An airline captain friend of mine says he only had one rule for his first officers.... "Make sure I don't wake up and find you asleep, or you're in big trouble"
All of this reminds me of the Gander dive of the PAA 707. The captain was in the cabin talking to the Pan Am VP of Operations, the co-pilot was working a navigation problem somewhere while the Mach warning LIGHT was flashing and the airplane went into Mach tuck and started a spiral dive. The captain happened to look out of the window and saw stars when he should have seen ocean. He clawed his way back to the flight deck and initiated a pull out that started at 30,000 and was complete when the airplane was at 3000 feet. The 707 exceeded Mach 1 and sustained a permanent set in the wings to increase the dihedral without one fuel leak. Switches
Or how about that Russian jet crash in which it was proven that the First Officer was letting his kids sit in the captains seat and pretend to fly (while it is on autopilot). Somehow they got the AP into a mode where you could bank the wings and it got tipped over and spiraled out of control. All the way down.
I don't know how the 707 was, but in turbulence it can be pretty easy to overspeed a swept wing jet, if you're running right on the barber pole. Personally, I like to stay a little bit back of the limit...
What is really amazing is that he got it back from that situation. There are some pretty well-regarded bizjets that probably would have been SOL.
I can't speak for the 707, but in the Falcon series it would not be a big deal. In a Learjet, it would be bad news if you let it get that far (and there are several fatal accidents which prove that point), but you should be able to keep it from getting that far. That said, the state of training and knowledge about high mach incidents has really improved over the last 40 years. Now, it's required to train this scenario in a simulator, and you can see that you have to let it go pretty far before recovery becomes really difficult. Many of the Lear accidents related to high mach jet upset involved crews who were cruising beyond the mach limit. Some people installed "go fast" switches which disabled the overspeed warning, if you can believe it. If you're already going faster than the mach limit, than it's pretty easy to get into trouble.
I have posted it before about the Western Airlines 720B's beating UAL to LAX from SEA by 15 or 20 minutes by flying " just under the bell". In the process they were chronically splitting high pressure bleed ducts. Switches
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Correct me if I am wrong but some old TWA F/O's used to tell me about a particular captain for them who used to be a crop duster and would roll his 707 or 727 in a very indiscriminate way.
There was a story that the test pilot for the 707 program did a roll during the demonstration flights before the prospective customers. At the time, there was quite a bit of speculation about how safe the jetliners were because of several BOAC Comet accidents.
The 707 pilot at Boeing was Tex Johnston, and he did it in a very public way-- there are pictures on the internet, I believe. His autobiography is quite interesting, by the way, once you get past his ego (which isn't easy). I find it hard to imagine that any airline pilot rolled a 707 in passenger service, although I wouldn't be surprised to hear it happened on a test or training flight. It's all good as long as you know what you're doing-- but if you don't, you can get in trouble in a hurry. Just ask the (ex) Airnet Learjet guys!
I saw that event in 1954 at the Gold Cup hydroplane races on Lake Washington. The first roll was to the north and the man next to me told me that it wasn't a barrel roll because you can't roll those airplanes. Then Johnston did one to the south and my expert didn't say anything after that. I was friends with one of the flight test engineers on that flight and he said that if his eyes had been closed, he wouldn't have known that they had done a barrel roll. He was the one that took the famous picture when they were inverted. Most Boeing jets had been rolled in the old days except for the 747. I saw a 707 rolled at altitude once and I was told that it happened more than once during flight tests. The B-47 was rolled in many A-bomb delivery tests when they were doing the over-the-shoulder toss and the lob delivery with an Immelman at the end. I knew Tex Johnston from attending QB meetings and he did have a bit of ego But he had mellowed in his old age. Switches
I met Tex at Boeing Field during an airshow late in his life, when he was signing books right in front of the Dash 80, which was still in Seattle pending completion of the Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles. A fascinating guy to listen to!
