A piece of amazing flying

Some more interesting battle damage at:

http://www.daveswarbirds.com/b-17

Wasn’t there an F-15 (Israeli?) that lost most of one side of its wing and still landed?

Yes, the F-15 lost the whole wing in fact but was saved by its battle-damage resistant design; twin independent tails and rudders and aren’t the (all moving) elevators and ailerons combined (elevons?) on an F-15?

No disrespect to the courage of the (senior) trainee pilot, who had been ordered to eject (as the instructor pilot did), but IMHO a recovery would have been impossible without the battle-damage resistant design; a design that even surprised the design team sent from the US who were convinced that this had to have been a ground accident!

not the video I was looking for but a one wing landing none the less

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh52tyilpr4

Edit

the video I was looking for!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=au2IkYLF7rc

Bazy,

Agreed you might be able to manage, though if you misjudge the approach you’ll have your work cut out if you need to apply power…however on a Hurricane the rudder also accounts for a fair portion of the vertical fin area, so we’re not just talking loss of the use of a control surface, there will also be a significant reduction in lateral stability…add a bit of longitudinal instability from the loss of elevator area and you have one serious handful of an aircraft…

It’s a great testament to the skill of the pilot and the design that the aircraft was able to land in one piece.

A rudder …you can definitely manage without,may not be pretty flying but if smooth with throttle control def manageable !
The tailplane /elevator damage is much more serious and with that amount of damage I would say the pilot did a very skillful landing indeed !

rgds baz

You don’t need rudder once airborne.
And there is a little bit of the elevator left.

I’d take issue with this…in a jet the rudder is pretty much superficial to requirements (other than yaw damping)in flight unless you lose an engine, in which case it becomes essential…In a torquey old warbird though, it’s important to maintain balanced flight (with power changes and in turns)and keep the a/c right side up if you need to fly a go around. If you’ve ever tried to turn with aileron in a Tiger Moth you’ll find a rudder indispensable…also if you’ve ever had to recover from a spin…

So…to fly a Hurricane without rudder is a pretty precarious business and one in which the safe outcome is in doubt.

Sadly that video is a poor fake, however there is a video on YouTube of a guy landing a quarter scale (or similar) model when it loses a wing, he knife edges it all the way in, real skill not cgi!

It appears from all your coments its is clearly a fake, certainly had me fooled I guess I wasnt looking closely enough. I have seen RC planes hang on the prop like a Helicopter. I didnt think it was CGI when we did “Doctor Who” I asked the director why they neede a full scale replica if they have CGI. He told me its not good for close up detail and they needed something real.

You don’t need rudder once airborne.
And there is a little bit of the elevator left.

Remeber that B-17, for got the name, that had its entire rudder ripped off, as well as an entire horizontal removed by a ramming Bf-109?

It too made it back to base after a long, long flight.

So, possible?
Absolutely.
But I bet he was sweating bullets and cussing the rammer the rest of the day! :diablo:

Quite true but you do need it as soon as you land surely, I cant imagine the elevator thats left would have much effect, clearly its possible as he made it down, but it must have been one heck of feat and probably required a new pair of trousers 😮

I hate to say it Graham, but that is a well known (and old!) fake.

Wasn’t there an F-15 (Israeli?) that lost most of one side of its wing and still landed?

Fascinating Hurricane story and what a sad end to Lundsten.

Graham, only the last sequence of the youtube movie shows the real plane (onn he ground). The first part show an RC model (see difference in details specially on the tail). It was uncovered as an hoax (albeit very well done) a couple of days after it was aired on youtube. No CGI involved there.

If conditions are perfect, you don’t need much vertical stabilizer at all.

B-52H 61-023: 1964-01-10, over New Mexico… landed safely in Arkansas (it took hours to find a B-52 base with no ground winds and to plan the landing attempt).

Of course, this was one of a series of vertical stabilizer failures after the change from high-altitude to low-altitude bombing… something the B-52 wasn’t designed for (sounds familiar, right V-bomber force?)… the other 3 aircraft crashed*, with fatalities.
1963-01-24 B-52C 53-0406, 7 dead 2 survived, Elephant Mountain, Maine
1963-01-30 B-52E 57-0018, 2 dead 4 survived, Mora, New Mexico
1964-01-13 B-52D 55-0060, 3 dead 2 survived, Cumberland, Maryland

* in addition, several other B-52s crashed after horizontal stabilizer & main wing failures during high-speed low-level flight.

How did he do that with no elevators or rudder amazing, do you what altitude he was when it happened?

You don’t need rudder once airborne.
And there is a little bit of the elevator left.

Remeber that B-17, for got the name, that had its entire rudder ripped off, as well as an entire horizontal removed by a ramming Bf-109?

It too made it back to base after a long, long flight.

So, possible?
Absolutely.
But I bet he was sweating bullets and cussing the rammer the rest of the day! :diablo:

Yes the previously mentioned video has been proven a complete fake. It uses footage of real aircraft, R/C aircraft, and CGI all poorly edited together. Watched closely at even low resolution it is pretty easy to pick apart.

However this recent clip of Dino Moline’s Rans S-9 losing a wing while doing an inverted pushup is quite real. He was saved by his BRS parachute system and the help of his spotter on the ground who told him to pull the chute via radio communications.

http://www.avweb.com/avwebflash/exclusivevids/LostWingLanding_BRSParachute_DinoMoline_203144-1.html

seriously? is that CGI, a fake? if so its pretty convincing, I dont think they can CGI detail as per bit at the end where he opens the hood.

The landing sequence is horribly edited. It’s clearly a fake.

You can land special RC planes on one wing. I’ve seen videos, and those were very real.

Def fake Graham…the a/c would simply ‘spin in’ if it lost the complete wing !

rgds baz

Hi Graham,

That video is CGI. There is no way that an aerobatic aircraft can lose a wing and return to the ground in one piece (unless you have a ballistic recovery system…)

Good pic of the Hurricane though. Amazing he got it down.

seriously? is that CGI, a fake? if so its pretty convincing, I dont think they can CGI detail as per bit at the end where he opens the hood.

Yes Dunbar,

A photo of the end result appears in `Aerobatics` by the Man Himself.

Neil Williams Zlin had a spar failure and he rolled it inverted to keep it in compression, rolled out at the last minute and crunched in…but walked away. Another feat of airmanship.

Hi Graham,

That video is CGI. There is no way that an aerobatic aircraft can lose a wing and return to the ground in one piece (unless you have a ballistic recovery system…)

Good pic of the Hurricane though. Amazing he got it down.