On Fri, 2002-02-08 at 15:06, Andy Ross wrote: > 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.
You might consider that aerodynamic load is not just a function of q but also alpha and beta. > > 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) > > > _______________________________________________ > Flightgear-devel mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel > -- Tony Peden [EMAIL PROTECTED] We all know Linux is great ... it does infinite loops in 5 seconds. -- attributed to Linus Torvalds _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
