Text 13808, 55 rader
Skriven 2011-01-30 06:51:00 av Bob Ackley (1:300/3)
  Kommentar till text 13798 av Michiel van der Vlist (2:280/5555)
Ärende: The Smolensk crash on April 10, 2010
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Replying to a message of Michiel van der Vlist to Robert Bashe:

 MvdV> Hello Robert, MvdV> Well.. technically it WAS closed. The pilot did not
get a "cleared
 MvdV> to land". He just got clearance for a "trial approach" with
 MvdV> turn-around when reaching an altitude of 100 meter above the runway
 MvdV> level. The last part was ignored. They just kept on descending,
 MvdV> obvously hoping to get a visual on the runway. They relied on the
 MvdV> radio altimeter, but they were unaware that the terrain was not
 MvdV> flat and that the runway was higher than the terrain in front of
 MvdV> it. So they decended to -15 meters above the runway without being
 MvdV> aware of it.

 MvdV> Had they used the barometric altimeter as authorative, the crash
 MvdV> would probably have been avoided. Clearly pilot error.

 MvdV> Well. . I know from personal exprerience that it does not help when
 MvdV> at crunch time you have a boss breathing down your neck saying:
 MvdV> "get the result I want!".

 MvdV> My evaluation is that this would not have happened with a civilian
 MvdV> aircraft. In a civilian aircraft, the pilot (AKA "captain") is
 MvdV> absolute ruler when in flight. A pilot in a civilan aircraft would
 MvdV> have ousted from the cockpit anyone trying to tell him what to do
 MvdV> in a critical situation, without further ado. President, Pope, or
 MvdV> Emporer.

It isn't intuitively obvious from the air, but the west end of the runway at
Offutt AFB
(there is no overrun on the west end) is at least 30 mteres higher than the
road that passes
100 meters west of the end of the runway.  Landing short on that end of the
runway
would be a disaster.

Most of the approach to Offutt from the west used to be over uninhabited corn
fields.
Unfortunately for all concerned, local developers bought off the county board
and were allowed
to build in the area that is (a) in the flight path to the base and (b) most of
it is in a flood
plain.

Since I've been here four aircraft have gone down in that area.  Two were
RB-57s trying to
let down in close formation through a rather thick cloud (one of them had no
radios and he
couldn't do a ground controlled approach), one was a KC-135 that lost power on
takeoff
and pancaked into a cornfield west of the runway (nobody hurt in either
incident AFAIK).
The fourth was a Navy bird that also lost power on takeoff.

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 * Origin: Bob's Boneyard, Emerson, Iowa (1:300/3)