View Single Post
Old 04-08-2011, 12:07 AM
  #21  
TonyWilliams
Gets Weekends Off
 
TonyWilliams's Avatar
 
Joined APC: Jan 2007
Position: Self employed
Posts: 3,048
Default

China Air 747 did a spin (spiral dive) over the Pacific while inbound to SFO. They lost one engine, and while they were attending to that, nobody noticed that the air speed was decaying, and the autopilot pitching up to hold altitude until, SURPRISE !!

Lots of damage to the airplane, but they did recover, I think from 30-something thousand feet to about 10,000.

The plane broke the sound barrier of Mach 1 during the descent.

Stolen from Pprune:

"A footnote here is that we at Pan Am, since the repair was done by PA SFO Maintenance, always joked that Boeing got the idea for their blended winglet design from this China Air 747 because the wingtips were bent upward from the aerodynamic forces exerted on the aircraft during the dive/spin."

"The 747SP didn't lower the gear; rather, the G forces pulled during the recovery ripped the gear through the uplocks and "extended" on their own, and the airflow ripped the gear doors off -- they were waaaaaaaaaaaaaay beyond normal gear extension speed."

"Wildest thing was that the crew of the SP landed at SFO and, unaware of the physical damage, asked for a refuelling and planned to continue on to LAX!"

"I remember the pix of this, particularly the ones of the horizontal stabs, which each had their outboard 4-5 feet missing. IIRC, the gear had been extended sometime during the dive, and the main gear doors ripped off and hit them."

"Local news media did a story on how the DFW-area Boeing sub-contractor (LTV, Vought, or whatever their name is) had to make a replacement stab from scratch, taking 6-8 weeks before it could be shipped to SFO."
TonyWilliams is offline