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Guest IguanaKing
Posted

What type of engine was installed in Hultgreen's ship? Granted, her reaction to the failure was not exactly the best, but what engine type was in that aircraft? Just curious.

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Posted

Below your dribble is a quote from wikipedia, where you yourself took sources. Looks like The Tomcat's engine problem was a great contributor to the problem ... it's funny how people latch on to 'human error' as 'sole cause' when it very obviously isn't. Kinda like people were calling certain bad bomber landings human error - and it was - but fatigue and problematic cockpit design were great contributors to the issue. This is no different.

 

Interesting how you dishonor a fallen NAVY aviator as well in your next post, when it was clearly shown that she was -very- competent. She had a bad day. Get off your horse while you still can ;)

 

hitman, about those pictures. The one being pulled outta the water is from the wreckage of when the first Female F-14 pilot crashed it. It was pilot error, NOT the jets problem, and the one in the woods I have no clue what the cause of it was. But if you want to get into the number of crashes of the F-14 to the F/A-18 series, oh I will REALLY get into!

 

 

 

The Navy's Mishap Investigation Report (MIR) for Hultgreen's crash was sealed, and rumors abounded that despite a Navy press release to the contrary it had found pilot error as a contributing factor. The report was later leaked over the Internet and is now readily available, confirming that Hultgreen was assigned partial responsibility for the engine flameout and subsequent failure to retain control and recover from the problem. It also described known mechanical glitches with the plane flown that day that could increase the likelihood of flameout, concluding, "although not sufficient alone to stall the eng[ine], this malfunction, combined with reduced throttle setting and sideslip, contributed to left eng[ine] comp[ressor] stall."

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Posted
hitman, about those pictures. The one being pulled outta the water is from the wreckage of when the first Female F-14 pilot crashed it. It was pilot error, NOT the jets problem, and the one in the woods I have no clue what the cause of it was. But if you want to get into the number of crashes of the F-14 to the F/A-18 series, oh I will REALLY get into!

 

Pilot error huh? We've been briefed before here about this same accident. The pilot attempted to reduce speed by applying rudder and the engine of the same side stalled causing the plane yaw into a spin. That hapened because TF-30's dont like the disturbed air comming from the frontal airframe blacking out the airflow.

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Posted

nice quote from wikipedia there GGTharos :). Yes it is all true and I have spoken to a pilot from VF-213 who witnessed the whole crash while onboard the ship and he said it just looked like there a big wind shear and ontop of that the powerful boost of the F-14's engine basically flipped it into a roll causing the thing to bank hard left right into the water. So, pilot and natural error? I would think so and with the full burst of power applied. Mechanical error? the flameout on approach but with rudder to you can still land straight enough.

Hultgreen was killed when her F-14 crashed on approach to the USS Abraham Lincoln off of San Diego after a routine mission. Finding herself too high, Hultgreen attempted to correct her approach by yawing the aircraft to induce a sideslip in order to lose altitude. In combination with an engine fault, this led to the left-hand engine suffering a "compressor stall" and losing power as air was no longer flowing straight into it. The F-14 flight manual warns against sideslips at any time for this reason.

After aborting the approach Hultgreen selected full afterburner on the remaining engine. The engines on the F-14 are mounted far apart and Hultgreen needed full opposite rudder to compensate for the off-centre thrust. Whilst distracted by this, the proximity of the sea, and the engine failure, she raised the nose of the aircraft too far as she tried to climb away resulting in an unrecoverable stall and rapid wing-drop to the left. The Radar Intercept Officer (RIO) in the rear seat initiated ejection for himself and Hultgreen as soon as it was apparent the aircraft was becoming uncontrollable. First in the automated ejection sequence, the RIO survived. However, by the time Hultgreen's seat fired 0.4s later, the plane had rolled past the horizontal, and she was ejected downward into the water, killing her instantly. The entire event unfolded in less than twenty seconds.

Guest IguanaKing
Posted
Mechanical error? the flameout on approach but with rudder to you can still land straight enough.

 

I'm going to have to raise the BS flag yet again. In an aircraft like that, if you lose an engine at that airspeed and altitude, you're either dead or you're going to get wet. I don't care if you're Kara Hultgreen or John Wayne, it just sucks to be you at that point in time. How does your quoting an excerpt, from the link you posted earlier, answer the question about the type of engine installed in that airframe? I'm also not sure how you can deduce from a photo of wreckage that it must have been an explosion. You ARE aware that water basically becomes like concrete at a speed somewhat below terminal velocity, are you not? How much do you want to bet that F-14 was well above terminal velocity when it hit the water. That has a tendancy to tear the aircraft to pieces as surely as it would if it had glanced off a concrete wall at that speed.

Guest IguanaKing
Posted

That's true. But its also the most widely-distributed. :D Shit happens...its just up to the law of averages. The F-111 had an abyssmal safety record as well, especially in the late 60's-early 70's...but in the early 90's it also had one of the most impressive A-G combat records, with no losses in that conflict. All of this comparison of crashes is a little crazy, actually, since military aircraft generally don't ever reach deployment if they are inherently unsafe. Heh...that's in a manner of speaking of course. Military aviation is inherently dangerous, and Naval/Marine Corps aviation is even more so. :D

Posted

Ok, what has one incident to do with the F-14(A) as a whole? And don't start that 'but women are' bullshit, they can handle G forces better and have identical response times and in average are smarter than we are, so there is really no reason to jump on a bandwagon shouting 'dum pilot should've applied rudder, cuz in lomac that's the way it is, and lomac=reality'. Besides, the lack of respect is also somewhat disturbing, I don't mean to wimp this thread up or something, but some, be it 'acted' sign of compassion could have been appropriate.

 

As IK said, a flame-out in a plane with such engine configuration often leads to an ejection, be it at 100 or 10000 feet, in that case the plane was flying slow, low and at a respectable angle of attack, if one engine fails, there is no computer system to apply counter rudders and gently increase the throttle to keep the inertial forces from the turbines manageable, so the only option there was was either wait until the thing slams into the carrier or other ships, or try saving the damned thing. Real pilots also tend to think about other people, trying not to let 25 tonnes of shrapnel hit them.

Of course, other factors may have been significant, such as sleep deprevation, or other physiological/psychological things. Also, she flew the F-14A, with the tf-30.

So, the most straightforward 'negative factors' were, the drag created by the dead engine, the rotational forces from the working one, low altitude, low speed, and lots of gusts/windshear.

 

In that aspect, the F-18 is safer because the engines are close together, and it probably has some kind of corrective FCS for engine failures, although I've read that it handles almost the same as if it were with 2 lit engines. So yes, the F-14A was a deathtrap in the early years, and since the super bug can't be classified as a 'new' airplane, I would say, count the total number of F-18s in USN, devide it by the number of total losses, and do the same for the tomcat, then take the amount of operational years, and then you'll get some kind of crash/flight ratio. Something tells me the F-18 might be marginally better, but not by much.

 

Okay, back on the engine configuration, we have similar planes with similar problems, the Mig-29 comes to mind due to the 1989 crash, and I've read that most single engine failures of the mig-29 result in an ejection, and that thing doesn't have such big engines, they are closer together, and the engines themselves are offset from the flight direction. Yet, if 1 engine fails, the thing is almost uncontrollable at low speeds.

Just plain physics, engines turn, and have a big sucking disc in the front, which becomes an airbrake, especially when it stops spinning fast enough.

 

So, pilot error my a$$, the thing was a 'special' plane to fly, as in you screw up for half a second, you die kind of special, funny it took the Navy so many lost lives and airframes to find that out :(

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Posted
That's true. But its also the most widely-distributed. :D Shit happens...its just up to the law of averages. The F-111 had an abyssmal safety record as well, especially in the late 60's-early 70's...but in the early 90's it also had one of the most impressive A-G combat records, with no losses in that conflict. All of this comparison of crashes is a little crazy, actually, since military aircraft generally don't ever reach deployment if they are inherently unsafe. Heh...that's in a manner of speaking of course. Military aviation is inherently dangerous, and Naval/Marine Corps aviation is even more so. :D

 

Yes, your sitting on a thing that has fuel crammed into every available space, with explosives attaced under the wings, you have to fly in nearly any kind of weather and then the other team takes shots at you!

 

But I live in Africa. In 2005 70% of all civilian aircraft accidents took place in Africa. Keep in mind that in that year Africa accounted for only 3% of departures in the world!

Posted

The Hornet and the Viper were both much more widely spread for the last six years than the Tomcat. Thus, they have a higher "Total force" accident rate than the Tomcat.

 

The vast majority of the accidents related to the Tomcat were related to the Craptastic TF-30 engines found in the A's . Those TF-30's were simply touchy, and would fly apart if you farted the wrong way, modifications were done on the TF-30 fleet during the mid to late 90's which helped this, but it never, ever fully went away.

 

Virtually all of the engine problems were solved with the introduction of the GE-110's on the B (intially A+) and D model Tomcats. The lack of the AMRAAM severely limited the Tomcats A2A ability, and after about 2001, you almost exclusively saw them as Mudmovers, while also having a A2A role as alert fighters and CAP aircraft.

 

Ultimately its about the pilot, not the machine. A well trained F-14 pilot could and did eat Nugget Hornet pilots, newbie F-16 and F-15 pilots. Just as when the initial wave of Tomcats entered the fleet, well flown and trained Phantom pilots could kill Tomcats. Because of its swing wing geometery and such, the Tomcat had very good low speed manuverability, and had very impressive role and snap turn rates.

 

The fact is, the Tomcat is gone, and in an A2A fight, I wouldnt take a F-14 lightly as an opponent, but it's not the super plane that some people think it was. The Hornet has its advantages over the Tomcat, and vice versa, same with the F-15 and F-16.

 

And I wouldnt call the F-14 garbage, alot of the first F-15 and F-16A's went to the Boneyard before the A model Tomcats, same with the Hornets.

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Posted

And IIRC, the maximum speed to maintain control and directional stablity with an engine out in a F-14 was about Mach 1.6-8, alot of F-14A's came back to the carrier and to the airfields with one TF-30 shut down or a piece of very hot junk.

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Posted

nicely put. hey I got a questions concerning your name I always wanted to ask you. Your name isnt Ryan is it because in my squad, mine and my XO's callsigns are Viper and Eagle, so I just wanted to check that out and make sure of something.

Guest IguanaKing
Posted
And IIRC, the maximum speed to maintain control and directional stablity with an engine out in a F-14 was about Mach 1.6-8, alot of F-14A's came back to the carrier and to the airfields with one TF-30 shut down or a piece of very hot junk.

 

How many of those had an engine failure low and slow though? :smilewink:

Guest IguanaKing
Posted
not many

 

Which would be why they didn't crash like Hultgreen's ship. ;) If you're high and fast, you've got all kinds of time to work things out and get your mind into a different mode of thinking. When you are low and slow like she was, unless you're Superman (or Wonder Woman as this case would be), you're very unlikely to save the plane. Even if you are in that situation over land where your landing parameters are much wider, you're still probably going to either die or punch out. The chances of landing successfully are slim to none.

Posted

sooo your basing one incident of what Hultgreen's "reactions" were and did, to the statistics of the F-14's power to one engine in a low and slow combination? That is wrong. It was her action that caused that crash, she wanted to wave off but till the last moment the LSO told her go around, so if he would of told her earlier, she would of had enough altitude and speed to be able to get up and out of that situation with one engine. And live to tell about it ;/

Guest IguanaKing
Posted

Nope, just calling it like I see it based on the report saying she was on approach and had a flame-out. Two years ago (almost to the day), I was on the flightline and watched a total of 5 people (2 in one, and 3 in the other) die after they had one of their two engines fail in the pattern...and there were less than 7 days between those incidents. One was a Mitsubishi Mu-2, the other was a Cessna 421. Neither of those aircraft had engines NEARLY as powerful as the F-14. The Cessna 421 crash happened early enough in the evening that I saw the whole thing. It yawed into the dead engine and slammed into the ground to the left of 34R. I could see stopped cars on C470, and the occupants of those vehicles running toward the wreckage. The upper door on 421 swung open, and the lower door was just opening as the whole friggin' airplane erupted into a fire ball.

 

So, just curious, are you now saying that maybe Hultgreen wasn't to blame? That's kinda what most of us have been saying all along. :D

Posted

Bottomline is the TF-30-related problems where solved with the GE-110. The many problems with carrier approach where also very adequately addressed with the DFCS.

 

The F-14D is certainly a slick machine; but as has been said, digital integration is now more radical: modern-day fighters are designed from the outset around digital systems, one of the most striking examples is the proposed F/A-18G Growler, which builds on builtin wiring capabilities of the F/A-18F.

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