My Dad (retired air force) also forwarded this to me, which I found pretty interesting. One of the 'features' of the X-29[1] demonstrator (which was exploring dynamically unstable flight) was that it continued to fly in all sorts of 'outside the envelope' scenarios.
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.
The thing is, it just sort of happens. It's not some massive effort to remain calm, but rather you just automatically focus. That's how people have described it, and it's been my own experience. I've never experienced anything close to this bad, but I've had a couple of aeronautical close scrapes and there's just no room for fear.
Edit: had the same experience in a car once as well. Total focus on solving the problem. Terror comes after.
After a total hydraulic failure, the pilots still managed to land just using thrust difference between the two engines. I'm impressed anybody survived.
A Belgian pilot managed to land a DHL Airbus A300B4-200F jet after a missile attack had drained all 3 hydraulic systems and damaged the left wing. He also landed the plane using throttle control only.
I know this is kind of nitpicky, but a loss of engine power isn't really an impossible situation if the plane is close enough to a runway. It's by no means easy to land one of those things without power, but they are designed for it to be possible.
A better explanation is the adaptive fly by wire system used the remaining wing to generate some lift which would normally cause roll however it compensated by using tail's control surface. Combined with thrust vectoring a high angle of attack to maximize lift from the airframe and a ridiculous amount of thrust and you only need one wing.
PS: You can also fly an F-15 sideways the stall speed simply goes through the roof.
Neither the original F-15 nor the F-15D mentioned in the article have fly-by-wire, which is considered as a feature for the updated F-15SE Silent Eagle.
So interesting aerodynamics and mad flying skills, not fancy electronics :-)
The point about fuselage lift isn't wrong. The F-15 has a relatively lightly loaded wing because it generates so much lift from the fuselage. Which means that the torque created by one wing continuing to operate while the other is destroyed isn't as much as you'd think.
This is not related, but still an interesting event. The Cornfield Bomber: An F-106 that went into a spin, pilot ejected, plane then managed to recover from spin and land itself.
>No warning light was on and the navigation computer worked as usual; (I just needed a warning light in my panel to indicate that I missed a wing...)."
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.
Hacker News seems to love fighter planes recently. They are pretty cool. However, there is one fighter plane that I absolutely hate everything about. The F35.
I'm not even sure why we're building this style of fighter jet at this point. A remotely operated or fully autonomous fighter jet seems like the future.
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.
Kinda disappointed the total emphasis is on him being a "hell of a good pilot" instead of the control engineers who allowed the plane to compensate for losing a wing. There's no way that plane would have stayed in the air without their work.
I suspect it's fair to share the credit. Point being that the pilot utilized the plane's capabilities (and his lack of awareness of the gravity of the situation) to land successfully. Wouldn't surprise me to find other pilots who'd failed at that.
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.
Everyone would have been safe if they were on the ground without all that extra potential energy. Maybe it is the engineers' fault that they were in the air in the first place.
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.
I don't want to detract from the incredible skill of the pilot, but the success of this event is also partly due to John Boyd, Pierre Sprey, and the rest of the "Fighter Mafia" who shaped the AF policy that produced the F-15 and F-16.
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress."
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
This reminds me of a case study sponsored by DARPA where a plane that suffered significant damage to a wing could still land when autonomous systems took over.
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
Also about this incident:
"Nedivi (the pilot) reportedly was demoted for disobeying his instructor's order to eject and immediately thereafter promoted for saving his airplane—which two months later was repaired and flying again." [1]
An ejection seat is actually only slightly safer than crashing the plane; the strain it puts on the vertebrae in particular is enough to force the pilot to retire after a few ejections.
And it sounds like he was flying over water, which carries substantial risks in itself.
There's a typical trend of people underestimating the severity of dangerous situations, but also pilot bravado in thinking, "I've got five minutes of altitude left, I can save this thing!" rather than the desk jockey, hindsight view of "He's only got five minutes to live."
I apologize in advance for posting rather far off topic but I am compelled.
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.
It blows my mind that it can accelerate in a 100% vertical climb.
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.
The fuel streaming away visually obscured the fact the wing was missing. While the linked History Channel video appears to be partly reconstruction and partly stock footage manipulated to dramatize the situation, at least part of it appears to have been real footage as well. There's an interior cabin angle that appears to show the real plane with the fuel streaming in such a way that it becomes clear why the damage was obscured. There's also at least one quick shot they seem to have gotten of the real plane landing, as it is clearly missing a wing at that point.
Partially being facetious here, but if he were a "hell of a good pilot" wouldn't this landing not have had to happen? That said it's pretty impressive that he managed to pull this off
Remember that the plane he collided with was being piloted by someone else. I haven't found any evidence to suggest it was the other pilot's fault, but nothing points to this pilot's negligence either.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|12 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] mikeash|12 years ago|reply
Edit: had the same experience in a car once as well. Total focus on solving the problem. Terror comes after.
[+] [-] smackay|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] FigBug|12 years ago|reply
After a total hydraulic failure, the pilots still managed to land just using thrust difference between the two engines. I'm impressed anybody survived.
[+] [-] stcredzero|12 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Baghdad_DHL_attempted_shoo...
[+] [-] twistedpair|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gonzo|12 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madeline_Tompkins
[+] [-] foldr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jussij|12 years ago|reply
Yet this guy still managed to dead stick land his crippled F-16 aircraft.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=21b_1358528621&comments=1
[+] [-] gonzo|12 years ago|reply
The A-10 is designed to fly with one engine, one tail, one elevator, and half of one wing missing.
[+] [-] nether|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Retric|12 years ago|reply
PS: You can also fly an F-15 sideways the stall speed simply goes through the roof.
[+] [-] mpweiher|12 years ago|reply
So interesting aerodynamics and mad flying skills, not fancy electronics :-)
[+] [-] rayiner|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foldr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zandor|12 years ago|reply
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3M2XZEYqIpQ
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornfield_Bomber
[+] [-] dredmorbius|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jere|12 years ago|reply
Hilarious.
[+] [-] raverbashing|12 years ago|reply
But then again it's a fighter jet, so maybe the "distraction level" is lower and too many warnings means eject.
[+] [-] tzury|12 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] tgholford|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] fasteddie31003|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sliverstorm|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aloisius|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] GotAnyMegadeth|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MechSkep|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|12 years ago|reply
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.
http://www.airdisaster.com/reports/ntsb/AAR90-06.pdf
[+] [-] rz2k|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] surlyadopter|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jobu|12 years ago|reply
It will be interesting to see if this site has any effect on Snopes.com
[+] [-] kitd|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arethuza|12 years ago|reply
Actual announcement from a BA 747 flight:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_9
[+] [-] infinotize|12 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] joshrotenberg|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OWaz|12 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] jjallen|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sushirain|12 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.historynet.com/the-10-greatest-emergency-landings...
[+] [-] throwaway812|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DaveLond|12 years ago|reply
And it sounds like he was flying over water, which carries substantial risks in itself.
[+] [-] nether|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kencausey|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] amorphid|12 years ago|reply
I've heard stories about A-10 warthogs landing on one wing, too.
[+] [-] rosser|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] giarc|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jerf|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doorhammer|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikeash|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] S_A_P|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monkey_slap|12 years ago|reply