Sunday, December 30, 2012

Close calls don't come much closer than this!


This video clip shows a Tupolev Tu-204 aircraft of Russian airline Red Wings sliding off a runway at Moscow's Vnukovo airport, and crashing into a road embankment.  Pieces of the aircraft fly onto the road, hitting several vehicles, including the one whose dash camera captured the accident.





Four out of twelve crew members aboard the aircraft were killed.  Mercifully, there were no passengers aboard, otherwise the death toll might have been much higher.




That won't buff out . . .





Peter

6 comments:

The Great and Powerful Oz said...

Yeah, the insurance company is going to want to see that video. "I was hit by an airplane" is a tough thing to claim successfully.

Do you have any good recommendations for dashboard cams? I'm thinking one might be useful at times.

Old NFO said...

WOW, that is 'impressive' to put it mildly...

skreidle said...

More details and photos here: http://avherald.com/h?article=45b4b3cb&opt=1024

Will said...

The aircraft's speed at impact with the embankment would infer they were attempting a go-around.

Interesting notice posted on that site about the thrust reversers sometimes not deploying when activated, and the very involved procedure to deploy same.

Spooling up the engines for braking effect, then discovering that one was still pushing, could lead to a late decision to abort the landing. I suspect that part of the problem would be how quickly the reverser could be uncoupled. If it requires the engine to go to idle first, they were screwed, and probably should not have attempted an abort. I would guess that the time required for the entire sequence, from touchdown to having both engines fully spooled up for flight, would be very marginal for most any normal length runway, especially in marginal traction conditions that would require reverse thrust in the first place.

It's a shame that full size engines can't seem to be engineered to use the simple clamshell thrust reverser that was put on the little BD5-J. Of course, being able to activate it at any time, even in flight, did cause at least one crash...

Will said...

BTW, did you catch the bankshot the tire made off the bottom of the overhead bridge, before impacting the car in front?

Will said...

Re: the dash cam.
A commenter on one of the versions on Youtube said that they are common in Russia, due to insurance fraud and corrupt police officers.

Which explains the large numbers of vehicle videos from Russian streets, I guess.