Brazilian jet hail damaged in flight!

I've seen worse. Fortunately not when I was flying. In this case, the radome is still on the airplane, anyway.

A friend of mine got some pretty nasty hail damage while in the clear, quite a distance from the storm cell.

 

weather does not appear on control radar, air traffic controllers only see traffic

controllers can get an overlay briefly or view an alternate screen that shows weather
one can ask controller what they see on their weather radar

hail can strip the paint off the aircraft, seen that happen many times, radomes are frequent casualities... there is a limit to building in strength, the domes must allow radar signals to leave and return, making them strong lowers the signal and sensitivity... radomes also use special paint that does not interfere with the signal

my hail event sounded like a gravel truck was unloading on the plane, while experiencing severe turbulence ( had a couple of electrical connectors break apart ) the aircraft was totally covered in ice and losing airspeed, put plane into a decent to keep minimum flying speed ( Plane was too heavy ) and find warmer air ( get out of sub zero F temps ) declared emergency with controllers... ( ground temp 80F + in summer ) cell did not paint on radar, next concern was what damage would be caused by ice breaking off and maintaining control...
fortunately was able to shed ice ( excessive weight ) without damage and land safely in Albuquerque. Hail event lasted only a few seconds, burned into memory forever

 

A number of years ago, a Southern DC-9 flew into a hailstorm not too far from here and after both engines flamed out, made a crash landing on a highway about 10 miles away, with rather substantial loss of life both in the plane and on the ground.

 

that crash changed the distance to stay away from TS, until then the recommended distance was 5 miles away from any cell. the new recommendation is 15=20 miles away

the same applies to people on the ground when TS are in the area... just because one is standing in bright sunshine doesn't mean that pretty cloud in the distance is safe. lightning has been known to reach out as many as 20 miles and srtike something under clear sky overhead. no need to panic, but be very aware if there are known TS in the area... complacency and being foolish are incestuously close

 

I just saw the documentary on this 3 days ago.
Baseball sized hail blew the guts out both engines.
The cockpit windscreens were virtually opaque from the stress cracks.
Amazing that they actually got it lined up on a roadway.

 

Indeed .. Southern Airways Flight 242 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_F-DhxHkA4

 

There is a photo of the windscreens of this A321 here

Accident: TAM A321 at Rio de Janeiro on Feb 8th 2015, hail strike

 

Hail will ruin props also, we used to lose a lot of prop from the de ice boots out, and balancing became an issue..this on on T56 engines...

 

At P&W they tried mightily to replicate the damage to the engines. The cores of the engines had overspeed damage and there was a theory that water entered the core, turned to steam and that caused the overspeed that damaged the engines.

They put an engine in an outdoor test cell and trained fire hoses on the engine inlet. The engines continued to run even when ingesting massive amounts of water at flight to full power.. They found the water was being centrifuged out the fan duct and not much was going thru the core of the engine. They couldn't seem to replicate the failure mode that would cause the overspeed situation.

After hours of trying to replicate the failure at high power, somebody happened to pull the power back to a lower power setting and they still had the water on.... The engine promptly blew up and they realized that at high power the water wouldn't go into the core, but at lower power it did and then it turned to steam, where it created an overspeed that the control couldn't catch.

When the plane got into the storm the pilots pulled back power as they should have to reduce speed, but that is what created the eventual failure.

 

That's interesting! It's awful when you do the right thing and it ends up creating a problem.

 

im In Rio right now. Few in from Sau Palo today. There are some big swaths of TR's over the Amazon. Thankfully we topped them at FL450...no problemo. Or how ever you say that in Portuguese.