[NSRCA-discussion] 747 Snap Entry?

[Matthew Frederick]

Wow, excellent research Marty...

Matt
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Martin X. Moleski, SJ" <moleski at canisius.edu>
To: "General pattern discussion" <nsrca-discussion at lists.nsrca.org>
Sent: Tuesday, July 01, 2008 5:43 PM
Subject: Re: [NSRCA-discussion] 747 Snap Entry?


> rcmaster199 at aol.com wrote:
>
>> A few of us were discussing just such an occurrence recently which 
>> apparently happened by accident and darned near crashed the plane. Dean 
>> remembered the details which went something like this:
>
>> The pilot of the 727 about 20 years ago had the plane trimmed as far aft 
>> as possible and had inputed a bit of flap to use fuel most efficiently. 
>> The co-pilot, soon after returning from a visit to the loo, saw the 
>> trimmed flap and flipped the switch to return the flap to neutral. This 
>> action immediately made the plane too tail heavy which made the plane do 
>> a pretty violent half snap to inverted. ...
>
> TWA Flight 841, 04 APR 1979.  Harvey G. "Hoot" Gibson.
>
> The NTSB says one LE slat failed to retract fully, causing the
> plane to roll to the right:
>
> Final report:
> http://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=19790404-0
>
> Accident report:
> http://amelia.db.erau.edu/reports/ntsb/aar/AAR81-08.pdf
>
> The Accident report notes that the pilot erased all of the
> cockpit voice recorder data (CVR) after the plane landed
> in Detroit.  Although the pilot and copilot denied actuating
> the flaps, the NTSB concluded that they could not have
> deployed by accident and suggests that the crew was trying
> to get 2 degrees extension of the trailing edge flaps.
>
> If all of the leading edge slats had retracted or if the
> pilot had responded to the second roll to the right sooner,
> there wouldn't have been a problem.
>
> "After recognizing the right roll condition, the captain rolled the 
> aircraft
> to a near wings-level upright position; thereafter, through untimely use
> of the flight controls, he permitted the aircraft to roll to the right 
> into
> an uncontrollable attitude. The captain probably was distracted
> immediately after restoring the aircraft to near level flight by his
> efforts in attempting to rectify the source of the control problem."
>
> They went from 39,000 feet to 5,000 feet in 63 seconds.
>
> Hmm.  I'm going to add these links to the Wikipedia article:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Flight_841_(1979).
>
> Marty
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