"...and Leon's getting l-a-a-arger!"
Posted on 08/08/2015 8:27:27 PM PDT by DUMBGRUNT
"...and Leon's getting l-a-a-arger!"
Pilots are probably too young to remember Southern flight 242. Most pilots are too smart now to try to fly through a heavy hailstorm. Lucky their engines held together. Weather radar is a whole lot better now than it was in 1977. Not sure that there is an excuse for this one.
Seriously, that plane will be in the hangar for at least a couple of days just to replace the windshield and the nose. And will likely be flown to a facility to do a full C-level maintenance check to make sure everything else on the plane that needs to be replaced will be replaced.
It’s an Airbus. Half their electronics are probably off from false positives.
Ice is slightly more problematic, so much that the FAA requires engines be able to handle several specific varieties of ice formation and ensure they can recover quickly. Besides starting the engines in freezing conditions, testers shoot huge ice balls inside a running engine.
Video at link:
http://www.wired.com/2014/11/how-ge-tests-jet-engines/
Via Snopes
In an issue of Meat & Poultry magazine, editors quoted from “Feathers,” the publication of the California Poultry Industry Federation, telling the following story:
The US Federal Aviation Administration has a unique device for testing the strength of windshields on airplanes. The device is a gun that launches a dead chicken at a plane’s windshield at approximately the speed the plane flies.
The theory is that if the windshield doesn’t crack from the carcass impact, it’ll survive a real collision with a bird during flight.
It seems the British were very interested in this and wanted to test a windshield on a brand new, speedy locomotive they’re developing.
They borrowed FAA’s chicken launcher, loaded the chicken and fired.
The ballistic chicken shattered the windshield, broke the engineer’s chair and embedded itself in the back wall of the engine’s cab. The British were stunned and asked the FAA to recheck the test to see if everything was done correctly.
The FAA reviewed the test thoroughly and had one recommendation:
“Use a thawed chicken.”
It sucks to land on a highway with wings wider than the highway and trees beside it. It really sucks when your turbines do not produce power due to hail damage and you windscreen is beat to hell by hail. An ugly day for a good pilot, it could have been worse and it was not a good day for them or passengers.
I remember that and they took a lot of kidding about that.LOL
Any landing you can walk away from is a good one.I don’t care how hairy it gets.
Everything else that needs to be replaced will probably include the seat cushions
Just yesterday I was watching all those clips from Airplane! What it turned into was me watching multiple episodes of Police Squad... which I can’t believe I never saw before.
Actually, the plane involved was originally delivered to Northwest Airlines in 1992. There’s a chance it could be retired instead given the plane is 23 years old.
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