Hail damage vs. Aircraft

[hitman]

Ouch.

[Silent Warrior]

Some days I'm glad I don't have a flight certificate... But only SOME days.

[Pilotasso]

Its funny, only one window of the windshield is damaged... o.O

[hitman]

Does look painful, doesnt it? :)

[Pilotasso]

yeah but why did the hail only hit one side of the windshield? o.O

[hitman]

The pilot was hard like that?? O.o

[Storm.i]

Maybe because of the direction of wind. Other option could be that it is fake, but why fake this?

[hitman]

lol yeah I forgot...everything anyone posts here is always fake! Damn you, photoshop!!

[Pilotasso]

lol I was just wodering because the damage on the nose is symetrical and the damage donne on the windshield is not, as for the direction of the hail, airplanes dont fly sideways. If your traveling at 400mph it doesnt matter direction of the wind unless you enter a hurricane.

[urze]

yeah but why did the hail only hit one side of the windshield? o.O

Don't forget that aircraft windshilds are usually extreme stable.

I heard once that you have to effort up to 400Kg on a square cm to damage it(don't nail me at this number!).

But when you got the first brick it destabilizes the whole structure and every new hit damage it even more.

 

So I would say that the right windshild has taken one "400Kg punch".

 

edit:

one more explanation could be that on the left side the windshild is totally gone.

 

:smilewink: and for all that still believe that this is photoshoped,

i have corrected it with photoshop:

[Guest IguanaKing]

Yup, Urze hit the nail on the head. The windscreen on passenger jets is unbelievably thick and strong. The radome, on the other hand, is a fairly thin piece of composite, usually fiberglass. The RH windscreen probably just happened to catch the golden BB that was big enough to break it. :)

[ViperVJG73]

Has he been it? :D

 

[warthogmadman987]

Has he been it? :D

 

 

LOL, i have that pic 2!

[Cosmonaut]

The RH windscreen probably just happened to catch the golden BB that was big enough to break it. :)

 

I agree with that as well, also maybe some debris from the nose may have hit the the windscreen.

 

The aircraft is a 727 and they're really quite old but even so it must have been a hefty size piece or pieces of ice to damage the aircraft like that. I'd guess the 727 wasn't going faster than 250 knots, seeing as thats the max speed allowed below 10K feet in the US and in most countries to maintain safe separation at low-ish altitude you probably wouldn't get cleared above that either .. especially in bad weather.

[Guest IguanaKing]

Nah, a piece of the radome wouldn't do jack to the windscreen, its pretty lightweight stuff. ;)

 

Oh, on the altitude and speed issue, he could have hit a hailstone at high altitude if he ended up flying through a supercell. They often top out at 50,000-70,000', and you can get torn up if you fly through one.

[Ardillita]

lol I was just wodering because the damage on the nose is symetrical and the damage donne on the windshield is not, as for the direction of the hail, airplanes dont fly sideways. If your traveling at 400mph it doesnt matter direction of the wind unless you enter a hurricane.

 

You are very wrong here, the wind IT DOES matter. Liveing where I do, I can perfectly tell you than big planes have to calculate the derivation they have because of winds of 50km... they do fly "sideways". This can be seen in our airport prefectly, and the effect is a lot stronger on little planes where you can see they use full pedal to the right/left to compensate the wind effect

[Cosmonaut]

Oh, on the altitude and speed issue, he could have hit a hailstone at high altitude if he ended up flying through a supercell. They often top out at 50,000-70,000', and you can get torn up if you fly through one.

 

Can you imagine descending from 30K feet with a cracked windscreen :cry: ..

 

That looks like an older 727 as well which didn't have much of an auto pilot either, it had this crazy looking mini Joystick thing to control the rate of decent and I'm not sure if it even had a nav hold.. :huh:

[Guest IguanaKing]

That would definitely suck. :cry: Its auto-pilot probably handled the job just fine though. Even the older auto-pilots in smaller civilian aircraft are remarkably capable. Heading and NAV hold are pretty common even on autopilots made in the 60's (and we see quite a few of those in my shop). :)

[Cosmonaut]

I used fly the 727 in FS9 quite a bit when I first got the sim and heres what the auto pilot didn't have, this is from Flight1's 727;

 

FMC: Sorry, but the vast majority of 727s were never fitted with this modern convenience, and neither is ours.

 

LNAV & VNAV: Not available- you want realism, don't you?

 

Autoland: The real 727 never had it, and neither does ours. Punch off the Autopilot at 1,000', and tackle that crosswind with your own two hands, just as the real 727 pilots do.

 

Autothrottle: Yet another modern convenience not on the real 727, and not on ours either. With the 727 you'll fully understand the term "a fist full of throttles".

[Guest IguanaKing]

Heh...none of those things have much to do with HDG, NAV, and ALT hold though. Sure it wouldn't autothrottle, and it wouldn't land the aircraft for him, but it'd help the pilot out quite a bit so he could manage other things in the pit. ILS might be a problem, but it doesn't look like the damage was low enough on the radome to have broken the G/S antenna (assuming it was one of the radome mounted types).

[ZoomBoy27]

Can you imagine descending from 30K feet with a cracked windscreen :cry: ..

 

 

On the New Year's weekend I was watching a full day's worth of Mayday on the Discovery Canada channel.

 

There was one case were a BA plane had the window pop outward. The captain got sucked out of the front left windscreen. The only thing holding him in was his feet getting stuck on the flying column. Which drove the plane downwards as the co-pilot fought to get the plane below 10,000 feet(oxygen).

They thought the captain was dead but they couldn't let the captain go because his body would have flown into one of the engines.

 

--- after some googling ---

06/10/1990 British Airways

BAC-111 Oxfordshire, England On a flight from Birmingham, England to Malaga, Spain, at FL 173, a large section of windshield fell away from the aircraft. The decompression pulled the captain out from under his seatbelt. Despite trying to hold onto the yoke, the captain was sucked out into the opening. A steward in the cockpit was able to grab hold of his legs. Another steward was able to strap himself into the vacant seat and aid in holding onto the captain's legs. The copilot wearing full restraints made an emergency landing at Southampton. The captain remained half way out of the aircraft for 15 minutes and suffered only frostbite and some fractures. Improper bolts used to replace the windshield two days earlier resulted in the accident.

 

 

A full 1st-person account is linked here.

 

That was the most riveting show ever.

[Cosmonaut]

Heh...none of those things have much to do with HDG, NAV, and ALT hold though. Sure it wouldn't autothrottle, and it wouldn't land the aircraft for him, but it'd help the pilot out quite a bit so he could manage other things in the pit. ILS might be a problem, but it doesn't look like the damage was low enough on the radome to have broken the G/S antenna (assuming it was one of the radome mounted types).

 

 

I agree I was really just listing the lack of automation out of interest because its one of my favorite airliners :D for the very fact that even flying it in a sim your work load never stops through out the flight. :pilotfly: And also how the pilot couldn't just setup the aircraft to fly itself while he kept his eye on the windscreen ;)

 

@ZoomBoy27, I remember seeing that story too .. Amazing how he survived.