 |
| Gerald Krueger |
The mistakes made in aviation are so noticeable because air tragedies are so public. Hardly a person today misses out on the sad news that an airplane has crashed, especially if it contained numerous passengers.
Airline pilots do not dwell on mishaps. They are very well-trained, and they do their job over and over each day. From that kind of experience, they become very relaxed and completely confident in the ability to handle most any type of event that causes some quick action on the pilot’s part.
Having said that, there are still mistakes made in professional circles of flying that cause tragedies.
This thought brings this old zoomie back to a tragedy of nearly 40 years ago. I lost a good friend who I served with in the Navy. He was the captain on an ill-fated flight from New York City on their way to Buffalo, N.Y., to pick up a professional football team.
They took off in terrible weather. Snow, sleet, freezing rain, strong winds, and just about as miserable weather you could ever endure. It was a sort of deadhead flight, with only three pilots in the whole airliner.
They crashed not long after takeoff. The co-pilot was flying and the airspeed kept increasing, and he kept pulling back on the yoke, until the aircraft entered a deep, deep stall. They tried everything possible to recover from the stall and nothing worked. They were in touch with air traffic control and home base right down to the impact in the mountains northwest of New York City.
Now, why did he keep pulling back on the yoke? The airspeed indicator gets its information from a device on the side of the aircraft called the pitot tube, which is very susceptible to freezing conditions. To counter this possible freezing, a “pitot heat” is always turned on as soon as the engines are started.
Sadly, somebody forgot to turn on this pitot heat, and it even went by the takeoff checklist which is very, very unusual. With the freezing rain, the information the airspeed indicator in the cockpit needed was false and showed a regular increase in airspeed when in actuality the airspeed was constant.
A simple act of failing to turn on two switches resulted in fatalities of three highly trained and professional pilots who had never been in a Boeing 727 that got into a deep, deep stall before. The training had neglected to teach them anything about deep stall recovery, so they were naturally helpless in understanding what to do to recover. The aircraft just kept falling and not flying and repeated attempts to get the machine flying again turned out to be impossible.
There is a unique characteristic of the Boeing 727. Installed on the tail of the aircraft is called a “T-Tail.” The exceptional design of the 727 is its long fuselage topped off by the high “T-Tail” with the engines at the complete aft part of the entire aircraft. Until this accident, no one had ever deep, deep stalled this unique aircraft. Perhaps if someone had, this terrible tragedy could have been avoided.
Nuff said.
Gerald “Jerry” Krueger is a retired educator, coach, commercial pilot and farmer. His column publishes Mondays.
- Source: http://www.aberdeennews.com/news/opinion
