid-air and the plane manages to land. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGiPNV1TR5k
[1] http://www.historynet.com/the-10-greatest-emergency-landings...
And it sounds like he was flying over water, which carries substantial risks in itself.
Not to mention, an ejected plane can now go hit some school or office building, whatever causing all sort of casualties. Most pilots would rather just try and survive the crash and risk their own life.
http://www.916-starfighter.de/SR-71_Waever.htm
He lived, his back-seater did not.
I recall seeing someone run the numbers, and it turns out that the guy in your link had it worse, as the much lower altitude more than made up for the lower speed.
Did anyone else who watched the Youtube video have trouble following the dialogue due to the 'background' music? It seemed entirely too loud in the mix for me. The fact that the highest quality was 240p means the audio was also low quality, I'm too lazy to look it up but likely 64kbps or less. Perhaps that is also relevant.
Not to be discounted is the fact of my age and the fact that I stopped watching television some years ago. Which is the cause and which the effect is not entirely clear to me.
I've heard stories about A-10 warthogs landing on one wing, too.
Not to diminish this feat, because it is indeed impressive, but it's a natural consequence of having a thrust:weight ratio significantly greater than 1. It's also horrendously expensive in fuel.
I like planes, but I thought this site was about internet startups?