A couple of occasional readers have sent along this clip:
And one has even provided an interview with the “pilot.”
Color me unconvinced: In the low level into the pull-up, the sound of the engine said to me “remote control” aircraft, even as the characteristic twitching of the airframe spoke of very light weight being manipulated from a distance. It was certainly lucky for the film crew that American English speaking spectators were on hand for a practice airshow in Germany to provide the voice over. The cameraman has a pretty hard time keeping the plane in focus – most video cameras will focus on infinity for an airplane at any distance. Plus, the camera operator appears to travel with the airplane as it lands and rolls out – tough to do from a standing start to 80mph.
An airplane missing its right wing ought to spin right, not left – no lifties, no turnies. Aerobatic pilots are equipped with parachutes – at least here in the US – and I’ve never seen a better reason for bailing out than the loss of a wing.
Finally, while a powerful aerobatic airplane could hang from the prop as is shown in the approach to landing, real airplanes, don’t – they can’t, I don’t think – snap around like that to plant the wheels, and come to a full stop in four seconds. I’d be interested in seeing how they transitioned from RC aircraft to the guy climbing out.
But I just don’t buy it.
The video tells me a different story – that we don’t need to send pilots through real flight school in order to train them to fly UAVs. You can learn to do some amazing stuff just from standing on the ground and twiddling some switches, knobs, and levers.
Totally fake!
Nice CGI…
Check this out. No CGI here…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nzY1Q4gea8&
Lex: I knew it was fake all along (Right!!!!!). Just wanted to see if I could get into the LORC. Come to think of it, I’ve been there before. Do we get to log our appearances, like NFO traps? Guy or gal with the most appearances each year receives an autographed empty Guiness glass from the “Lex”. Transportation and lodging while in Sandy Eggo not provided.
It’s a fake, mos def. Two things: One, the sound of the engine when the wing falls away, and shortly afterwards. It’s definitely a gas model engine. The high-pitch and small prop make for something much higher in frequency than anything a real engine would. Two, the last scene. Note how the camera angle prohibits you from seeing the right side of the aircraft? If this was real, the cameraman would’ve gone around the other side to show the missing section.
Lastly, no matter what you do, it is incredibly hard to take an image of a model and pass it off as real with more than a passing glance. The only time it comes close is a still image with lots of “finesse” .
From the web:
The plane is advertising the Killa Thrill clothing company. Doing a bit of googling brings you to http://www.jamesandersson.com/, in which the “pilot” claims to be an acrobatic flyer sponsored by Killathrill.
Do a ‘whois’ search on jamesanderson.com ( http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/results.jsp?domain=jamesandersson.com ) and who owns it? Killathrill.
And then there’s the little matter of the jamesandersson.com website claiming that the “pilot” placed 15th in the Red Bull Air Race in Detroit. Didn’t happen. It’s hard to place 15th in a field of 12.
You can see it morph from the RC to the real plane just as it turns to the left at the end of the video. The transition can be seen by looking at the change of appearance of the landing gear and plastic to metal look of the plane.
Even with the brute horsepower some sport planes have they cannot defy the laws of aerodynamics, no wing = no lift and the simple fact that a low mass model can defy them does not mean an aircraft weighing several hundred pounds will.
Must admit I was fooled. Wonder how ‘street cred’ for “KillaThrilla” clothing line will survive this fakery? Not that I care. Street CRUD I guess.
When it loses the wing, it rolls/spins the wrong way. It’s rolling toward the side with the wing, vice away from it.
Not buying.
Methinks that with a wing missing, it would have rolled to a stop with the left wingtip on the ground. I really don’t think it would still sit upright on the gear.
Bogus
In any case, it rates a Falcon 633 from my grossly outdated edition of the codes.
Update website:
http://www.reggiepaulk.com/2008/10/killathrill-generates-huge-buzz-with.html
Pure green-screen.
Everything looks like CGI; the background, the aircraft… everything – except the pilot and person running out.
It even looks like his arm goes partially through the fuselage when his elbow sticks out.
On first viewing, I thought it was a pretty good fake up until the few seconds of landing sequence, which doesn’t come close to matching the quality of the rest of the video. The roll direction with the wing coming off wasn’t one of the clues. Haven’t tried it myself, but you will roll away from the remaining wing with negative g on the airplane. As a matter of fact, you’d probably have to break off a wing in negative g not to get smacked with it when it broke loose…
I thought the landing sequence looked rather awful, myself. That old 90s-style improperly-lit-CGI looks even worse now that the technology is out there to do it right…
In addition to the engine whine and aerodynamic idiosyncrasy ably noted above,
1. No puff of spilled fuel when the wing departed.
2. Canopy trim on the model doesn’t match the “full scale” job.
Other than that, not a bad job of fakery.
If it had been a model, it would have to be 40% of full size and there would have been a wing tube sticking out. This wing sheared off clean.
There is no shadow under the right wing when he stops.
RC’ers have landed in a knife edge when one wing broke off. Sounds were typical Lycoming engine sounds with Hartzell prop.
Still not sure it could have been flipped upright.
But, colors don’t seem to match.
Mysterious.
When the aircraft lands and it goes out of picture, it comes back in picture further away, yet the aircraft has appeared ever so slightly larger….
this is deifnatly wher eit transitions from rc to airplane.
Totally Fake. For all the reasons listed in comments above, AND:
- In the first 5 seconds of the clip, the airplane appears to be a non-RC plane. It moves past the control tower and a racing pylon (Blue and White). After this, the RC plane does not look the same at all in respect to size to the tower when it comes back around. Also, the racing pylon is gone when the RC plane is coming at the camera. Who moved the racing pylon?
- Last good reason: Moving a 1500+ lb. airplane of which the main landing gear is at least 30 feet AGL (in its final low pass) to the ground in such a fashion at a necessary speed to maintain flight in that attitude, (over 100 mph, due to lifting surfaces only being the horizontal stablilizer and the motor), would result in a catastrophic crash to the ground, coupled by a cart-wheel/ nose over/ tail-swapping-high speed-ground loop along with a collateral gear collapse.
- The clouds and sky look different from the first 5-6 seconds of the clip, to the remainder.
- You can’t Google this and find a news-worthy source.
- They purposely left off any registration numbers, preventing anybody from checking national databases.
It’s been fun looking at it, but I’m tired of it now that it is so obviously a faked clip.
[...] is supposedly a pilot in the Red Bull Air Race, but his name is not listed as such. (Source: Neptunus Lex, Reggie [...]
http://www.hoax-slayer.com/one-wing-plane-landing-video.shtml
Impossible! With a wing only on the left side the lift is only on the left side, so the airplane would want to spin clockwise. To stop it from spinning you would have to overcome it with the ailerons. The ailerons are smaller than the fixed portion of the wing and therefore cannot negate the lift of the wing, only reduce it. Even if you could overcome the lift of the wing to stop the spinning, you would then have no lift at all and the airplane would slam into the ground. Not to mention, that if this actually happened, this would have been all over the REAL news all over the world, and not just on the internet. FAKE FAKE FAKE. Clever but fake!!!
You sceptics make me laugh, everybody thinks he’s an MIT graduate when all they are doing is looking at the inside wall of their lower intestines. Any real pilot knows that you can fly with the wings (or wing) vertical with enough horsepower. Secondly, it’s much more difficult to fly an r/c rather than the real thing when trying such an intricate maneuver.
bud soucy: More difficult?! haha-Guess what!? When you’re flying a TOY plane your life isn’t on the line! I’d think that fact alone would make it infinently more difficult.
Stop THAT! It’s all bullshit. The pilot did it. The F-15 pilot did it. It’s fake because it wasn’t an accident, but it’s REAL because the pilot did it! He did it, it’s not RC, it’s just REAL. Leave with THAT, people.
It is profoundly fake. It strikes me as likely intended to be a viral promo video for the Killa Thrill clothing line. The two aircraft, the real one and the R/C (or CGI) model, in the video have only a passing resemblance to each other (nose length is different, white trim stripe missing, wheelpants angle inconsistent and more). The wing loading of a monoplane aerobat is quite high and the landing shown, especially the hop and lack of rollout, are behaviours associated with aircraft of very low wing loading, such as a J3 Cub or biplane along the lines of a Bucker Jungmann.
There is nothing anyone can write here that will convince me that the video is anything other than utterly fake and an only moderately executed fake.