This one needed a boost to get airborne (loaded, I guess!)
Posted on 09/14/2009 8:15:11 PM PDT by Flavius
At an airshow, an old Handley Page Victor bomber was supposed to do a taxiby photo op. Instead, it took off. The explanation? The co-pilot accidentally firewalled the throttles. Really? You be the .
(Excerpt) Read more at youtube.com ...
Bear in mind, the ‘co-pilot’ in this case was really no such thing. Even the ‘pilot’ is no longer officially qualified. While a genuine pilot would be highly unlikely to make such a mistake, that’s not who was sitting in the chair.
This one needed a boost to get airborne (loaded, I guess!)
My flight training has had me keep my hand on the throttle whenever on an active runway. I call shenanigans.
One explanation I heard was that the pilot, a former Victor pilot in the RAF, didn’t realize the aircraft was loaded with such a small of amount of fuel (thus weight) and pressed the airspeed too much resulting in a lift-off.
Hard for me to believe that the pilot didn’t know what the tanks were holding as part of general pre-flight and he should certainly have known the Victor’s take-off speed under the circumstances.
Me, I think the pilot wanted to generate as much “wow” factor for the crowd and got over-confident........and then the dang thing got off the ground. Oops....
Hard one to really believe, spent time at California Capital Air show this past weekend. To get a hog like that one off the ground from what I saw in the video was a bit more than some throttle up activity. No wonder the Brits have not figured things out in their neck of the woods.
Not really a hog. Probably only about 100K lb weight, with 2600 sq ft of wing area and close to 70,000 lb engine thrust, its gonna lift easy.
The prototype Victor with only 30,000lb thrust lifted off in 1500ft on its first flight.
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