Gliding a jet

UrbanFox

Can you really glide a jet airliner to a safe landing where you have no engine power ?

Imagine a Boeing 737 (whatever model you like !) where the engines both cut out and no restart is possible. Could you actually glide one of those to a landing ?

highlydebased

For sure. There is a ratio, for x miles travelled you lose x feet. There are numerous documentaries about it

There was an Air Transat A330 which glided from mid atlantic to the Azores, and actually landed safely. They were very lucky...

Steyr

Neon-Circles wrote:

There was an Air Transat A330 which glided from mid atlantic to the Azores, and actually landed safely. They were very lucky...

You beat me to it! I think some wires caught fire or a fuel line leaked and started a fire on that Aircraft, smoke was in the cabin.

RoundyMooney

Neon-Circles wrote:

There was an Air Transat A330 which glided from mid atlantic to the Azores, and actually landed safely. They were very lucky...

Wikipedia article.

oscarBravo

I think about 15:1 is a fairly typical glide ratio for an airliner: for every 15 metres it moves forwards, it loses a metre of altitude. Given a cruising altitude of (say) 12,000m, it would be possible to glide for 180km.

Sn@kebite

In X-plane, I have both the engines out and it glides perfectly, although every now and then i have to point the nose down more to speed up and slow my descent.

'a save landing' - all depends on what type of terrain you're above.

FlutterinBantam

Steyr wrote:

You beat me to it! I think some wires caught fire or a fuel line leaked and started a fire on that Aircraft, smoke was in the cabin.

No, It was a fuel loading error as far as I know... Kilos vs pounds and suchlike.

JSK 252

That was on Air Crash Investigation on National Geographic Channel on tv.

Brilliant pilots.

FlutterinBantam

Das Royatt

FlutterinBantam

However, they wern't brilliant pilots.

They failed to notice the fuel was calibrated incorrectly.

Were had up before the Canadian Avation dudes.

hobie

Release #04.045
October 18, 2004

Air Transat 236 Report Confirms Pilots’ Airmanship Saved Flight

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The following statement was issued by Capt. Duane E. Woerth, President of the Air Line Pilots Association, International (ALPA), regarding a report released today by the Portuguese Office for the Prevention and Investigation of Aircraft Accidents on an incident involving Air Transat Flight 236 on August 24, 2001.

"The competence and professionalism the two pilots exhibited in safely landing the aircraft and protecting the crew and passengers under exceptional circumstances is clearly confirmed in the Portuguese government’s report.

"ALPA commends the Portuguese government’s thorough investigation, which finds that the Air Transat Flight 236 incident resulted from a rare convergence of factors, including aircraft design, training, mechanical and performance issues.

"The investigation left no doubt that flight crews, even in today’s sophisticated aircraft, still require clear, unambiguous indications of technical problems if they are to make the accurate, timely professional judgments expected of them. The Air Transat Flight 236 crew was faced with confusing, and even sometimes contradictory, information. The report clearly points out the need to address the human factors issues that will always surround the design and operation of commercial aircraft if we are to avoid similar situations in the future.

"The good news is that this report serves mostly as a history lesson, because the aircraft manufacturer and the airline have already put changes in place to address the safety issues raised in the investigation of the Air Transat 236 incident.

"We’re pleased to see that the Safety Management System is now the guiding factor in the Air Transat safety culture and that the manufacturer has already begun making improvements to ensure that warnings presented to crews better convey the seriousness of the situation."

I seem to remember them receiving some major international aviation awards for their performance .... :rolleyes:

pclancy

....and for only $25 canadian dollars you can own his book "hands on destiny"...

http://www.robertpiche.com/en/book.asp

UrbanFox

Cheers for that.

The Portugese air accident investigation report makes for fascinating reading and sweaty palms.

The report is 103 pages long in PDF format. The URL for the report is http://www.moptc.pt/tempfiles/20060608181643moptc.pdf

Dodgy installation work by the airline's technical guys on an engine seems to have been the main culprit amongst many other factors !

I'm sticking to boats.........

Deacon Blues

The Air Transat incident was caused by maintenance fitting the wrong fuel pipe for the engine, which eventually cracked due to stress. There was an Air Canada 767 which ran out of fuel, and that was caused by using the wrong units during fuel loading when they converted the quantity of fuel in the tanks to pounds instead of kilograms, and then topped up. This resulted in an insufficient amount of fuel for the flight. Check out the "Gimli glider" on your preferred search engine. It ended up gliding to a disused runway in Gimli, Manitoba.

Sn@kebite

Deacon Blues wrote:

There was an Air Canada 767 which ran out of fuel, and that was caused by using the wrong units during fuel loading when they converted the quantity of fuel in the tanks to pounds instead of kilograms, and then topped up. This resulted in an insufficient amount of fuel for the flight. Check out the "Gimli glider" on your preferred search engine. It ended up gliding to a disused runway in Gimli, Manitoba.

Is that the one where the pilot did 'slip-gliding'? Or some techique used on light planes to descend rapidly but not gain air-speed. If it is I heard that it was a faulty fuel gauge. As I believe 767s only have two crew in the cockpit and it relies on computers for things such as fuel consumption/remain. But maybe you're right too and it's the two things that made the outcome so drastic.
Anyway excellent skill on the AC pilot's side.:cool:

RoundyMooney

If you liked that for airmanship, you'll love this and this.

FlutterinBantam

Deacon Blues wrote:

The Air Transat incident was caused by maintenance fitting the wrong fuel pipe for the engine, which eventually cracked due to stress. There was an Air Canada 767 which ran out of fuel, and that was caused by using the wrong units during fuel loading when they converted the quantity of fuel in the tanks to pounds instead of kilograms, and then topped up. This resulted in an insufficient amount of fuel for the flight. Check out the "Gimli glider" on your preferred search engine. It ended up gliding to a disused runway in Gimli, Manitoba.

Sorry thats the one I was thinking about.....My bad.

pclancy

UrbanFox wrote:

Can you really glide a jet airliner to a safe landing where you have no engine power ?

Imagine a Boeing 737 (whatever model you like !) where the engines both cut out and no restart is possible. Could you actually glide one of those to a landing ?

Essential Hydraulic power to make the plane controllable and electrical power for essential instruments can be got from one of these RAT babies!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ram_air_turbine

So you've a pretty good chance of surviving a powerless landing!

Deacon Blues

Sn@kebite wrote:

Is that the one where the pilot did 'slip-gliding'? Or some techique used on light planes to descend rapidly but not gain air-speed. If it is I heard that it was a faulty fuel gauge. As I believe 767s only have two crew in the cockpit and it relies on computers for things such as fuel consumption/remain. But maybe you're right too and it's the two things that made the outcome so drastic.
Anyway excellent skill on the AC pilot's side.:cool:

As always in accident investigation, there was no single reason for the incident. The FQIS (Fuel Quantit Indicator System) on the aircraft had a snag, and the MEL stated that if the FQIS was operating on one channel, then an independent dripstick (an upside down dipstick) measurement should be made. An engineer pulled a breaker to try to fix the FQIS then got called away and forgot to reset the breaker, so the fuel gauges were blank in the cockpit. The captain was aware that there was a problem with the FQIS, so wasn't surprised to see the blank gauges. He consulted the MEL, and saw that the aircraft couldn't be dispatched with both channels of the FQIS inop, but as the 767 has recently entered Air Canada service, there had been loads of updates to the MEL, and it had become the norm for maintenance to override the MEL. The captain was aware that the aircraft had flown in to Montreal the day before with an FQIS problem, and thought that the problem was inop gauges, and so the aircraft had been passed by maintenance. The calculations on fuel quantity used the correct figures, but the wrog multiplier, to get from litres to kilos. Canada had just converted from Imperial to Metric, so there was still confusion, as the refuelers previously worked in gallons and pounds.

So, if the type hadn't been so new, or Canada wasn't converting to metric, or the MEL had become a stable document, or the aircraft hadn't had a recurring problem with the FQIS, or maintenance hadn't been allowed to overrule the MEL, or the engineer hadn't been distracted, and a 101 other things, the mistake would've been caught, and it would have been just another routine flight.

The captain was a glider pilot with loads of glider hours, and used this experience to land in Gimli. Apparantly, there were hundreds of people at the Gimli Drag Track (a decomissioned parallel runway) family day. Wonder if that's where the Passenger 51 funfair scene came from !!!

jmayo

Deacon Blues wrote:

....
The captain was a glider pilot with loads of glider hours, and used this experience to land in Gimli. Apparantly, there were hundreds of people at the Gimli Drag Track (a decomissioned parallel runway) family day. Wonder if that's where the Passenger 51 funfair scene came from !!!

Also the other advantage they had was the co-pilot had supposedly done some military training at the old airfield so he knew all about it.
AFAIK the front gear collapsed as well after impact?
By the way a 15:1 glide mentioned above would appear to be very good if achievable for a heavy wide body.
The Gimli glider, a Boeing 767, apparently achieved only 12:1.

oscarBravo

According to this, a 767 has a L/D ratio of 19 - only slightly less than an albatross. Would it be fair to say that the Gimli glider only acheived 12:1 because it didn't need the full reach available to it? Of course, the theoretical L/D ratio is probably for an empty aircraft.

jmayo

oscarBravo wrote:

According to this, a 767 has a L/D ratio of 19 - only slightly less than an albatross. Would it be fair to say that the Gimli glider only acheived 12:1 because it didn't need the full reach available to it? Of course, the theoretical L/D ratio is probably for an empty aircraft.

Of course it depends how far away from airfield he was when he began his glide. He wasn't thinking about flying circuits and achieving best glides I guess.
He only wanted to maintain airspeed and have enough height to arrive at that runway. Overshooting wasn't an option, but then again neither was undershooting.

Still find it hard to believe the big boys can achieve 19:1 and I don't want to be on board when they test the theory for real.

Fulmar

Most big boys use a simple rule of thumb. Take your altitude on thousands of feet and multiply by 3. i,e. at 30,000' you will glide 90 nautical miles. This then has to be adjusted for headwind/tailwind and weight of aircraft. A heavier aircraft goes further because the energy the aircraft has at altitude depends on its altitude and velocity. Energy level directly proportional to the altitude but to the square of the velocity.

electric69

well at least they dont fly a plane full of whitehouse officalls into a mountain in Serbia because they are actually that dumb!
Americans!:rolleyes:

RoundyMooney

Eh?

el tel

For glided landings the space shuttle is hard to beat. I wonder what they would do if it ever made a missed approach...

jmayo

el tel wrote:

For glided landings the space shuttle is hard to beat. I wonder what they would do if it ever made a missed approach...

Do what you do in any glider, go to your undershoot or overshoot option.
BTW have you ever seen the size of that runway, it is massive thing 15,000 feet long.
You use to be allowed overfly it before 911.

Also if they know they will miss Florida then they go usually for Edwards Air Force Base in California or else White Sands Space Harbor, New Mexico.

But they have options right around the world: including Guam, Zaragoza in Spain, Darwin Australia, Las Palmas Canaries, RAF Fairford in the UK.
Sure they might even use Shannon if they had to:D

Davidth88

Sure they might even use Shannon if they had to

Apparently they were going to use SNN but have decided not to after 2008


The classic Air Canada 767 story came to mind when I read this thread...... anyone knot the difference between KG and lb ?

FlutterinBantam

2.2016 lbs to the kg.

Davidth88

I was being sarcastic

Capt'n Midnight

electric69 wrote:

well at least they dont fly a plane full of whitehouse officalls into a mountain in Serbia because they are actually that dumb!
Americans!:rolleyes:

How about putting everyone senior in the administration likely to be opposed to the good friday agreement into one chinook and slapping them into a mountain in scotland ?
conspiracy theories

there was a BA 747 gliding over the dust clouds in indonesia for a while

the russia shuttle didn't need a pilot to land.

Of course if the jet happens to be a U2 or a canberra at maximum altitude...