Cameron Moore wrote:
> "Safety board says pilots can cause tail fin to break off"
> http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/02/08/ntsb.flight587/index.html
>
> IANAPNAE, but this sounds like they're blaming the pilot for a weak
> tail fin. Thought it was interesting...
There's politics at work here somewhere. The actual statement by the
NTSB was actually fairly straightforward and plausible. But the fact
that it was made at a podium in front of a room full of reporters
pretty much guaranteed that the "pilot error" angle would be played
up. Weird.
The statement in question is this:
Many pilots have not been made aware that full rudder inputs,
under certain conditions, can jeopardize the integrity of the
vertical tail fin and that in some airline modes, rudder
deflections can be achieved with relatively small pedal movements.
Well, duh. Get an aircraft going fast enough and full surface
deflections will produce more force than the airframe was designed to
handle. That's the whole purpose behind defining Vne (ne == never
exceed) speeds in the first place. It's never happened to a jetliner
that I'm aware of, but other aircraft have had structural failures for
this reason. I know that the V-tailed Bonanzas had a terrible record
with pilots getting in trouble, working up too much speed and pulling
their tails off.
What this doesn't address is why the tail of this particular airliner
fell off while it was travelling at a comparatively modest speed.
Anything over 250 kts would have been illegal at that altitude and
would have been REALLY played up by the media. But the point is
valid; the NTSB quizzed a bunch of pilots about Vne issues and
discovered that most of them were clueless about the subject.
So they pointed the training problem out.
In front of a room full of reporters...
Andy
--
Andrew J. Ross NextBus Information Systems
Senior Software Engineer Emeryville, CA
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.nextbus.com
"Men go crazy in conflagrations. They only get better one by one."
- Sting (misquoted)
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