How to crash your plane properly upside down

[Gandahar]

Don't get hurt ... check
Plane almost undamaged ... check


http://www.kentlive.news/a-plane-has-crashed-in-as...


Pretty impressive. It's like the anti-stunt version of the stunt particle.

[Mave]

Didn't realise fokker albatrosses were used in WW2.... ;-)

[Dogwatch]

Downed all over Kent

[Gandahar]

Mave said:

Didn't realise fokker albatrosses were used in WW2.... ;-)

Me neither.

Here's an interesting fact, the newly formed state of Israel used Messerschmit BF109 copies in it's fledgling airforce.

[davepoth]

Gandahar said:

Don't get hurt ... check
Plane almost undamaged ... check


http://www.kentlive.news/a-plane-has-crashed-in-as...


Pretty impressive. It's like the anti-stunt version of the stunt particle.

Maybe the plane turned turtle in a forced landing?

[AnotherClarkey]

Mave said:

Didn't realise fokker albatrosses were used in WW2.... ;-)

Didn't realise that Fokker made Albatrosses....... ;-)

[Mave]

AnotherClarkey said:

Mave said:

Didn't realise fokker albatrosses were used in WW2.... ;-)

Didn't realise that Fokker made Albatrosses....... ;-)

Apologies, albatros dv :-o

[steve2]

It was at Goodwood over the weekend

[ecsrobin]

Gandahar said:

Mave said:

Didn't realise fokker albatrosses were used in WW2.... ;-)

Me neither.

Here's an interesting fact, the newly formed state of Israel used Messerschmit BF109 copies in it's fledgling airforce.

Not really a copy though as it was from the original jigs and tooling I believe in the same factories the Messerschmitts were produced. The name changed and so did the engine when they run out.

[aeropilot]

ecsrobin said:

Gandahar said:

Mave said:

Didn't realise fokker albatrosses were used in WW2.... ;-)

Me neither.

Here's an interesting fact, the newly formed state of Israel used Messerschmit BF109 copies in it's fledgling airforce.

Not really a copy though as it was from the original jigs and tooling I believe in the same factories the Messerschmitts were produced. The name changed and so did the engine when they run out.

Avia S-199, used the Jumo engine and prop.....which created an evil handling machine...even more so than a DB engine 109!!

[jamieduff1981]

I'm going to venture that the undamaged plane will be non-trivially damaged and won't be flying before this time next year if it goes well.

This one ...



... nosed over at Flying Legends 2011. The commentary and wider casual opinion was that it broke the propeller - no big deal. It needed the wings and fuselage rebuilt due to bad crushing of the former and twisting of the primary structure of the latter. So quite a big deal actually.

Still, no big deal. It's no harder than reshelling a monocoque body car using a body shell you can't buy.

[aeropilot]

Gandahar said:

Pretty impressive. It's like the anti-stunt version of the stunt particle.

I know that's tongue-in-cheek, but it's not too far removed from what the late, great Neil Williams was faced with during an aerobatic competition a long time ago.....

"While practicing for the 1970 world aerobatic flyoff, British champion Neil Williams felt the wing spar of his Zlin 526 suddenly fail during a pullout from a vertical dive. As he instinctively closed the throttle and tried to level off, Williams realized that the left wing was folded at nearly a 45-degree angle to the fuselage, severed at the root but still somehow held in place.

Sure that he was about to die, Williams flashed back to a Bulgarian Zlin pilot who’d snapped an upper wing bolt while flying inverted. When that airplane flick-rolled upright in reaction to the suddenly askew spar, the wing flopped back into position under positive Gs and held until the stunned pilot landed. Williams figured that if he’d had the opposite failure upright, maybe he could invert the Zlin and hold the wing in place with negative Gs long enough to at worst crash-land inverted, perhaps into trees to cushion the impact.

With the airplane on its back and the broken wing indeed maintaining a tenuous connection, Williams now had another problem: The Zlin’s engine died. He’d inadvertently jostled the fuel cock closed during the confusion, but he got the engine restarted, remembering to select the correct tank for inverted flight.

The airfield from which he’d departed, RAF Hullavington, was now nearby, and his ground crew had already summoned crash trucks, so Williams decided to land there. He flew the pattern and final approach inverted and at the last possible moment rolled the Zlin upright and flopped onto the ground just as the left wing totally failed.

At the last possible moment? Consider this: The Zlin’s left wingtip briefly furrowed the airstrip grass for six yards while the airplane rolled from inverted to level, yet never broke the plastic cover of the wingtip nav light."

[eharding]

aeropilot said:

Gandahar said:

Pretty impressive. It's like the anti-stunt version of the stunt particle.

I know that's tongue-in-cheek, but it's not too far removed from what the late, great Neil Williams was faced with during an aerobatic competition a long time ago.....

"While practicing for the 1970 world aerobatic flyoff, British champion Neil Williams felt the wing spar of his Zlin 526 suddenly fail during a pullout from a vertical dive. As he instinctively closed the throttle and tried to level off, Williams realized that the left wing was folded at nearly a 45-degree angle to the fuselage, severed at the root but still somehow held in place.

Sure that he was about to die, Williams flashed back to a Bulgarian Zlin pilot who’d snapped an upper wing bolt while flying inverted. When that airplane flick-rolled upright in reaction to the suddenly askew spar, the wing flopped back into position under positive Gs and held until the stunned pilot landed. Williams figured that if he’d had the opposite failure upright, maybe he could invert the Zlin and hold the wing in place with negative Gs long enough to at worst crash-land inverted, perhaps into trees to cushion the impact.

With the airplane on its back and the broken wing indeed maintaining a tenuous connection, Williams now had another problem: The Zlin’s engine died. He’d inadvertently jostled the fuel cock closed during the confusion, but he got the engine restarted, remembering to select the correct tank for inverted flight.

The airfield from which he’d departed, RAF Hullavington, was now nearby, and his ground crew had already summoned crash trucks, so Williams decided to land there. He flew the pattern and final approach inverted and at the last possible moment rolled the Zlin upright and flopped onto the ground just as the left wing totally failed.

At the last possible moment? Consider this: The Zlin’s left wingtip briefly furrowed the airstrip grass for six yards while the airplane rolled from inverted to level, yet never broke the plastic cover of the wingtip nav light."

...and hence the UK national trophy at Unlimited level, the Neil Williams trophy...



Back in those days, they didn't tend to bother so much with parachutes - had Williams been wearing one at the time, there wouldn't have been quite so much drama.

The thing about aerobatic trophies is that it is far better to have you name engraved in small letters at the bottom than in large letters at the top - the latter case generally meaning that you're dead - although as it happens there is one trophy with both our names on it, but Neil got his on there several years before I was born....

[aeropilot]

eharding said:

but Neil got his on there several years before I was born....

I feel lucky that I had the privilege to see him fly.

[Dr Jekyll]

And Neil Williams was killed flying a licence built version of another WW2 German type.

(Another as opposed to BF109)

[FourWheelDrift]

aeropilot said:

ecsrobin said:

Gandahar said:

Mave said:

Didn't realise fokker albatrosses were used in WW2.... ;-)

Me neither.

Here's an interesting fact, the newly formed state of Israel used Messerschmit BF109 copies in it's fledgling airforce.

Not really a copy though as it was from the original jigs and tooling I believe in the same factories the Messerschmitts were produced. The name changed and so did the engine when they run out.

Avia S-199, used the Jumo engine and prop.....which created an evil handling machine...even more so than a DB engine 109!!

Avia also continued to build Me 262 jets and the Czech airforce used them up until 1951.