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Monday, October 25, 2021

Hit and Run Alaska Style

The National Transportation Safety Board is looking for a plane that reportedly collided with another aircraft in midair last week and kept flying.
-Frank

5 comments:

  1. Kinda hard to pull over and exchange insurance info.

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  2. Something doesn't pass the smell test here, I'm thinking there was no other plane. Our boy may have hit something flying but I'd put even money that this was a taxying blunder.

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  3. "The NTSB encouraged anyone with information" to come forward, so we can arrest you and take your pilot's license.

    Nemo

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  4. I can just picture that pilot. Wham! Fuck this shit, I'm outta here!

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  5. "Kept flying" after a mid-air collision is far better than the alternative, but I assume there's an FAA rule that requires both pilots to report the accident as soon as they land. I see three possibilities:

    1. The first pilot is lying and it was a one-plane accident, hitting something with the wing either while taxiing or in low-level flight.

    2. There's a wrecked plane a few miles away. In Alaska, wrecks can remain undiscovered forever...

    3. Or there's another damaged airplane landed somewhere and a pilot that doesn't want to admit what he was doing when they touched wings. Maybe doing some stunts and failed to keep track of traffic, or maybe smuggling drugs?

    It is quite possible to fly away from a mid-air collision and land safely. It's happened many times with military pilots, usually when flying in close formation, but in WWI and II there were pilots that successfully rammed and enemy and made it home. OTOH, they didn't always survive; Boelcke, the first leader of the German Flying Circus, was killed in a collision while practicing close formation flying. A light civil aircraft like a Cessna 180 isn't as strongly built as a military airplane, but it's slow and surprisingly tough.

    Then there's my favorite midair story: Back in the 1960's, a Northwest Airlines (the airline that connected small towns in Michigan) twin-prop small airliner (possibly even a DC-3) was rammed by a Piper Cub. It punched into the side right behind the control cabin, which was the "galley" where the in-flight meals were stored. The airliner landed with the tail of the little airplane sticking out the side, no one hurt except the two people in the little airplane. I used to have a newspaper clipping with a picture.

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