Credo
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"A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancour, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate."--Edmund Burke
“You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”--General Sir Charles Napier
"Μολὼν λαβέ" -- Leonidas
"Blogito Ergo Sum" -- Neptunus Lex
Holy Cr*p! God protects idiots and drunks, and I’m pretty sure the crew was NOT drunk! The damage in the photos tells the story. They’re lucky that the old P-3′s are built like iron.
Good thing they weren’t in the P-8….
The photos of the partial wing failure tell the tale, panel separation and a broken spar. That was just as close as it gets.
7 G pullout in a P-3 at 100 feet. I’ll bet the pilot is still puckered up tight enough that a team of horses couldn’t pull a greased knitting needle out of his ###.
Do you ground the crew for departing the aircraft, or give them a medal for saving it? Wow.
One suspects there just might be an Approach article here.
Not too sure how great the headwork was on this one. Not real impressed by the initial airmanship. But MAD PROPS for bringing this one home and putting it on 3 wheels!
Ok, y’all are the experts, but after reading the forum thread I got the impression that the pilots were testing/demonstrating feather operation on #1 when #2 went south.
Is that bad flying, or bad luck?
I’ve never flown anything with more than two engines, but I think I know that a P-3 on two motors is flyable, even if they’re on the same side. It’s bad luck to have to shut an engine down after you’ve already feathered a prop on that same side. But you don’t stall until you let the airspeed get away from you. If they had the altitude to stall, spin and recover, they had the altitude to reduce power on the remaining motors, lower the nose to maintain airspeed and then relight the good engine on the left hand side.
I was not a perfect pilot, and God knows I’ve had my share of “oops’s”. But it is what it is, and an otherwise flyable machine of a dwindling store of precious resources is now class A’d.
Rumor is they initially tried to divert to China.
What’s the old saying “You can’t get an Air Medal for something you forked up in the first place…”
Possibly privileged info and misinformation slipped out onto the web…..Never would have seen it here a month ago.
re “the old P-3’s are built like iron”
LOL.
re Spin. IMO, LOL.
b2
Concur with B2 – If P-3s were built like iron this one would still be flying and we wouldn’t be buying (more) boeing products to replace them.
I believe the phrase in the SIR will be something like “Failure to maintain flying speed.”
That’s a below average in basic airwork…
Uhhh. If I remember my AD 3 & 2 books you can feather the prop on a T56 with the engine at idle.
Nose,
Other than the pictures and some hyperbolic comments most of the info in that email was incorrect or anecdotal…prolly.
Maint control comments perhaps? I.E.- 2nd hand.
b2
I flew P3′s and this story doesn’t make any sense. The P3 will fly easily on two engines on one side. I see comments about what a great job the pilots did, but, WTF? First, why wouldn’t you restart number one before shutting down number two? It only takes seconds. Why would you purposely shut down an engine with flaps extended? Never heard of that being done. Strange story.
One of the challenges with a multi seat cockpit is having a bit of coordination among the members. This is just a hypothesis, but it might have been one member grabbed the e-handle on #2 once he/she thought they had a run away prop and never waited for the Plane Commander to fully ascertain the situation. It’s happened before.
Lex, you don’t even need to power off and drop the nose. Just go to military power, center the ball, and off you go. On a maintenance flight they were sure to have less than 35,000 pounds of fuel so they were “light”. When your are flying with four engines you need to manage the situation. Even if they didn’t have time to relight number one they should have powered up engines three and four before they pulled the handle on number two.
Dan,
Good point I’ve been mulling over for a while. One shut down on purpose, another starts chugging, lets go back to 4 online before we take another offline!
N
….as soon as I read your post, and followed the link, printed out the pics, picked up a former TACCO (Moffet 1966-1971), FOD checked sat at the Hangar 5 flightline gate, past the H-60s preflighted and ready to launch, the Prowlers hooked up to huffers and NC8s, two Echo Model eff a-teens we borrowed from Lemoore waiting for the 0800 indoc crews, the C-9′s preparing to taxi in front of Ops, us transiting farther south to the pee three line side of the field.
The Tacco poured over the three pics and in his normal rambling that would win any boatswains mate spelling contest, expressed his concern, reliving the few close calls he had with the aircraft forty years ago. Checking BUNOs’ on all the birds on the line we convinced ourselves it was in Hgr 6 or 7. Ten Orions out in the open, the normal number of Aeries also, yup, its’ in one of the barns.
Grabbed our hardhats and donned our reflective vests, might as well be a good target. Road side bay of building 410 only had two in phase, stopped in the flightline galley, grabbed a Washington Delicious, a couple of V8s, three packs of Chicklets and some brown shoelaces. Cut across the Miramar style hangar to the squadron spaces, and exited into the ramp side bay, three birds there, none matching the BUNO. We glanced at the hangar queen that is a testament to the boneyard that area of the ramp had become: 400 kt tape and preservation foil all over every crack, crevice, crawl space access, no MAD, no antennas, no props, rubber not fit for even one more rollout, sad state.
Walked across the ramp to Hgr 7, hangar door access hatches placarded with hastily written script “Go around to the main entrance”
No need, it’s in there, we both knew. As we remanned up our flightline vehicle saw the Wing MCO, I nodded permission to enter the building, he mouthed, “Come back tomorrow” and gave us the wide sheepish grin. Thumbs up returned.
Dropped off my pax and headed north to the Prowler/Growler end of the field; re-educated a construction crew on the finer points of elevating a 55 gallon drum full of slurry with a properly rigged loader/backhoe. All the time wondering why I didnt ask more questions about the slowly taxi-ing a/c surrounded by every apparatus in the crash house last Tuesday 22 Jul as it limped down Delta headed back to the line. Was too busy wringing out the 80 Ton Crash Crane to notice a bent bird on its last leg. It was sure a well kept secret until the pics went viral, twenty years ago this would have been kept quiet for at least three more days………
Ah, the joy of a simple servant at NASWI.
v/r jug
Being a retired Flight Engineer this is NOT new. They fell behind theplane and are VERY lucky to have made it. Take a look at this;
http://www.safetycenter.navy.mil/media/approach/issues/novdec05/pdf/We_Just_Spun.pdf
Note the date of the article……
OK, I’ll admit that I was a bit overzealous in describing the P-3 as “built like iron”, but personally I think the results speak for themselves. I can’t think of any other 4 engine aircraft (except maybe the C-130, though I’m doubtful) which would still HAVE two wings (even if one was broken) following a rolling 7 g pullout. Large aircraft are generally limited to +2, maybe +2.5 g. I personally find it impressive that the bird held together as well as it did. They did, after all, walk away.
I used to fly at the test center, and one of Rocky’s favorite “drills” was to show the students the two engine flight characteristics of the P3. Then do it boost out.
But we did it at altitude, and with the center and right seat fully qualified.
Glade they brought it home.
They’re lucky as hell. There is really no excuse for missing airspeed for that long to get so slow during a training flight.
Thats a broken wing rib, not spar.