BonzoESC posted:

E-170/175/190/195 is one of my favorite narrowbodies; I can stand up straight unlike on the CRJs, and the windows are high enough to look out of. Delta's have a (usually empty and therefore easy to upgrade to) first class section, and they're putting wifi in them too.

(Your image looks right on Chrome on Lion.)

Nerobro posted:

I remember all the CRJ complaints in here. I found a good explanation of why they suck so bad.

They have no leading edge lift generation devices. At landing speed, they would descend level at a 7 deg angle. ...... Commercial landing paths are 10 deg. So they're flying INTO the runway. The proper landing procedure has them pulling up hard at 50' AGL into a 6deg up angle before touchdown.

This just sounds like crashing to me.

Nerobro posted:

I remember all the CRJ complaints in here. I found a good explanation of why they suck so bad.

They have no leading edge lift generation devices. At landing speed, they would descend level at a 7 deg angle. ...... Commercial landing paths are 10 deg. So they're flying INTO the runway. The proper landing procedure has them pulling up hard at 50' AGL into a 6deg up angle before touchdown.

This just sounds like crashing to me.

Linedance posted:

the business class Contour seats on Air Canada all have them. They're herringbone oriented pods with hard things like monitors to smack your head on in the event of a dodgy landing. I'm guessing for someone figured the same thing for the bulkhead seats on the plane you were on.

Philip Greenspun posted:

The Canadair Regional Jet is considered one of the hardest airliners to fly. There are no leading-edge devices, which means that Vref on approach (speed just before arriving at the runway threshold) is 145 knots, about 20 knots faster than a Boeing 737. The high speed comes with a nose-down attitude of about -3 degrees, which must be adjusted to a flare of about +9 degrees during the last 50'. This lead one FlightSafety instructor to refer to every landing in a CRJ as a "controlled crash".

Slo-Tek posted:

and they also crash in front of cameras a fair bit.

Epic Fail Guy posted:

I will take a JungleBus any day over a CRJ, mostly because i'm 6'3".

D C posted:

I've heard that there's an actual airframe hiding somewhere that wasn't destroyed, you would think by now that coming forward with it would be okay, I dont see how the government would have issue with it, I'm sure most of the people involved with the decision to cancel it would be dead by now.

slidebite posted:

No way an airframe survived the torches. Nothing more than wishful thinking and dreams.

Schindler's Fist posted:

Every single one was cut up. This is why it's such a sad story, and why Canadians can still be bothered by it all these years later. There was a dramatized CBC mini series with Dan Aykroyd, 'The Arrow', and it has a scene where a pilot absconds with an Arrow to a secret location - pure romantic fiction.

BonzoESC posted:

The CRJ is proof that Canadians shouldn't be allowed to make airplanes, sorry.
- a canadian

SyHopeful posted:

Don't you dare blaspheme your DHC-2/3 heritage

SyHopeful posted:

Don't you dare blaspheme your DHC-2/3 heritage

Epic Fail Guy posted:

What sort of kite is this?

Meydey posted:

The pic of the P51 graveyard got me searching. Found this...a scene from The Best Years of Our Lives from 1946. I watched it with no sound in a Starbucks, and, well, gently caress. I now have a new(old) movie on my list to watch.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tU0d3DVcKoY (start at 1:50)

Meydey posted:

The pic of the P51 graveyard got me searching. Found this...a scene from The Best Years of Our Lives from 1946. I watched it with no sound in a Starbucks, and, well, gently caress. I now have a new(old) movie on my list to watch.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tU0d3DVcKoY (start at 1:50)

Space Gopher posted:

Good to know that objective source LockheedMartinVideos says that there are no problems!

Back in the real world, those tests had a few problems. Nothing serious, though - just enough cracking to stop all VTOL testing on three of five airframes. I'm sure that Lockheed can fix the problem on a shoestring. Probably not more than a few hundred mil, and what's that, really?

Bill Smith posted:

“After Grumman’s Chief Test Pilot was killed in an F-111B takeoff accident in the spring of 1967, I was named the new chief test pilot.

The F-14 program promised to produce an airplane ready for first flight 17 months after contract go-ahead, which would be January 1971. As chief test pilot, I would make the first flight, and Bill Miller, our project pilot, would occupy the rear seat.

The F-14 program was led by a vice president who had previously spent years heading up the Preliminary Design Department. He was a very aggressive leader with a short attention span. It was his goal to fly a month earlier than the optimistic schedule had promised.

By December 30th, everyone was back (from a Christmas break), bright-eyed, and the weather was bluebird day. We were ready for our “real” First Flight, when we would go to altitude, sweep the wings, push out to Mach 1.2, and generally exercise all systems within the modest flight envelope allowed on First Flight and, of course, take pictures. (The First Flight, taking the Tomcat up and making a few simple turns, was made on December 21.)

By agreement, we would swap seats and Bill would sit up front. The weather was CAVU and cold, with about 20 knots of wind out of the northwest.

After takeoff we climbed to 10,000 feet, lest there be any hydraulic or mechanical mischief in the system. We had rounded Montauk Point and were headed back along Long Island’s south shore when we got to gear retraction entry on the flight card.

Immediately after raising the gear handle, our A-6 chase pilot said we were venting fluid out of the right side of the airplane. At the same instant, the combined hydraulic system gauge went to zero. Twenty-one gallons of hydraulic fluid had just left the airplane.

We started back to home base at 180 knots, our limit airspeed because the flaps were still extended. In about ten minutes, we were lined up with our runway about three miles out when we blew our gear down with the nitrogen bottle, since our flight hydraulic system only powered the flight controls.

At this time, our chase said we were venting more fluid, and our flight hydraulic system gauge went to zero. The airplane then went through about two cycles of gentle but uncontrollable pitching, and then snapped violently nose down.

At this point we were about a half-mile short of the runway, about 25 feet above the trees. Bill quickly initiated the ejection sequence using his face curtain. A sensitive accelerometer on the nose strut recorded and telemetered back to the ground the little blips showing the firing of the canopy and then the ejection guns on the two seats in turn. That all took 0.9 seconds as advertised; 0.4 seconds later the nosewheel hit a tree!
My Martin-Baker seat sent me staight up about 150 feet, but when Bill’s fired a split second later, it sent him forward, only gaining about 10 feet vertically. Both chutes deployed nicely, and neither of us was injured. Thirty minutes later, when the fire caused by 10,000 pounds of fuel was put out, the ground crew found two fractured 5/16th-inch-inner-diameter titanium hydraulic lines, one in each wheel well.

The F-14 had an all-titanium hydraulic system with an 84-gallon-per-minute pump on each engine with no accumulators, all in the interest of saving weight. Each pump had nine pistons, which were varied in output by a swash plate. As it turned out, each time one of the nine pistons did its thing, it sent a 200-300-pounds-per-square-inch pulse down the basic 3,000-psi system. Apparently, without accumulators to dampen the pulses, a resonance occurred which fatigued the lines. Engineering duplicated the failure on a full-scale mockup of the system in 1.2 minutes at just the right pump RPM. When the line was changed to stainless steel, the line failed in 23 minutes. The answer was not material, but proper forming and clamping of the line to prevent resonance. The second F-14 did not make its first flight until May 24, 1971. There were no hydraulic problems again on the F-14 program.

As an embarrassing postscript, this whole episode could have been avoided if we had not been in such a bloody hurry. During one of the all-night engine runs a few days before First Flight, I was running the engines under the lights during systems check at 2-3 a.m. when the plane captain started waving his arms to shut down the engines. I looked over the side and saw a large puddle of hydraulic fluid.

I asked what happened, and he said it must have been a loose B nut. Well, there was only a handful of B nuts on the airplane, since most of the hydraulic connectors were the super-dry Cryofit connectors. We were all sleepy, so we went home and thought no more about it.

We later found out that a report from the Engineering Lab was working its way through the system over Christmas, telling us that the engine run failure was a fatigue fracture of the 5/16th-inch titanium line.”

grover posted:

This was but the first of five F-14s that crashed during testing. 37 more were lost over the next 5 years. The cold war was a real bitch for forcing aircraft into service quickly, risks be damned.

quote:

I spent the past week down in Florida visiting a friend...I had some spare time, so I spent a day at the AF Armament Museum outside Eglin and another at the Museum of Naval Aviation on Pensacola NAS. No pictures because I didn't have my camera with me, but I just wanted to point out the historical poo poo at these two museums...both museums were well done and had the standard complement of aircraft you would expect at each museum (the Naval Aviation Museum was packed chock full of aircraft...I was there for 3 hours and probably only saw 2/3rds of their collection). What I really wanted to point out is the history behind the actual airframes that are at each museum...the museum at Eglin has the very first C-130 to roll off the production line that was subsequently converted into the first AC-130 and was in active service from the late '60s until the late '90s, as well as the only "Big Tail" SR-71, a BUFF that flew combat missions during Desert Storm, and a MiG-21 that just showed up at the museum overnight; the curator was told not to ask any questions (it was a "YF-110" that came from the Constant Peg program.

However, the Museum of Naval Aviation kicks this up a notch...in that one museum they have the first airframe to fly across the Atlantic (it only took them 19 days), the only F3F in existence, the only SB2U in existence, the Viking that delivered Dubya aboard the Abraham Lincoln, an almost all original N1K2 "George" that still retains field expedient repairs and battle damage, the Coronado that served as a high level transport during WWII, regularly transporting among others Chester Nimitz, the Truculent Turtle, a F11F that flew with the Blue Angels, an OV-10 that saw service in Vietnam, during which time one of its pilots was killed in action; the pilot's brother discovered the airframe in a scrapyard 20 years after the fact with his brother's name still stenciled on the fuselage and undertook an effort to get it restored and into the museum, this guy's Bird Dog, the Tomcat with the last combat trap, and perhaps most incredibly, a SBD Dauntless airframe that was on Ford Island during the attack on Pearl Harbor, took part in a raid on New Guinea for which its pilot was awarded the Navy Cross, and then took part in the Battle of Midway.

Yeah. Basically if these aircraft could talk I would spend a solid week doing nothing but listening to them, so all of you should go visit these museums if you ever are remotely in the area.

quote:

Oh yeah, I completely forgot about the whole Cubi Point thing, which is awesome. The Navy generally has their poo poo together when it comes to preserving heritage and the like...light years ahead of the Air Force, anyway, although that isn't saying much.

I also forgot to mention that they have a R4D (C-47) there named Que Sera Sera that just happens to be the airframe that was the first aircraft to land at the South Pole...the reason I was reminded of it is apparently the dude that was flying it on the famous mission lives in the Pensacola area and is one of those volunteer geezers who occasionally comes in to help clean up and tell stories.

Oh, and that Mauler? Yeah, the airframe they have is the airframe that was used to set the single piston engine payload record.

Actually, going back and looking through their collection, I'd say that there are at least 7 or 8 aircraft that are one offs which are literally the only one of their type left in existence, along with several more that are in single digits left. And their most boring airframes are pretty much the ones that "just" flew some combat missions or crashed in the ocean 70 years ago and were fished out and restored...I can probably count on one hand the number of aircraft in their collection that did the usual museum thing of "flew a few years stateside, sat in the boneyard for a while, then went to the museum." In short the museum owns.

Nebakenezzer posted:

quote:

"From what we know, still everything isn't confirmed, there was a plane likely from Safford, Arizona that went to Falcon Field in Mesa to pick up three children to bring them back for Thanksgiving," Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu told 92.3 KTAR late Wednesday night. "It's likely three adults and three children were on that aircraft."

Ridge_Runner_5 posted:

Much better video of that Auckland helicopter crash..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5aMT9MBfZI

The Locator posted:

What the hell was that dude on the ground thinking when he jumped up and grabbed the cable pulling it straight into the rotor blades?

Godholio posted:

No kidding...I suspect he's no longer doing that job.

Is there no concern over static buildup on these cables, too?

slidebite posted:

If the helicopter is already attached to it though, I'd presume it isn't an issue?

Also at the guy who moved that cable. What was he trying to do?

slidebite posted:

If the helicopter is already attached to it though, I'd presume it isn't an issue?

Godholio posted:

The static buildup is from the rotors, but I guess in this case the cable's already grounded to the tower?

Ola posted:

I'll send the link to a friend who works with it and ask him his opinion on how this is normally done.

Ola posted:

That sounds like codswallop to me. An ILS glideslope is 3 degrees.

CRJ200 landing looks like any other.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LmsN1a-QZg

Loads of commercial aircraft have no leading edge lift devices, doesn't mean they're monstrosities of nature.

slidebite posted:

Yeah, that's my point. I know the rotors generate the static, but since it is already connected to the cable from the get go, it shouldn't be an issue between the two.

SyHopeful posted:

Reminds me of when I used to hot-fuel Astars

Ridge_Runner_5 posted:

Much better video of that Auckland helicopter crash..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5aMT9MBfZI

D C posted:

We hot fuel all the time, hell, we do everything hot.

It's going to take more then a static shock to ignite Jet-A