Colgan Air Flight 3407 down in Buffalo NY

Sad news.

44+4 crew and 1 on ground fatalities, per CNN and other sources. Best source of information so far seems to be the airliners.net forum, if you stay on the newest posts.

http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/read.main/4315267/


Links:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/02/13/national/main4798963.shtml
http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/02/13/plane.crash.new.york/index.html

Condolences to everyone affected
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Just reading about this now, absolutely awful.. Sincerest condolences..

 

Just saw this, terrible news, kind of makes me more nervous to fly...My Condolences as well.

 

There is a Live News Conference going on right now.

 

I live a few towns over from the crash site; what a tragedy. We had horrible weather all day yesterday.
50-70mph winds; rain turning to snow. (I lost two 50' pine trees in the wind, and from the weight of wet snow)
A sh*TTY day even by our standards. Ice build up had to be a factor here.
Kevin
Orchard Park, NY

 

I have a couple friends that fly for Colgan. Sounds like a very tight knit group of pilots and flight attendants and they're taking the loss pretty hard. RIP.

 

nervously awaiting the passenger list...

 

Airframe icing was the first thing I thought of. It can happen pretty quickly and would cause exactly the kind of crash that seems to have happened.

RIP. Sad day.

RMX

 

Very sad.

Terribly ironic that a widow of a 9/11 victim was among the lost passengers.

 

I don't like the wings on the things. Too sleak and sexy for the intended use. They are just too small and probably are high load factor. That means danger in my book.

The old "No visible means of support."

My thoughts and prayers go out to the families and loved ones.

 

I guess that I have to agree on the skinny high aspect ratio wings of the Q400's. They work well in the optimum conditions but when the short chord gets stacked up with ice really quick and the airspeed is deteriorated by the extension of flaps and the landing gear, the L/D can go to hell really fast. Even with de-icer boots breaking ice off the leading edge, in certain bad conditions there can be a rapid build up of ice aft of that that will destroy the wing section profile and create turbulent flow and a stall instead of smooth attached flow to maintain lift. Even 100% power and nose down will not suffice sometimes. My son flew freight in DC3's for several years in the Pacific Northwest and he experienced severe icing conditions around the Portland area coming down the Columbia Gorge. He recounted that several times they could hear the ice hitting the runway after falling off the airplane when they landed at PDX. ice is bad and NOT FOR ME.
SWITCHES

 

24yo co-pilot. Hmmmm.

 

I believe that's exactly what the NTSB determined was the cause of the ATR crash in Roselawn many years ago.

 

A twenty-four year old pilot was OLD when I was in the war. A 27 year old was REALLY old. I flew with a 23 year old capt. who was AC of a B-24 and 10 men. He had over 30 missions and he was very sharp and totally serious about what he was doing. With the proper training and attitude, a 24 year old can do just fine. " Beki" was a good pilot, and a sharp young lady with the right attitude. Few and far between nowadays.
SWITCHES

 

I wonder if something asymmetrical could have happened with the flaps?

From the news:

 

I have a good freind of mine whos a 23 year old FO, I hope to be a 23 year old FO in about 6 months (hope being key word)
What about the 27 yr old captain who was off duty?
I had actually met Joe Zuffoletto back in 2006 when he came to recruit pilots at UND. I spent nearly the whole hiring fair just BSing with him cause he was a car nut and just a funny guy.

 

That's a darn good point, I hadn't thought of that. Taking that one step further though, I wonder if an asymmetrical flap issue at what you would assume to be the first notch, 15 degrees or so, would cause anything that severe. My gut tells me no, but I'm not a fixed wing pilot. It certainly bears consideration though.

 

Configuration changes can significantly effect the effective angle of attack (AOA). When you drop the flaps, even one notch, you are changing the effective camber and that causes the effective AOA to go up, even if your pitch attitude doesn't change. If you have an ice buildup, the leading edge can be very sharp, and with a sharp leading edge a small AOA change can put you past stall very quickly. If you are turning when that happens, you could easily stall one wing and not the other. If that happens you are going to have a very sudden rolling manuever and that could account for what happened. It doesn't have to be an asymmertical flap condition, the alerions can give you a difference in AOA and one wing outboard section could stall, which would cause the pilot to apply more alerion to that side, which would do nothing since that part of the wing is already stalled..... It could happen as a result of trying to turn the airplane or in response to a bump in the air. What the pilot would be trying to do is raise one wing, and when he tried, the wing would drop suddenly, essentially a reversal of control. The proper response would be to push the nose down, but not sure if that is included in anybodys training... The NTSB will eventually figure out what happened.

Graveyards are littered with instances where the pilot flew the airplane "by the book", and right into the ground. If you have a degraded airplane it doesn't fly by the book. It is incumbent on the pilot to be able to recognize when his airplane isn't going to fly by the book, and icing conditions is one of those times.

 

A very good lesson in the aerodynamics of icing! I think that an asymmetrical flap condition is unlikely the way flap drive systems are usually designed now. I know that anything that I worked on had a common torque tube that drove all the flaps or none at all. I don't know how the flaps are driven on a Bombardier ( Dash 8 ) but I would bet that it is the same type of set up.
I think Solofast is on the right track.
SWITCHES

 

"I have a good freind of mine whos a 23 year old FO, I hope to be a 23 year old FO in about 6 months (hope being key word)
What about the 27 yr old captain who was off duty?"


No disrepect intended, but I'd prefer to fly with someone more experienced. A layman's perspective. IMO 24 is too young to be reponsible for the safety of a planeload of folks.

 

"A twenty-four year old pilot was OLD when I was in the war. A 27 year old was REALLY old. I flew with a 23 year old capt. who was AC of a B-24 and 10 men. He had over 30 missions and he was very sharp and totally serious about what he was doing. With the proper training and attitude, a 24 year old can do just fine. " Beki" was a good pilot, and a sharp young lady with the right attitude. Few and far between nowadays."


Military a different deal. We're talking about a commercial carrier whose sole busines it is to get people safely and without drama from a to b. Safe and experienced the Continental crew may have been, but a lot of people died on their watch. We'll see what the cause is determined to be ....

 

I think you'd be hard pressed to find older, more experienced pilots willing to work for $18k a year like these FOs at Colgan do.

 

I saw the news conference that the NTSB had this evening....

One thing of note was that the aircraft apparently did not come down nose down, it came down relatively flat... The wing tips, nose and tail are were in their respective positions and it was pointed in the opposite direction of the indended flight...

Also, the stick shaker and stick pusher had activated, so they likely stalled it before they lost control.

With the direction opposite the intended path and a flat pancake impact, it sounds like a stall/spin incident to me...

 

I learned first hand, not my mistake, but it was a lesson I won't forget, ever...

I was doing my IFR training and my instructor wanted me to get some experience in some actual icing.. This was in the great lakes area and icing was commonplace in the winter so some time in real icing wasn't a bad idea...

So we went up, got a local clearance and did some holding patterns and picked up about an inch or so of rime on the leading edges.. It was the standard sharp edge stuff, about a inch or so thick at the maximum... I shot the approach and as I was coming down final I told Hank (my instructor) that I was only going to use only one notch of flaps and carry about 10 kts or so more down final.. (being the engineer type I had a healthy respect for ice, even though I had no real experience, and it seemed prudent to me to do that) Hank got pissed and said "my airplane"... He had gotten mad at me a few sessions earlier for carrying too much speed on approaches (comes from being a racer, where I was more comfortable with speed than he was) and he was going to show me that I didn't need more speed on final, maybe he thought I was using the ice as an excuse to carry more speed, but whatever, he was a mad at my decision to use more speed.

Well, he carried the standard 75 kts down final and when he got over the runway and started to round out the airplane dropped about 20 ft and smashed into the ground... There was no warning, no stall buzzer (the stall warning deice was on and there was no ice on the warning flipper), no buffet, the airplane just flat stopped flying and dropped to the ground. We bounced probably 15 ft back up, and we bounced twice more... Fortunately no damage other than a cut on the sidewall of the nose tire, but it was nothing like I had ever seen or thought could happen.. When it happened we were shure that there had to be some serious airframe damage, it was that violent.... If it had happened any higher off the ground we could easily have been a statistic, since there would have not been a chance of a recovery.

As we taxied back in, Hank said, "I guess that we both learned a huge lesson today didn't we"....

 

A military bomber pilot's mission was fraught with crucial decisions for some times 8 hours in duration while they were under fire from FLAK and fighters. The mission was to deliver the bombs AND get the plane and crew back safely. It took a lot of guts, determination, and the ability to make the correct decision while under far more stress than any airline pilot will face and a helluvalot of 22 and 24 year old's did day in and day out. The Continental crew ran into a situation that could have overwhelmed any crew. They just weren't lucky enough to get out of it.