Alaska damage/repair novel notification medhod

[Highkeas]

http://news.yahoo.com/alaska-airline...ws-travel.html

Follow the link for a picture.

[Highkeas]

From today's AIAA newsletter:

Alaska Airlines Jet Looses Cabin Pressure, Prompts Emergency Landing.

ABC World News (8/8, story 3, 2:25, Stephanopoulos, 8.2M) reported that an Alaska Airlines passenger jet bound for Seattle "made an emergency landing" at San Jose International "when a pilot reported a, quote, 'catastrophic electrical failure.' So bad that the auto pilot spontaneously turned off." Reporter Jim Avila added that ears popped "plane-wide as the 737 with 131 passengers and flight crew momentarily" lost "enough cabin pressurization to cause a painful alert that something is wrong." Once the plane landed safely, "mechanics...find it's a simple mechanical control near the landing gear telling the plane it's on the ground, not flying, turning off pressurization and the auto pilot."

[mawheatley]

Originally Posted by Highkeas

Once the plane landed safely, "mechanics...find it's a simple mechanical control near the landing gear telling the plane it's on the ground, not flying, turning off pressurization and the auto pilot."

With some black marker pen by it saying "we know about this?"

[Gabriel]

This fault is potentially fatal.
Imagine it happening in approach with the spoilers already armed.

[Evan]

Originally Posted by Gabriel

This fault is potentially fatal.
Imagine it happening in approach with the spoilers already armed.

It's hard to imagine this happening at all. I expect this relay to be quite failsafe and redundant. I hope they did something better on the NG's.

[Gabriel]

It happened before. Not exactly in this way, but I remember an accident in a DC-9 or MD-80 landing I think at O'Hare where the spoilers self-deployed when they were just about to land. The pilot pulled up and retracted the spoilers to initiate a go-around but they still hit the runway very hard and had some important damage. They were able to complete the go-around and subsequently landed safely.

In that case, the problem started shortly after take-off when they could not retract the gear. They found that the problem was that the plane remained in "ground" mode (later it was concluded that the nose-gear strut did not extend completely after lift-off, thus preventing the squat switch to change from ground to air). They troubleshooted and, following the procedures, pulled the CB of the relay that is commanded by that switch, thus forcing the plane into "air" mode. The troubleshooting called for pushing the CB back in shortly after touch down to bring the plane back to "ground" mode, but the pilot mistakenly did just that shortly BEFORE touchdown. With the squat switch still in the same wrong condition, the plane turned immediately to "ground" mode extending the spoilers that had been armed for landing.

[AVION1]

Originally Posted by Highkeas

http://news.yahoo.com/alaska-airline...ws-travel.html

Follow the link for a picture.

Looks like a lighting bolt damage.
I have seen many of them on 727 and metro III.

[Peter Kesternich]

Well - the picture looks to me like it's just the edge of the flap missing. Maybe some FOD, where an object hit trown up by the number 2 engine hit the flap.

[Gabriel]

A higly reliable source (AvHerald) could not confirm that the story is real. In fact, they found hints that it could be fake.

[Deadstick]

Originally Posted by AVION1

Looks like a lighting bolt damage.
I have seen many of them on 727 and metro III.

http://news.yahoo.com/alaska-airline...ws-travel.html

I like the video in this link where at the end the reporter says (with marvel in his voice) "The pilots took control of that big airplane and flew it to safety like a little Cessna." Barf.