Pretty amazing and tragic video of what happened a few days go. Looks like it hit the ground too hard and broke in half. It looks almost survivable but the cockpit ends up rolling into the burning wreckage.
Was it too hard a hit or was it too high an AOA? Hard to see but looks like tail hit as hard as the mains.
Ok , I'll ask the question, why didn't the guy filming or anyone with them , go to help? Terrible outcome S
I thought if you hit too hard the landing gear breaks. Does not make sense to me that the front broke off like that.
Mind you this plane was heavy, with Kh-22 missiles, I dont think any airplane would have survived it, be it American, Russian or Martian.
It looks like the landing gear bottomed out and rebounded after the tail hit but it seems odd that the fuselage structure should fail even then. I'm not a stress guy but I am not aware that anything like that has happened to any of our airplanes. I have flown with some Russians and they have sort of a fatalistic approach to things and they live life to the fullest . A late friend of mine who had several flights with the Russians who flew them back to their base in Italy. Going through the Alps in IFR the Russian pilot flying the Russian C-47 turned to my friend with a big grin and said. "You afraid to die?" Maybe today, yah?"
On another note, the Russians say it was unarmed, whereas there is clear evidence it was armed. SOP for info these days. Bob, it is curious how this plane failed. As I remember the boeing 777 that came from Shanghai with watered fuel and had power failure on landing, the gear failed first, probably absorbing a lot of the vertical force. Same I believe with the Korean 777 in SF. I know a passenger plane is designed with different stresses, and probably designed to fail that way, whereas a miltary aircraft has different design criteria. Still it does seem odd that the front broke off the Tu 22 and the rest seemed strong enough to remain intact even the landing gear. Yeah the Russians are really a fatalistic and as you say the benefit is they live life to the fullest. Theres an old Riussian saying, you ask someone how they are doing, their repsonse "still breathing" , with that view, rooted in their reality, all the rest is gold.
With no attempt at a flare, it's a best guess he had no idea where the surface was. I didn't see any runway lights, markers, or any indication that the surface was marked at all. Tough one.
When I was working on the 767 and 777 there was always a concern about " slap down" loads and the forward fuselage was designed to absorb these. Slap down is what the Russian airplane experienced. The DC-9 incident was the result of the same thing, sort of, The aft fuselage couldn't withstand the force of the heavy tail reacting to a high G impact of the hard landing. I'm not adept at "engineeringese" but I hope that I make an honest observation of the causes of the failures.
Am I the only one hearing the throttle just before he hits? That would certainly add to the didn't understand where he was idea.
I noticed that, also. It appears that the whiteout conditions didn't give the pilot any reference to where the runway surface was until it was too late to make a correction. Pretty bad. Author, Ernie Gann, spoke of landing at the old Newark Airport at night on a cinder surfaced runway that absorbed the landing lights and thus removed any reference to where the surface was. He told me that some of his landings there in a stiff-legged DC-2 where nothing more than a rude impact.
The copilot or navigator should have been calling out altitude calls during the approach so the pilot had some idea of how close he was to the runway elevation. Normally calls would be made at some interval over whatever minimums had been chosen for the approach. May not happen routinely in the Russian AF.