From another accident report involving this type of helicopter, it appears that there is a main tank and two supply tanks, each of which would feed one engine. Presumably a later report will tell us how much fuel was in each tank.
Colin Bignell
I'm really cross. I stopped and thought about it for a moment. AND THEN I STILL GOT IT WRONG! GRRRRRRR!
Can we have a petition to ban all homophones from the language?
What would cause that to happen to both engines at the same time?
Ah.. but would that stop the blades? I THOUGHT they had a sort of one way clutch that would kick into autorotate.
Maybe someone simply shot the pilot from the ground.
Except you would have thought they might have noticed that.
although
probably something pretty unusual. I have never heard of a turboprop flaming out. A violent manoeuvre might do it I would suppose.
or maybe not..
Not unless you want to be stalked by Gay Pride.
Googling double engine flameout produces about 100k hits. One example near the top of the list was the plane descending, throttled back in a hail storm. The engines simply cooled down too much to stay alight.
We don't actually know that it did. In 1989 an aircraft crashed on the approach to East Midlands airport after the crew shut down the wrong engine in response to an emergency. They were not the first to make that mistake.
However, assuming both compressors did stall, it would almost certainly have to be something external. A bird strike is probably the most common cause of compressor stall, but both engines would have involved a multiple strike and that should have left evidence. Other possibilities are severe air turbulence around the air intakes or ingesting some form of contamination. Among its other faults, the Starfighter used to suffer compressor stall after ingesting its own gun smoke.
Colin Bignell
It should allow the rotors to free wheel, but the pilot still needs lower the pitch fairly quickly for autorotation to happen. If the revs drop too far before he does that, the helicopter will simply drop like a stone.
US police helicopters have armoured floors, because so many people do shoot at them.
Colin Bignell
yeah I looked at case of helicopter flameouts and there seem to be two essential reasons
- 1/. accidental fuel starvation.
- 2/. flying through oxygen depleted air - typically over a power station stack or a bush fire.
Two further things seem to add weight to this..first of all auto or manual re-ignition causes popping and banging.
Secondly if the pilot had attempted full collective to pull up (out of autorotate?) it could have stalled and stopped the blades.
That's as close as I can get to a plausible scenario...
Amongst .....
German Starfighter crashes
A total of 298 German F-104 Starfighter were lost in accidents, losses on the ground and damaged beyond repair (including MAP F-104G serial number 62-12312) with the tragic death of 116 pilots, but 171 pilots ejected safely, 8 pilots ejected twice
There's a list of the crashes here.
How did they persuade people to fly them?
Perhaps time to mandate a Pilot Voice recorder - built into the helmet. Recording time could be short - always recording last 2 minutes. Saves on high G force. Wouldn't cost much.
That'll be the scrappers :-)
Owain
For single pilot aircraft, it probably won't record much that isn't on a recording at ATC either.
Reputedly, the most common phrase on modern airliner CRVs is 'I wonder why it did that' or variants.
Colin Bignell
Does not make sense, as far as i know you just cannot have a case where the rotors stop, for a start there is a lot of inertia to remove. if the hub just stopped then they would break off. Brian
The thing is though, you cannot just stop the rotors, as I said earlier it would take time to do that, and as it was not that high, there was no time, so I'd suggest that bit was wrong. Brian
The AAIB wouldn't have included that statement in their preliminary report unless they were 100% certain about it.
Colin Bignell
about 31 minutes in...
Or maybe instrument failure. One depends on them in bad vis.
Maybe a bird strike. Many accidents are caused by two coincidal faults/occurances.
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