Mesabah

Interestingly, I combed through the Delta 747 manuals on DeltaNet and it looks like the Delta training manual has a procedure laid out as Carl states. The Boeing company manual does not, unless I missed it.

Check Essential

If you roll a widebody transport 90 degrees and drop the nose far enough below the horizon to make airspeed rapidly increase you would have to be trading quite a bit of altitude.
Might work at 10,000 feet but I don't think you'd have enough room to perform a maneuver like that right after takeoff.

gr8vu

We do this drill in C-17 for runaway pitch trim. It's tough to do with less than 200+ knts and some altitude to play with. Since the reaction would have needed to be so close to the ground and airspeed at takeoff speeds not sure you could keep it from stalling past 60 degrees bank or digging in a wing. I'm sure we'll do it in the sim shortly. The gear were still down and with the flaps probably in takeoff that would have been a factor to help and hinder as well.

JobHopper

A procedure such as Carl's might work in a "steady state" condition. However, if the cargo did come loose it was now free floating in the back. Who is to say it didn't all come crashing back forward as the nose fell through the horizon? Those guys never had a chance. RIP.

TeddyKGB

Right on. I know Carl thinks he is the man, but put him in that ship and he would be well on to his way to the scene of the accident.

iceman49

Don't think that Carl was implying he was the "man, in fact his last paragraph says; "There's no way you can pull this off without the instant reaction that only comes from prior training and mental preparation. Assuming the crew never got this training, they sadly had no chance. Not saying with certainty this recovery technique would have worked in this condition, but it may have."

Sad deal!

Carl Spackler

I agree with that assessment. The 747-400 has very docile aerodynamic stall characteristics. Even the spin that was developing looked like it was beginning to self correct while the aircraft was still stalled.

Carl

Carl Spackler

First off, the fact that we're talking about a wide body has no relevance to aerodynamics and physics. Second, you're not purely "trading" altitude for airspeed because the engines are at full thrust. This is how you are able to maintain a net altitude gain with every roll reversal cycle.

Actually, you do. In my case we started at 10,000 feet only to provide the required altitude to recover if we departed controlled flight. We began the test at 10,000 feet and V2+10. We bottomed out from the first roll reversal cycle at about 10,500 then gained about 500 to 600 feet with every subsequent cycle.

Again, I don't know if this would have worked for this incident since we don't know how bad the CG shift was, or even if there was a CG shift. I'm just saying it may have been a way to prevent a full aerodynamic stall. For me, even if my first cycle resulted in ground contact, I'd rather hit the ground in controlled flight because the airplane slides after it hits. In uncontrolled flight, the airplane wreckage is all in one area and nobody can survive those kind of G loads.

Carl

Columbia

Why weren't those tires on this MRAPs removed or at least deflated?

Justdoinmyjob

MRAPs have run flat tires. Deflating them wouldn't do any good. As to removing them, That would take a lot of time and effort once they were loaded, only to reverse the process a few hours later.

In case anyone doesn't know what an MRAP is, it's the size of a 18 wheeler rig.