TU-22 Crash

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Ouch.
Put on the power way too late for the go around.
The rear wheel touched down and the plane broke apart...like really?
The front wheels didn't even have a chance to hit the ground.

Poor engineering of the plane's structure?

As a comparison, the 777 that landed short of the runway in SF, Asiana 214, smacked that tail really hard, and the cabin maintained integrity through out crash.

Be interested in cujet and Astro14's thoughts.

1:20 in the video is where it gets interesting.
 
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Because of my employment I have several hours of drinking coffee in one of the pilots seats in a cold and dark 747. I could not imagine the skill it would take to fly one of those monsters,,, or any plane actually.
 
TU-22's get intercepted all the time off Alaska but the current news mentions two US F-22's , and two CF-18's from the Royal Canadian Airforce escorted two Russian TU-160 strategic bombers from Canada's air defence identification zone.
 
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Originally Posted by CT8
Because of my employment I have several hours of drinking coffee in one of the pilots seats in a cold and dark 747. I could not imagine the skill it would take to fly one of those monsters,,, or any plane actually.

Three of my life long friends (we met in 1st grade) flew commercial aircraft. One of them flew 747 freighters transoceanic for the final 20 years of his career, the others a variety of passenger multi-engined jet aircraft (727s. 737s, 757s, DC-8s, MD-80s, DC-10s, Airbus 3xx, etc). My across the street neighbor was a career Air Force pilot who flew nuclear armed B-52s. During the Bay of Pigs he was "dispatched" to Moscow with a fuselage full of nukes. Hearing his story is riveting. He knew it was a one way trip. After retiring from the Air Force he flew L-1011s for Delta (he said the L-1011 was the last of the "watchmaker's" aircraft - it was the finest engineered plane he ever flew).

The common denominator for all of them is that each one of them are alpha males who like high performance cars and/or motorcycles. The ability to be a good pilot, race car driver, large mainframe computer engineer (me, and like them I'm alpha and like fast machines too, it's just that mathematics was always easy for me), etc. is determined by your DNA. If it's not in your DNA, even with the most extensive training imaginable a person will only be "average".

Scott
 
Waiting for Astro to weigh in on this one-they came in hot, but that seemed really weird that the ENTIRE FUSELAGE snapped right in two like that! Maybe Russian aircraft inspections aren't so hot?
 
Originally Posted by SLO_Town
Originally Posted by CT8
Because of my employment I have several hours of drinking coffee in one of the pilots seats in a cold and dark 747. I could not imagine the skill it would take to fly one of those monsters,,, or any plane actually.

Three of my life long friends (we met in 1st grade) flew commercial aircraft. One of them flew 747 freighters transoceanic for the final 20 years of his career, the others a variety of passenger multi-engined jet aircraft (727s. 737s, 757s, DC-8s, MD-80s, DC-10s, Airbus 3xx, etc). My across the street neighbor was a career Air Force pilot who flew nuclear armed B-52s. During the Bay of Pigs he was "dispatched" to Moscow with a fuselage full of nukes. Hearing his story is riveting. He knew it was a one way trip. After retiring from the Air Force he flew L-1011s for Delta (he said the L-1011 was the last of the "watchmaker's" aircraft - it was the finest engineered plane he ever flew).

The common denominator for all of them is that each one of them are alpha males who like high performance cars and/or motorcycles. The ability to be a good pilot, race car driver, large mainframe computer engineer (me, and like them I'm alpha and like fast machines too, it's just that mathematics was always easy for me), etc. is determined by your DNA. If it's not in your DNA, even with the most extensive training imaginable a person will only be "average".

Scott


That's because you (like myself) have "The Nack!".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mpYM4N698s
 
Originally Posted by Snagglefoot
According to Wikipedia, the last TU 22 was manufactured in 1969. That's a 50 year old plane. Maybe it was metal fatigue combined with the hard hit that caused it to fail.


The TU22M3 was built from 1977 until 1993 and was quite a different plane from the TU22 (swing wing compared to fixed delta wing, for example).
There is some suggestion that the lack of a whole new model number for the new plane was intended to confuse Western enemies while others think the naming was for budgetary considerations in the Soviet Union (pretending the new plane was a minor upgrade instead of a largely new plane). Ironically, a big reason swing wing was used in the TU22M was to improve upon the terrible landing characteristics of the older TU22.
 
Originally Posted by clarkflower
Wow.. Vermont. I wonder if Bernie saw it from his house?


Vermont? Murmansk is a LONG LONG way from Vermont, I doubt old Bernie got a good look at it!
 
BTW, the Backfire bomber (TU22M) was pretty notorious in the US in the 1980s and there was a lot of arguing between the US and the USSR about whether it should be considered a strategic bomber.
It was pretty scary looking from the right angle and was often used to grab attention on magazine covers and newpaper front pages.
 
Got a chance to look at the video...

The TU-22 in the video was what we called a Backfire-C. It had the F-15 style intakes. Later production. Early versions, the Backfire-B, had F-4 style intakes. Anyway, it's a big jet, over 250,000 lbs at max weight. And it was pretty highly wing-loaded. Lots of weight for the wing. It was designed for a Mach 2 dash to the target, so the wing was thin, and variable geometry to reduce drag and allow a strategic bomber to go that fast. Doesn't leave a lot of wing for landing, or takeoff performance, it's a thin wing, flown at high AOA for takeoff and landing. Not like an airliner, that has a thick wing and flies at a low angle of attack.

I don't know much about how it flew or handled, but I suspect that it was landing at over 150,000 lbs. That would be base empty weight plus some reasonable fuel reserves. It's a highly wing loaded airplane. Lots of weight carried by each square foot of wing. That kind of high-performance airframe is unforgiving. The high weight means that anything you do with the airplane involves large forces, and lots of momentum.

It's my initial impression that the sink rate was extreme. Far beyond design limits for that kind of airplane, perhaps beyond what a carrier airplane could handle. Typical airliners can handle about 600 FPM (10 FPS) of vertical velocity. Carrier airplanes routinely land with 10-12 FPS, and are designed for up to 15 FPS. 19, FPSI think, was the design goal for the F-14 (which was a notoriously strong airframe).

So, what happened? Here is my guess:

Training mission for a crew that flies very few hours/year. Bad weather on return. Adrenaline-filled approach. Pressure to land felt by crew (pride, command pressure, worry, etc.). So, they try to salvage a bad approach, where they got a bit above glideslope while on instruments. The transition from instruments to visual is always challenging - and when doing in it in bad weather, particularly in heavy snow, it's hard to make sense of where you are. You often "feel" something that isn't so.

Pilot flying tries to correct from what he knows is a high approach and in trying to correct for that, by reducing power, and likely pushing forward on the yoke/stick, sets up a huge sink rate - easy to do in a high speed, highly wing loaded, and very heavy airplane. If you're already at high AOA, as I suspect this model flies on a normal approach, then raising the nose will do nothing to change the descent rate, you simply lose lift as you exceed critical AOA. If you take the power off a high AOA, thin wing, you're taking energy out of the airplane/system, and there is no way to add enough energy in time to stop what you set up with too large of a power reduction and descent rate increase.

High-performance airplanes are like that. There is no margin, no reserve, aerodynamically. It takes lots of power, LOTS of it, to change the descent rate, and if the airplane gets slow, it's just coming down a lot faster, no matter how much power you add. Ask the guys the flew F-8s aboard carriers... You can take off enough power, and set up a sink rate (in nearly 100 tons of machine, in this case) that cannot be changed in the time remaining...and I think that's what happened here.

The runway is obscured in snow - masking the sense of height above the runway, so as the crew sees the runway they don't perceive the excess sink rate. They got behind the airplane, which was coming down like a falling safe...

I heard the engine power increase about a second before impact, but I saw no change in pitch to adjust the rate of descent. The change in engine noise could simply have been the airplane getting closer, as well. Hard to tell from the grainy video...but it was clear that the airplane was flown into the runway with no attempt to flare, or arrest/change that sink rate. They hit far harder than any land-based, and perhaps any carrier-based, airplane was designed to hit. It broke the structure of the airplane just forward of the main gear. I don't think the structure was weak.

That was just an incredibly hard landing. An insane sink rate. I doubt, in the confusion of approach parameters, blowing snow, and an obscured surface, that they even knew...

So, simply, pilot error.
 
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Originally Posted by BobsArmory
Sink rate. Woop Woop, Pull Up! Terrain, Terrain


If they had had GPWS, I would bet it was going off for the last several seconds...

But I very much doubt they have it in a Russian AF bomber...
 
By the way, the 777 is a big pussycat compared with this airplane. A clean, efficient wing that generates lots of lift. A forgiving airplane that is easy to fly.

Asiana 214 hit the seawall with modest sink rate and was 30 knots slow, at idle power, and was still flying...
 
Just as an aside....


I have personally done line maintenance on Vladimir Putin's Ilyushin IL-62 when he came to visit GW Bush in Waco.

What a total heap of corrosion..... that thing really looked like it was maintained "3rd world style"


Russian aircraft are NOT maintained to the same standard as US aircraft - - AT ALL!!

Astro 14 thinks it wasn't necessarily bad structure -
I disagree, knowing what I know and seeing what I have seen on how Russians keep up with corrosion and stress cracks.
 
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