[varyouga]

Hold ma beer n watch dis!

[Dashing Dasher]

Pingable?

[handy old one]

Darwin award on the way??

[Maceman]

Hold muh beer alert.

[Safetgiver]

Hold muh Pepsi and watch this......CRASH! Alert.

[caver]

Geez, glad no one on the ground got hurt by the actions of these two.

[TheOtherOne]

[demlosers]

Well, now we know the published maximum ceiling for that aircraft is only good for 2 minutes. The manufacturer better put out a warning notice.

[Kirkwood]

Take the Pepsi Challenge

[Tennessee_Bob]

"This is more a story of pilots having time on their hands and playing with things in the cockpit that they shouldn't," he said.

New standard equipment in all modern jet aircraft is a big dog. The pilot's job is to feed the dog. The dog's job is to bite the pilot if he tries to touch anything.

[SkyPilot]

I don't understand why they could not airstart the engines once they were at a lower altitude. Something is wrong here.

[wideawake]

Good thing they didn't kill anyone else.

[USNBandit]

This article does nothing to shed light on why the engines failed. They were flying a light load at the operating ceiling of the aircraft. What happened?

The article makes much of the pilots' "see if we can do it" attitude, but they were still within the altitude envelope approved by the FAA.

[bwteim]

From AV Web in October regarding original incident:
http://www.avweb.com/newswire/10_43a/leadnews/188357-1.html


They almost made it. Pilots of a Pinnacle Airlines CRJ2 apparently glided their powerless regional jet for 20 minutes and almost 100 miles before it crashed two miles short of the Jefferson City, Mo., airport late Thursday.

Now, the NTSB is trying to figure out why both engines apparently stopped, possibly while the plane was at cruise. The plane was on a repositioning flight from Little Rock, Ark., to Minneapolis. Only the pilots, Captain Jesse Rhodes, of Palm Harbor, Fla., and First Officer Peter Cesarz, of Helotes, Texas, were on board when the regional jet went down in a residential area of the city, narrowly missing several houses.

Both pilots were killed but no one on the ground was hurt. NTSB spokeswoman Carol Carmody said flight data recorder information showed the plane was at 41,000 feet, about 100 miles south of Jefferson City, at 9:51 p.m. Four minutes later, both engines quit. Other reports suggest one engine quit at cruise and the other during the emergency descent. The plane crashed at 10:15 p.m.

Carmody said 41,000 feet is the maximum altitude for the CRJ2 and told reporters that exceeding that altitude could cause engine failure.

She also said there was no clear indication of the cause of engine stoppage and investigators don't know why the plane was flying so high. "That's the most interesting thing," she said.

Carmody said the plane had been pulled from a scheduled flight earlier Thursday when an indicator light went on for its bleed air system. Unspecified maintenance was performed before the plane took off later that evening.

[tuffydoodle]

ping

[Luna]

Idiots.

[Xenophobic Alien]

WTF ping

Let me know if you would like on or off the ping list

[safisoft]

This is nonsense. Not only is it NOT wrong for a crew to take an aircraft to its PUBLISHED max altitude, it is a good thing if the light load permitted. Most pilots of commercial jets have been at the PUBLISHED max altitude for their aircraft, so wanting to do that was not wrong for this crew - if in fact 41,000 was the max published altitude.

The question is not whether they should have been at the PUBLISHED max altitude, but whether FL410 was in fact the published max altitude. This article does not answer that question, and blaming the pilots without that information is pure silliness.

If FL410 is the max published altitude for the Canadair, then the fault is not the pilots' for going there.

[Syntyr]

As pilots tend to say they ran out of Altitude, Speed and Ideas all at the same time...

[nightdriver]

I wonder what kind of engines are used on that aircraft. I've been on commercial flights before that went to 41,000 ft.

Jet engines control themselves by monitoring internal pressures. At high altitudes, the thin air passes through at such a high velocity that the fire gets blown out just like a birthday cake candle. The good ol' P&W engines on the airliner I was on were engineered well enough to accomodate it.