Plane crash Schiphol

[Marcel]

They had an erratic approach as you can see on the graphs. Story now goes that one of the altimeters was wrong. They did the approach on autopilot, but the autopilot "thought" they were close to the strip, so put the engines on idle. One of the pilots tried to correct, but in vain. The plane crashed tail first into the ground.

 

[Vassili Zaitzev]

Interesting, I thought using autopilot on take off and landings were uncommon?

 

[Marcel]

On landing, yes, but during approach, no, that's quite often done by autopilot. Joe can probably explain better.

 

[FLYBOYJ]

Interesting, I thought using autopilot on take off and landings were uncommon?

On landing, yes, but during approach, no, that's quite often done by autopilot. Joe can probably explain better.

Take offs yes, landings are frquently done with a coupled approach. That when you'll time one or more picese of navigation equipment into the autopilot and aloow that equipment to fly the approach and landing. Here's some info on it.


Flying the coupled approach

 

[Vassili Zaitzev]

Thanks for the link FBJ! A little confusing, but I think I got the point.

 

[HoHun]

Hi Marcel,

>They had an erratic approach as you can see on the graphs.

Hm, there must be something wrong with the energy graph in my opinion - since the aircraft apparently touched down at about 1.0 G stall speed, it must have had significant amounts of kinetic energy left when the potential energy fell to zero. A zero kinetic energy impact with a non-VTOL aircraft seems unlikely since it will either go forward at a significant speed, or drop like a stone ...

Regards,

Henning (HoHun)

 

[Marcel]

In this case it dropped like a stone.
The graph is made by using the ADS-B data from here: OpenATC.com recording of THY1951 crash

 

[HoHun]

Hi Marcel,

>The graph is made by using the ADS-B data from here: OpenATC.com recording of THY1951 crash

Intersting link, thanks! The lowest ground recorded speed (of the first data point with a negative altitude) is 83 knots ground speed, which is about 900 J/kg.

I guess the problem with the above graph is simply that the speed is arbitrarily set to 0 at the impact point ...

Regards,

Henning (HoHun)

 

[Marcel]

Intersting link, thanks! The lowest ground recorded speed (of the first data point with a negative altitude) is 83 knots ground speed, which is about 900 J/kg.

I guess the problem with the above graph is simply that the speed is arbitrarily set to 0 at the impact point ...

Regards,

Henning (HoHun)

Yup, that's what it look like.

 

[Henk]

The passengers said that the plane just dropped like a rock and they think it run out of fuel.

If the cockpit crew was still alive we all might have had a bit more insight into what happened to the plane.