Posted on 09/16/2011 6:16:44 PM PDT by NoLibZone
Edited on 09/16/2011 6:30:12 PM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
A World War II era fighter plane plunged into the grandstands Friday during a popular annual air show, injuring at least 75 spectators and leaving a horrific scene of bodies and wreckage.
It wasn't immediately known how many people were killed, but a medical official said more than 75 people were injured.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
I feel for you. While I was in college, my best friend was serving in the Army in Germany. I had gotten a letter that he was going to see an air show, and it was the one back around 1988 or so, when the Russian plane crashed into the crowed, killing a number of people. I received the letter shortly after I saw the news about the crash. Luckily, at the last minute, he and his friends decided to go to the Monsters of Rock, or some such concert, and were safe. But there was about a week and a half that I was seriously worried.
Mark
While I don't claim to be an expert, I'm wondering if the P-51 he was flying was based on the same model as that in the photo you included, the "D" model. Earlier models, like the P-51 "A" and "B" models didn't have the "teardrop canopy," though they did have the oil cooler scoop beneath the belly.
So if it was an earlier version, I'm not sure that it would have had the massive structural modifications you mentioned.
Mark
Happens @ around the 40 minute mark.
No fireball, and it’s perversely lucky the strike came staight-down; if he’d have come in fast and shallow, he could easily have taken out hundreds.
It looks like about 20 dead or so, probably less, though there are certainly more injured.
The worst one I’ve seen is that Su-27 in the Ukraine, with the fireball, and all.
Video pulled.
11:00 News channel 8 showed a VERY clear still photo of a trim-tab coming off the plane’s tail just before the pilot lost full control.
The trim-tab is not that large a part, it is part of the horizontal stabilizer.
Apparently, losing it made this plane uncontrollable.
So, it seems fairly clear that this was a mechanical failure at racing speed.
No doubt the NTSB will have more to say, in several months.
Makes me wonder why he didn't go back to the drawing stage and build a new aircraft from the ground up, new metal, new materials, the whole works?
What he had was a P-51 in the sense that Richard Petty used to drive "Dodges" ....
OK. You are absolutely correct with the model designation and differences. The plane that crashed did start out as a P51-D model, not an A or B.
wrote:
Look at the pictures. That airplane was completely redesigned and modified extensively. The canopy was modified and lowered,
While I don't claim to be an expert, I'm wondering if the P-51 he was flying was based on the same model as that in the photo you included, the "D" model. Earlier models, like the P-51 "A" and "B" models didn't have the "teardrop canopy," though they did have the oil cooler scoop beneath the belly.
So if it was an earlier version, I'm not sure that it would have had the massive structural modifications you mentioned.
Mark
Still, the canopies on these "unlimited class" air racers are usually lowered and shortened (and sometimes narrowed), and the upper rear of the fuselage is lowered/modified to match.
For racing, the oil cooler scoops are almost always removed, and the oil cooler is usually changed over to a oil to glycol/water heat exchanger (the stock cooler is a cross flow air/oil cooler, similar to a car radiator). I think the P51-H and P51-K models had a similar glycol/water based oil cooler, and lacked the belly scoop for the cooler. That's the design that the racers tend to imitate/copy for the lower fuselage, if I remember right.
Engine cooling (both oil and he engine itself through a water/glycol cooling jacket and radiator system) is one area where these racing machines are very highly modified. These guys use a much more efficient, more modern radiator design, with thicker cores, more rows of tubing and many more fins than the original. Beyond that, they typically spray water over the radiator during the races, at the rate of 4 to 6 gallons per minute. The water flash boils on the radiator, carrying away significantly more heat than just air through the radiators would carry. This gives these planes a characteristic white steam "vapor trail" when they are racing.
The North American P-51 has one of the best wing airfoils ever designed for subsonic flight. Very good lift and very low drag. You could spend tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions on design and wind tunnel testing time and you'd be hard pressed to come up with something better. Actually, you'd be extremely unlikely to come up with something better, and hard pressed to even match that wing.
lentulusgracchus wrote:
Makes me wonder why he didn't go back to the drawing stage and build a new aircraft from the ground up, new metal, new materials, the whole works?
What he had was a P-51 in the sense that Richard Petty used to drive "Dodges"
Your second statement is about on the mark. That plane was as much a P51-D Mustang as this car is a Ford Mustang:
I don't think the elevator trim tab would have caused the crash. It would have caused a reaction from the pilot, though. When something goes wrong in one of these races, the instinct of the pilot is to climb out of the race formation immediately. They want to convert as much of their forward speed as possible into altitude. That gives them more options for an emergency landing.
Candor7 wrote:
Thanks for the update. What a tragedy.I am amazed that an aeleron failure would cause a dive in, but at speeds like that , maybe the elevators could not keep the AC up if one aileron was forcing the AC down, it did not appear to be spinning or rolling in the vid.
The videos that I've seen from the ground don't stay on the plane while it's in the air, but from the few frames I have seen, the plane seems to have rolled to the right. It looks like the right hand wing may have had a structural failure from the abrupt upward maneuver. It's also possible that in pulling up, he snap stalled the right wing (only) and the thing rolled over from that.
Again, the videos are really sketchy around the area where he goes off the race course, at the beginning of the sequence of events leading to the crash. The plane did veer abruptly. Either straightening out, or actually turning right (where the course turns left.
There are some pictures being shown today with the elevator trim tab breaking off. That's most likely what started everything, but I don't think that alone would have brought the plane down. I doubt this racing plane was equipped with any kind of flight data recorder, unless his race team/engineers were doing some data gathering. I confess, I'm not familiar enough with the rules and practices of these racing teams to say for sure. In some forms of racing (NASCAR comes to mind), data acquisition/storage devices are banned by the rules. We may never really know. That would be the worst outcome.
Reminds me of that horrific Ramstein crash, back in 1988....with the Italian team....
Prayers out for these poor folks and their loved ones....
And if I am lucky, God will appoint me Chief Atonement Officer.
Left side tail stabilizer broke off in the air.
Thanks....some were saying starboard aileron trim tab.The turning forces on the surface likely were just too high for it.
Laz if you were Chief Atonement Officer I would be insanely happy!!! I could just imagine you zapping psycho libs with lightning :)
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