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[Breaking News] Afghanistan cargo plane crash caught on camera

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Tinman57:
  I've looked at the footage many times over.  From a pilots view of things and past experiences with aircraft accident investigations teams, I can tell that the aircraft did in fact stall.  It's not hard to tell from not only it's forward speed, that appeared to "hang" in the air for a few seconds, but also it's steep nose up attitude.  It is hammered into every pilot trained, when your nose is too high and your stalling, push forward on the stick to get your airspeed back up, even if your going to hit mother earth.  More forward motion reduces impact damage, and it hit the ground nose first with little forward airspeed.  But what I thought was strange is that it appeared that he was turning left initially and then turned right and got almost inverted but with the right wing down.  All visual indications looked like an aft heavy balance* which would make the aircraft nose high from too much weight in the aft section.  At that low of altitude and hardly any forward airspeed, it's mostly impossible to get your nose down without enough air flowing over the horizontal stabilizers, so how would they get the nose down right at impact?  It should have hit tail-feathers first.

* If it wasn't a load balance problem, then the pilot was just climbing too steep or the controls weren't functioning correctly, which is why I thought it strange with an aft-heavy aircraft flying that low and slow would hit nose first.

  Perhaps they have other footage from another angle that shows what happened during the time the aircraft was out of camera range above the cars windshield.  It only takes one second for an aircraft to go from flyable to unflyable.

skwire:
Perhaps they have other footage from another angle that shows what happened during the time the aircraft was out of camera range above the cars windshield.-Tinman57 (May 04, 2013, 04:54 PM)
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzC1j1ddkRI&feature=player_embedded

The aircraft never goes out of frame in this version.

Stoic Joker:
Perhaps a combination of the plane tumbling a bit while (quite literally) falling out of the air, and the pilot overcorrecting then freezing, as the pane gets just enough air speed (from gravity) to "amplify" the tumble.

Tinman57:
Perhaps a combination of the plane tumbling a bit while (quite literally) falling out of the air, and the pilot overcorrecting then freezing, as the pane gets just enough air speed (from gravity) to "amplify" the tumble. -Stoic Joker (May 13, 2013, 06:54 AM)
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  There is a point where air-speed is totally unuseable for the flaps/ailerons.  Turning the controls left or right will have NO EFFECT.  The only useable control surface at this point will be the Horiontal Stabilizers, in which the pilot would push down the controls forcing the nose down, therefore gaining enough airspeed for the other control surfaces to be useable.  Of course, when your that close to the ground you don't have enough time to gain airspeed before the aircraft impacts the ground.

  IF he had of been flying lite (empty cargo) then he would have had enough thrust from the engines to power out of the stall condition with little loss of altitude.  This is why most aircraft incidents happen during landing and takeoff (mostly landing), it's when your flying at minimum airspeeds where the loss of forward flight can happen with just a few knots too little.

  There's an old pilot saying:  "Flying is the second most exciting thing you can do.  The first most exciting is landing", which, by the way, was always the funnest thing about flying to me.  There were many of my flights where I never left the traffic pattern just doing "touch and go's" for hours at a time.  It really sharpens your flying skills since it's the most difficult to do, but I just think it's fun.    :D

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