Victor Bomber makes unintentional take-off

[sandgate]

Hi Guys
This was all over the news yesterday (see link below). It seems the proposed fast taxi to demonstrate the aircraft to the public became an unintentional short flight due to the co-pilot freezing and not pulling back the throttles when instructes to do so. The captain, in his seventies and not having flown this aircraft since the early eighties, manged to get it back on the ground - without damaging anything. This aircraft is a BIG aircraft to handle. Not a bad bit of flying for someone out of practice. Also, the plane was only licenced to taxi, and no-one in the cockpit was a current pilot. Now, being honest, how many of you would have continued to climb, done a circuit and returned to the airfield which, incidentally, is where the Vulcan is hangared.
The Vulcan and Victor, together with the Valiant, made up the V-bombers in the sixties and seventies, our deterrent to the Russian missiles.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/h...re/8246544.stm

Best regards
John

[deor]

I saw the pilot interviewed on TV and he said that he considered continuing to take off, doing a circuit and landing but that the plane hadn't got a certificate of airworthness and hadn't flown for 15 years, so he wasn't confident that the airframe was up to doing a circuit and getting it back on the deck ASAP was the safest course.

D

[Raptor22]

Not me! I wouldn't have flown a plane that wasn't rated. Did hear about
guy in the B-52? he was showing off and the bomber crashed.

[ytzpilot]

Amazing they would even conduct a high speed taxi in the first place. I bet they wouldn't consider one of those again.

Just taxi and old plane like that around is good enough. No need to bring it up to 100 knots.

[munnst]

Hi,

this happened several months ago and no one was harmed.
Must be a slow news day here in the UK.

Ted.

[tigisfat]

This was a hoax and was planned. Noone 'accidentally' brings throttles forward to fast to react for an entire takeoff run.

Not to mention; that was some shoddy flying.

[Chairborne]

Originally Posted by Raptor22

Did hear about the guy in the B-52? he was showing off and the bomber crashed.

Correct: on June 24, 1994, Lt. Col. "Bud" Holland was flying the pattern of Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane, Washington in preparation for an airshow the following day. The B-52 was too close behind a KC-135 on final and told to go-around, which it did. The plane began to climb and performed a backcourse turn to the left. It was noted that the turn was a very high-angle bank, which Holland was known to do. He had been unofficially reprimanded by superiors for this manoeuvre before because it violated the operational restrictions of the aircraft; lacking ailerons, the B-52 uses spoilers for roll control. At first, the plane began to sink until its roll was corrected and the plane levelled. Then once again the plane rolled rather violently to the left, descended sharply as it achieved a near-90-degree bank angle and plunged into the ground near the tower. Holland and 3 other male officers died instantly, of course.

It has been suggested that Holland and his copilot were fighting for control of the -52 at the time of the go-around. Many accounts state that they were so deeply at professional and personal odds against each other that they exchanged verbal tirades, with Holland's being the most blunt and offensive. Many times the copilot had filed verbal grievances in the chain of command regarding Holland's methods and manoeuvres, but they were all handled unofficially, if at all. Video exists of Holland flying so low over hills in the Yakima Valley Bombing Range that camera crews were forced to duck; another video captures Holland missing the crest of a hill by 15 feet (Holland was reprimanded for that incident). Yet another video shows Holland performing a high-speed pull-up with a rapid, high-angle climb, finishing with a zero-G crest at the top.

The subsequent investigation of the crash revealed a great deal of internal cover-up by superior officers and their indifference to complaints raised by flight personnel assigned to Holland's flights, including the aforementioned Yakima flyover whereas two officers screamed "Pull up!" to Holland (who responded by calling one of them an insult referring to female anatomy). The investigation found Director of Operations Col. William Pellerin guilty in a courts-martial: he was forced to forfeit $1,500/month of salary for 5 months and was formally reprimanded.

For a laugh: one of the Google links for "Bud" Holland was for a Wikipedia disambiguation page: "Bud Holland (Lt Col Arthur A. Holland, died 1994 in a self-inflicted B-52 plane crash), American aviator and B-52 pilot from Suffolk, Virginia". Yeah, I'm thinking that, too: "self-inflicted"???

[Flying Officer Jevans]

Tig,
The guy on the throttles was NOT a pilot - he was an engineer. I don't think it's a planned hoax - if the CAA got wind of that, they'd be stopped doing taxi runs, and the Vulcan might well be affected too. They wouldn't risk that.

As for shoddy flying - he wasn't exactly expecting that to happen, was he?

[Andy71]

Originally Posted by Flying Officer Jevans

Tig,
The guy on the throttles was NOT a pilot - he was an engineer. I don't think it's a planned hoax - if the CAA got wind of that, they'd be stopped doing taxi runs, and the Vulcan might well be affected too. They wouldn't risk that.

As for shoddy flying - he wasn't exactly expecting that to happen, was he?

Spot on.

Take into account all of the R.A.F. equipment that had been removed from the Victor including the heavy radar eqipment in the nose too. The aircraft's centre of gravity is seriously out which probrably accounts for the "shoddy" flying mentioned in the post above yours.

[tigisfat]

Originally Posted by Andy71

Spot on.

Take into account all of the R.A.F. equipment that had been removed from the Victor including the heavy radar eqipment in the nose too. The aircraft's centre of gravity is seriously out which probrably accounts for the "shoddy" flying mentioned in the post above yours.

Spot on? Where was the CG? Noone can speak definitively about this unless they know the Cg and they were in the cockpit. How do you explain the elevator deflection?

Whether they got into the air intentionally or not, this was a poor display of airmanship. That's the only thing we know for a fact.

1. If they got into the air on purpose, then it was a poor display of airmanship in that they should'nt have broke rules, and they flew like garbage once airborne.

2. If they didn't get into the air on purpose, then they displayed poor airmanship by letting it get into the air. Being a pilot, I can tell you it's not possible at all for an underranking crew member to 'leave the throttles on so long it got airborne' when you were supposed to just taxi.