Did not know that a 727 was a tail dragger! This is the biggest tail dragger I have ever seen. Cracked up when I saw this a couple of hours ago. It seems that most accidents/incidents in aviation are caused by a series of bad decisions. It happened at Salt Lake International Airport, General Aviation, Salt Lake Jet Center. They are very defensive about it their security guard asked me not to take any more photographs from public areas. So I got my information from the ABC News Team, a 757 charter captain and an employee who saw it all. Yesterday there was a chartered plane (the 727) full of prisoners. However, it had a bad tire. So a crew went out to change the tire. However, the jack punched through the pavement. (Pavements are suppose to be certified to the different weights). So they decided to unload all the prisoners. Apparently someone then made the decision to off load all the fuel (a 727 carries something like 50,000 lbs of fuel). Apparently they did not check with anyone on the proper method and did not put a maintenance jack under the tail. With all the fuel gone, the weight of the 3 engines caused the plane to settle on its tail. This happened around 7 PM last night. Now everyone is standing around trying to figure out what to do. They must have 20 to 30 people standing around doing nothing while waiting for someone to come up with a solution.
I thought this was going to be about the plane crash in Halifax NS. A plane crashed during take off, due to weight and speed. The tail slammed the runway a couple of times then after it was on the way up, it ran out of room and collided with trees. It was a cargo plane so only 7 passengers. Yeah, only. Seven killed in Canadian plane crash October 15, 2004 - 10:29AM Four Britons were among the seven crew members killed when a cargo plane crashed immediately after take-off in eastern Canada and burst into flames, Canadian police said. The other crew members killed when the Boeing 747 got into trouble after leaving Halifax, Nova Scotia, and ploughed into a quarry, were one German and two Zimbabweans, Constable Joe Taplin, of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, said. Earlier reports said there were six Zimbabweans and one South African on board. Emergency services battled for four hours to quell the flames that engulfed the fuel-laden aircraft, which was carrying a consignment of tractors, lobsters and fish to Spain. "There were four United Kingdom passport holders, one German passport holder and two Zimbabwe passport holders," Taplin said. The all-male crew died in the accident, he said. "There were seven crew members on board and they all perished in the disaster," he said. Initial reports suggested the jet's tail hit the runway during take-off and the aircraft crashed near an industrial park. Steve Anderson, of MK Airlines, said seven bodies were recovered from the wreckage. The airline will meet Boeing and the Canadian Transportation Safety Board on Saturday. The aircraft was on its way to Zaragoza, a centre for fish distribution in Spain, Anderson said. It had stopped to refuel and pick up fish supplies in Halifax. The weather at the time of the accident was good with clear skies. Taplin said there was an unknown explosion, either within the aircraft or on the ground, shortly after take-off. "The plane came down about 500 metres from the end of the runway, and the fuselage broke into several pieces," he told PA News. The second runway at Halifax airport was opened to limited air traffic, but the wreckage of the cargo plane has been left for police investigations. Taplin said the incident was being treated as a criminal investigation until police could prove otherwise. Witness Peter Lewis was dropping off his wife at the airport when he saw two explosions. "As we were approaching we saw what I thought was heat lightning, because I told everyone in the car that we've got heat lightning in the sky," he told the local radio station. "That was only a quick one followed by a second one that was bigger. And then we seen a very bright orange light, and I mean bright. It took up the whole sky." MK Airlines was set up in 1990 and operates scheduled and non-scheduled cargo flights around the world. Although its planes are registered in Ghana, the company's administrative centre is in the UK. In November 2001, four Britons survived when an MK Airlines cargo plane crashed in Nigeria. One member of the 13 crew was killed when the Boeing 747 came down near the airport at Port Harcourt, in the south-east of the country. © 2004 AAP Brought to you by AAP http://www.herald.ns.ca/plane1004/747crashlg.jpg
Ummm, put the fuel back in??? enough to get forward balance center back? Lessee, 3 engines x Z# worth of fuel should do it, no??
Jordan can tell us more about Planet Airways but IIRC they are a rather small operation. Here is one of their planes that I saw here in San Antonio a few months back, maybe the same one?
when a rear engined large aircraft is defueled, there are nose weights that are fixed to the nose landing gear to keep the aircraft from becoming unbalanced. the idiots that defueled the aircraft failed to follow FAA and manufactures maintenance procedures that outline the care that must be taken to the status of the aircraft's weight and balance. most rear engine jet aircraft must have ballast weights afffixed before they can be towed or worked on when they are defueled.
Can be a very expensive de-fuel,depending on how hard the tail hit will depend on the cost,if I could see some close up pics I could do a rough calculation of costs.A couple of years ago I was involved with the repair of a B747 frieghter(US carrier) that ran over it"s tow truck and caused extensive damage to the nose section(area 41 for those in the know) and the repair bill came to $us 5 Mill.obviously this would not be near so expensive however nothing in aviation is cheap!! Dave Mc
NM that entirely depends on which branch of the "help"You happen to be in,but generally agreed,example being that My car cost 3x the cost to service that I can reasonally charge for a commercial aircraft. Dave Mc
Was not able to get close enough or at the right angle to see the damage. Salt Lake Jet Terminal was trying to hide the fact that it happened and trying to hide the details. On a public driveway outside the fence, their security guard asked me not to take any more photographs and to move on. Not a legal request, but already had a few photographs and (unless it is important) do not like to argue with people carrying guns. Since people at the Salt Lake Jet Terminal were being rude and not giving out any information, I talked to the news crew. While talking to them, an employee of Salt Lake Jet Terminal came out. He was upset because management had chewed him out for taking a photograph and upset about how badly his organization had handled the tire changing plus the de-fueling. So I went two doors down to Millionair (besides they have better coffee). Talking to their security person, the 757 Captain came over. He said he had never seen such a clust** fuc*. The plane looked so far from what it should be that it was funny. On the serious side I was surprised how incompetently Salt Lake Jet Terminal had handled a minor thing like changing a tire, how incompetently they had handled the de-fueling, and how incompetently they were handling the media and members of the public (like myself) who were there on other business and saw it. In a situation like this I think it is impossible to save face by trying to deny it happened and/or hiding the details. I would put more faith in using a companys services if they would just say that mistakes were made, but corrective action is being taken. There are many things I love about Utah, but one of the things I dislike is there seems to be more saving face here than many places. Many times appearances seem more important than reality (I think both are important). I see it in both big and small things. When I worked for seven years at Dugway Proving Grounds, I was interested in the sheep kill way back in 1968. I wanted to know if there was any danger to myself or my family. The non-persistent nerve agent was released over V-Grid at the tip of Granet (sp) Mountain. V-Grid is still hot but with other things. The cloud traveled across the plains of Dugway killing the wild mustang horses. The Army did a study on how long it took for each horse to die. They even surveyed the location of each dead horse noting the time of death (we found the maps while cleaning up to move to a new building). The gas cloud hit the mountains and here the Army got lucky. The nerve agent cloud went through the passes and killed the sheep on the other side. If it had followed the mountain line, it would have hit the town of Dugway and probably killed all the civilian families there. Dugway denied it ever happened. However, after this there was a tremendous personnel reduction at Dugway. Dugway also paid for the sheep. While I was there, the person responsible retired. He was one of the highest ranking people at Dugway. He had never been displinied (sp) because of politics and because it officially never happened. There is much distrust of Dugway and Tooele South Annex. I think there would be more trust if people were more honest and also more honest about corrective actions. There was a recent study of hospitals. The hospitals that admitted mistakes, emotionally looked after the families, and paid a reasonable amount of money ended up paying far less. Maybe I am wrong, but I have always thought that people could normally be trusted with the truth. I know that I am less likely to deal with Salt Lake Jet Services due to their handling of the bad situation. It makes me wander what else they are hiding. One of the planes I am interested in is the SeaStar http://www.seastarplane.com Besides what the plane can do, I like the company because they admit mistakes and/or admit they have found a better way. I put more trust in them than many aviation companies. If a company has people, then it will make mistakes. I look at how they handle the mistakes. A competitor of SeaStar sues anyone who says anything bad about them rather than improve their product. SeaStar is growing and the competitor is declining.
Dave,thought You would like this,it"s a Kalitta aircraft which lost an engine over Michigan a couple of days ago. Dave Mc
