UPS MD-11 Crash Investigation

A fractured spherical bearing race (center, on either side of monoball) began the chain of events that caused UPS 2976 to lose its left engine. Credit: NTSB

You might remember hearing about the giant UPS air freighter that crashed in Louisville, Kentucky, last November. Looks like the NTSB has finished their investigation. My Daily Kona has a post about this. I'm not sure if they figured out who to blame, it's kind of a long post and I didn't read the whole thing. The part that amazes me is the huge volume of records that must be kept to even allow this kind of analysis. It's frankly mind-boggling.

Airliner - Helicopter Disaster

Gold-topped VH-60M versions of the Black Hawk are used to transport high-ranking military and defense officials around Washington

As you may have heard, an American Airlines airliner collided with military helicopter near Ronald Reagan Airport in Washington D. C. ZeroHedge has the story. I didn't know they had special helicopters for transporting VIPs. 

1981 Tu-104 Crash

When the Soviet Navy Lost 16 Admirals in a Single Accident: The Tu-104 Crash at Pushkin
Paper Skies

A fine example of what happens you have blockheads in charge. The more powerful they are, the more dangerous they become. The crash happened at Pushkin Airfield in Leningrad, known today as St. Petersburg.

Cargo shifting also caused the crash of a 747 in Afghanistan back in 2013. I vaguely remember hearing about this. This one only killed the crew, there were no passengers, and it seems to have been due to a human error or mechanical failure, not slavish obedience to drunken fools.

Keep Breathing - Netflix Series

Keep Breathing | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
Short, half-hour episodes. A young woman hitches a ride with a couple of guys in a small plane in Alaska. On the way to Inuvik the airplane's engine fails and they crash land into a small lake so what was supposed to be quick jaunt turns into a real battle to survive. The two guys quickly bite the dust so our girl is on her own, miles from nowhere with no food, water or even matches. She recovers a couple of bags from the wreck that is sitting in maybe 20 feet of water at the bottom of the lake, but do those bags have anything useful? Well, one bag is full of cash and the other is full of oxy, so not a lot of help.

The show basically cuts back and forth between flashbacks of her life back in the big city and her trials in the wilderness. It doesn't do a great job of depicting her efforts to provide for herself, but it's not really horrible either. I think the first thing would have been to build a giant frigging bonfire and then catch some fish. She gets by with a cute little campfire and a couple quarts of wild berries. So she's taking care of business and she's getting by. We shall see how she manages to get out of the pickle she's in.

Update May 2026 replaced missing video.

Emergency Landing at Hillsboro Airport

Cessna Catastrophic Engine Failure Emergency with Video and ATC Audio
Cessna Twoohfive

The engine on this Cessna airplane quit while enroute from Seattle to Sacramento, California, last week. Fortunately, he was only a few miles from the Hillsboro Airport and was able to glide in and land safely. He was at 9,000 feet of elevation and six miles from the Hillsboro Airport when the engine quit. A Cessna 205 has a theoretical glide ration of 1.5 miles for every 1,000 feet of altitude, so he had a little cushion of time and space, not a lot, but some, and he was able to land safely. Hillsboro Airport, home to Nike, Intel and the Portland Trail Blazers charter flights, is just a mile from my house.

Cessna 205, same one as in the video

The Cessna 205 was only made in 1963 and 64 before is was superseded by the 206.

Continental 470 Engine

There are some photos at the end of the video that show the catastrophic damage to the engine. I hope to hear more about the causes in the near future.

Via Byron

Blackhawk Helicopter Crash

Two Black Hawk helicopters crash at Snowbird resort
BYU Universe
Two Black Hawk helicopters from the Utah Army National Guard crashed at Snowbird’s Mineral Basin. No serious injuries were reported.

One of the crashed helicopters

Video via FlightAware and Unofficial Networks

Update January 2026 replaced missing video. Aviation Safety Network has the results of the investigation.

North American Aviation XB-70 Valkyrie

North American Aviation XB-70A-1-NA Valkyrie 62-0001 Prototype just before landing at Runway 4 Right, Edwards Air Force Base, ending of its first flight, 21 September 1964.

Detroit Steve and I spent some years on farms in Ohio when we were in high school. His dad (Bill) and my dad (Roman) both worked for North American Aviation, but something prompted them both to buy farms, so off to the farm we went.

In 1966 one of the two prototype XB-70s collided with a chase plane and crashed in the California desert. (Wikipedia) The copilot of the XB-70, Carl Cross, was killed in the crash. He was a friend of Bill's and Steve may have even met him.

Major Carl Cross

EverythingAviation has several photos of this disaster.

The XB-70 has appeared here before.

Pardo's Push

Pardo's Push: McDonnell F4 Phantom
AVweb

Pretty good trick, and pretty nuts, but it worked. But then you've got to bail out, and things got a little rough then.

Ejection seats are nasty. They get you out of the airplane, but acceleration from the rockets that get you out is ferocious and pilots often suffer back injuries. I guess that's better than being dead, but geez, you'd think all our science and technology we could do a better job.

Via Knuckledraggin My Life Away

Airplane of the Day - Douglas DC-8

Fatal Combination for Arrow Air Flight 1285
Smithsonian Channel Aviation Nation
Arrow Air Flight 1285 crashed 35 years ago on takeoff from Gander Newfoundland killing all 256 people on board. Ice likely caused of the crash of this DC-8.

Via Knuckledraggin My Life Away

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

Left: The Malaysian lawyer and activist Grace Subathirai Nathan, whose mother was on board MH370. Right: Blaine Gibson, an American who has mounted a search for debris from the airplane. (William Langewiesche)

William Langewiesche has a story in The Atlantic that summarizes what we know about the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which isn't much. He also relates some theories about what happened, all of which he dismisses, except for one, which is pretty grizzly.

The most interesting part is about Blaine Gibson, who had no connection with the flight or the investigation, but took it upon himself to go searching for bits of wreckage washing up on Indian Ocean beaches. Surprisingly he found a bunch. Well, several pieces anyway.

William has nothing good to say about the government of Malaysia, unless you consider, corrupt, incompetent, morons as 'good'.

Via Posthip Scott

Are We Stupid?

The cruise ship Viking Sky arrives at port off Molde, Norway, on Sunday after having problems and issuing a "mayday" call in heavy seas off Norway's western coast. (Svein Ove Ekornesvag/NTB scanpix via AP)

We are all on board the express train to hell, or maybe I should say cruise ship. Rough weather started the engine lubricating oil to sloshing about in the tank, which caused the oil level sensors to sound an alarm, which caused the artificially stupid engine controller to shut down the engines, which set off panic amongst just about everyone.

WTF? No engineer on board? Well, maybe not, after all, we have a sophisticated engine control system so we will not have the problem that we had. We're seeing the same situation with airliners falling out of the sky. We are putting people in command of these complex machines, people who don't have a complete understanding of the machines under their control. It's a dilemma. Our control systems have become very sophisticated and most of the time, everything works perfectly. It's only in those rare instances that something goes wrong, and in those cases the only person who can save you is the one who knows more than the control system does. Those people are few and far between and becoming fewer everyday. Someone who knows enough to save the ship in that rare instance when things go wrong is going to be very bored babysitting a system that will likely never fail. If you are running a business, are you going to pay the big bucks necessary to have a talented person sitting around when you can hire a novice for a fraction of the cost, a novice who will more than likely be able to competently handle the job?

One hundred people paying $100 a seat for a short flight comes to $10K. One million similar flights adds up to ten billion dollars. One plane crashes where everyone dies happens once out of 300 million flights (my guesstimate). How often could one of those been averted if a super competent person had been in charge? How many of those happened where there was a super competent person in charge, but that super competent person had gone off the rails for some reason?

Automobile accidents still make the local news, but if you want national headlines, you need a major disaster. There are any number of ways to die. Life is a gamble. Place your bets accordingly.

Blast From The Past

Mail recovered from the 1955 crash of United Airlines Flight 429

United Airlines Flight 629 was blown up with a dynamite bomb placed in the checked luggage on November 1, 1955. The explosion occurred over Longmont, Colorado. All 39 passengers and five crew members on board were killed in the explosion and crash.
Investigators determined that Jack Gilbert Graham was responsible for bombing the airplane to kill his mother as revenge for his childhood and to obtain a large life insurance payout. Within 15 months of the explosion, Graham—who already had an extensive criminal record—was tried, convicted, and executed for the crime. - paraphrased from Wikipedia

Not quite a year later United Airlines Flight 409 crashed into Medicine Bow Peak in Wyoming, about 100 miles farther north.

The letter was addressed to Posthip Scott's dad and was eventually delivered. Via Posthip Scott.

Medicine Bow Peak

Medicine Bow Peak
The horizontal line across the bottom of the picture is Interstate-80

Last year was the 60th anniversary of the crash United Airlines Flight 409 into Medicine Bow Peak in Wyoming. There were a spate of stories about the crash, and I spent some time looking them over. I also put together a rough map of the flight plan.
    When we were driving back from Iowa not quite a month ago, our route took us through Cheyenne, Wyoming, where we spent the night. The next morning we are headed west on I-80 and I look over and see these mountains and say "that's where that airliner crashed".
    I didn't get a picture, but Google Earth bears me out.

Prompted by looking at the terrain around Chidago Canyon, site of Mr. Spock's return to Earth. Via Mr. Healy.

Night Flight

Ernest K. Gann, author of Fate is the Hunter, mentions "Mermoz of l'Aeropostale", and down the rabbit hole I go.

Jean Mermoz and his office in Buenos Aires

He's referring to Jean Mermoz, French aviation pioneer. Established airmail routes to Argentina and Chile. Being an aviation pioneer means he had some misadventures.

Latecoere 25 3R LV-EAB in the markings of Aeroposta Argentina exhibited in the museum at Buenos Aires Aeroparque in 1975.

One Latécoère 25 was involved in a celebrated incident when it made a forced landing high in the Andes. Hitherto, flights between Buenos Aires and Santiago made a 1,000 km (620 mi) detour to avoid the mountains. On 2 March 1929, while searching for a safe route across the range, a Latécoère 25 piloted by Jean Mermoz was caught in a downdraft and forced down onto a plateau just 300 metres (1,000 ft) across at an altitude of 4,000 metres (12,000 ft). With his mechanic Alexandre Collenot and passenger, Count Henry de La Vaulx, Mermoz spent the next four days repairing and lightening the aircraft and making a clear path from it to the edge of the precipice. He then rolled it off the edge, diving to attain airspeed, and successfully reached Santiago. - Wikipedia

Antoine de Saint-Exupery was another French aviation pioneer, friend of Mermoz and author.
    He wrote Night Flight [1], a best seller in 1931 described as "lyrical" by Wikipedia. A few years later it was made into a movie. After its initial run it was locked away in MGM's vault for 70 years. Antoine, the author, didn't like the movie. Turner Classic Movies finally obtained the rights to show it and broadcast it in 2011. Got all this from the introduction to the movie on Vimeo.
    Antoine, being an aviation pioneer, had his own misadventures.

On 30 December 1935, at 2:45 a.m., after 19 hours and 44 minutes in the air, Saint-Exupéry, along with his mechanic-navigator André Prévot, crashed in the Sahara desert. They were attempting to break the speed record in a Paris-to-Saigon air race (called a raid) and win a prize of 150,000 francs. The crash site is thought to have been near the Wadi Natrun valley, close to the Nile Delta.

Both Saint-Exupéry and Prévot miraculously survived the crash, only to face rapid dehydration in the intense desert heat. Their maps were primitive and ambiguous, leaving them with no idea of their location. Lost among the sand dunes, their sole supplies were strawberries, ten oranges, a thermos of sweet juice, chocolate, a handful of crackers, and a small ration of wine. The pair had only one day's worth of liquid. They both began to see mirages and experience auditory hallucinations, which were quickly followed by more vivid hallucinations. By the second and third day, they were so dehydrated that they stopped sweating altogether. Finally, on the fourth day, a Bedouin on a camel discovered them and administered a native rehydration treatment that saved their lives. The near brush with death would figure prominently in his 1939 memoir, Wind, Sand and Stars, winner of several awards. Saint-Exupéry's classic novella The Little Prince, which begins with a pilot being marooned in the desert, is, in part, a reference to this experience. - Wikipedia

David O. Selznick, producer of Night Flight.
     I recognized this name immediately, but after I looked him up I wonder why. He died in 1965 and the only film of his that I know I've seen is Gone With The Wind, and that was 50 years ago.

Clarence Brown, famous as a film director, director of Night Flight.

Brown moved to Universal in 1924, and then to MGM, where he stayed until the mid-1950s. At MGM he was one of the main directors of their female stars–he directed Joan Crawford six times and Greta Garbo seven.
He not only made the difficult transition from silent cinema to sound cinema, but thrived there, proving himself to be an "actor's director": listening to his actors, respecting their instincts, and often incorporating their suggestions into scenes. In doing so, Brown created believable, under-played, naturalistic dialogue scenes stripped of melodrama, pulsing with the honest rhythms of real-life conversation. - Wikipedia

Shades of Quentin Tarantino.

[1] I think I inherited a copy of Night Flight, or maybe it was Wind, Sand and Stars, another one of his books. I tried to read it but it was too, I dunno, lyrical, maybe? In any case it wasn't my cup of tea.

1961 Goldsboro B-52 crash

CNN reports:

Declassified report: Two nuclear bombs nearly detonated in North Carolina

(CNN) -- On a January night in 1961, a U.S. Air Force bomber broke in half while flying over eastern North Carolina. From the belly of the B-52 fell two bombs -- two nuclear bombs that hit the ground near the city of Goldsboro.

The rest of the report goes on (and on) about what might have happened if the bombs had detonated. Well, yes, that would have been bad, but they didn't.
    What got me though was the first sentence: "... a U.S. Air Force bomber broke in half while flying over eastern North Carolina." How did that happen? As far as I know Air Force bombers are not in the habit of simply breaking in half in mid-air for no reason. A little point and click and I arrive at Wikipedia's article about the incident where I found this:

The aircraft, a B-52G based at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro, was on a 24-hour Operation Coverall airborne alert mission on the Atlantic seaboard of the United States. The operation was part of a larger Cold War program called the first Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP). This early plan called for one third of the Strategic Air Command's fleet of nuclear bombers to be airborne at any point in time, so that in the event of war, the fleet would not be caught on the ground, and be able to fly directly to targets in the Soviet Union,^[4] China and Soviet-aligned states.

I'm not sure what to make of this. Is this showing a correct level of concern with the security of the United States? Or is this paranoid cold-warrior thinking run amuck?

The Wikipedia article does go on to explain the breakup and the fate of the bombs, and as you might expect, it is more illuminating than the story from CNN.

P.S. I think the name of the operation is Coverall, not Coveral with a funny little character tacked on the end.

Still Looking for that Missing Airliner

INDIAN OCEAN (April 14, 2014) Operators aboard the Australian navy vessel ADF Ocean Shield move U.S. Navy's Bluefin-21 into position for deployment. Using side scan sonar, Bluefin will descend to a depth of between 4,000 and 4,500 meters, approximately 35 meters above the ocean floor to spend up to 16 hours at this depth collecting data. Joint Task Force 658 is supporting Operation Southern Indian Ocean, searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Peter D. Blair/Released)

4,500 meters is almost 3 miles deep. That won't get you to the very deepest part of the ocean, which is more like 7 miles, but it's pretty darn deep, and still deeper than most conventional submarines.

Bluefin is now owned by Batelle, a not-for-profit research outfit headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, where I lived when I was in Junior High School. There is a similar outfit in San Antonio, Texas, which is just down the road from Austin, called the Southwest Research Institute. They are called non-profits now, but when I first ran into them they were called not-for-profit. I took this to mean that they could make money from what they were doing, but it was all plowed back into their organization or research, not distributed to stock holders, because there aren't any stock holders.

Ocean Shield

April 9, 2014. Royal Australian Air Force AP-3C Orion flies past Australian Defense vessel Ocean Shield on a mission to drop sonar buoys to assist in the acoustic search of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the southern Indian Ocean. The ship searching for the missing Malaysian jet has detected two more underwater signals that may be emanating from the aircraft's black boxes. (Photo by Australian Defense Force)

Ship builders are building some funny looking ships these days. This one was originally ordered by a Norwegian company that is in the offshore oil and gas business. Before it was launched it was sold to the Australian Navy. The visor over the bow is a helipad.

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

Two Ilyushin Il-76 aircraft from Chinese Air Force on the tarmac in Perth, Australia, on March 22, 2014. (Xinhua/Lui Siu Wai)

Chinese aircrews flying Russian built aircraft out of Australia to search for an American built Boeing 777 airliner being flown by a Malaysian crew.

Mid Air Collision

According to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) preliminary report on the accident:

On January 16, 2004, about 1415 Pacific standard time, a Cessna 180K, N61691, and a Beech 95-B55, N555RD, collided about 6.5 nautical miles west of Tehachapi, California. The Cessna was destroyed, and its airline transport certificated pilot was fatally injured. The Beech was substantially damaged, and its private pilot received minor injuries.

The Beech pilot reported to the Safety Board investigator that, at the time of the collision, he was in a cruise climb. His altitude was over 5,500 feet mean sea level (msl) but less than 6,500 feet msl. Less than a second prior to the collision he observed the right landing gear of an approaching airplane in his 1 o'clock position. He then ducked in a reflex-like manner and the collision occurred. The Beech pilot observed a dirt airstrip near his location, and he made a precautionary landing.

Text borrowed from Snopes

Photos arrived in an e-mail from Posthip Scott this morning attached to a story with the tag line:
"Meeting a goose at 11,000 ft. doing 185 knots can ruin your whole day."

Testament to this assertion is provided in the movie The Edge:

The edge Plane Crash scene
Movie clips channel The Edge was a pretty terrible movie with a lot of really neat scenes in it. I thought I wrote something about it once before but I can't find it now. Anthony Hopkin's character is the only one that displays any sense. Fortunately the dumbkoffs get killed off, though we have to put up with Alec Baldwin's dummy until the very end.
    Also found this video about how they filmed the plane crash for the movie. The narrator is really annoying. Does anyone really enjoy this kind of breathless enthusiasm? Shooting the plane crash was quite a production.


Movie Magic - "The Edge" Plane Crash
Thomas FX Group Inc.
Update February 2023 replaced missing video.

Update November 2024 replaced missing video.

Helicopter Crash

Russian Ka-52 "Alligator" helicopter crashed near Moscow today, the two pilots were seriously injured, but no fatalities. Unfortunate for the two guys involved, but not really noteworthy. I mean helicopters are always falling out of the sky and killing or injuring people.
    The odd bit is that this helicopter is equipped with ejection seats, which sounds like a really dumb idea for a helicopter. Wouldn't you get chopped in half by the rotor blades before you got clear? I suppose you could make like a machine gun on a WWI fighter plane and synchronize your firing with the rotation of the blades, but you would really want to trust the synchro mechanism on a helicopter that is so broken that it is falling out of the sky? Anyway, they came up with another solution: jettison the rotor blades before you fire the ejection seats. I mean, if the jettison part successfully disconnected the blades they would be gone in a fraction of a second, leaving clear sailing for the guys to boost clear.
    So what happened here? First of all you need to know that this is one of those crazy Russian helicopters with the contra-rotating blades.

Looking at the crash picture, it appears that the upper set of blades is still attached, but the lower set of blades is missing. There is some speculation that the jettison-blade portion of the ejection sequence failed. Either the portion for the lower blades was activated inadvertantly, or the portion for the upper blades failed. In either case, the chopper would have lost half of it's lift and would have started to rotate in an uncontrollable fashion, neither of which are good things to have happen in a helicopter.