That’s incredible footage.
It looks like it was trimmed for some much greater speed than it was doing.
Is the height above the ground (at which the loss of control happened) known?
I think the aircraft hit the ground relatively slowly. If it hit it at what might be nose-down terminal velocity, say 500kt, there would be nothing left of it bigger than about 30cm. And anyway aerodynamic forces would have broken it up within perhaps 10 seconds, in a nose-down attitude like this.
Peter wrote:
It looks like it was trimmed for some much greater speed than it was doing.
How do you see this?
A plane will not fly nose down like that by itself. It will accelerate very very fast and will pitch up (because it cannot possibly be trimmed for such a speed), so depart from the vertical trajectory. The resulting G will also break it up, fairly soon. This one seems to have been just going like there was a lump of lead in the nose, and no elevator / elevator trim. There was just a bit of aileron roll to the left.
Somewhere somebody who appears to know about this kind of film analysis was talking of a forward speed of about 250 km/h at the time of impact. This would correspond roughly to what the wreck looks like.
The intermediate report is talking of a left turn which got steeper and steeper until the plane nosed down and crashed vertically. The STSB know about this video since the 1st day, I bet they are not really impressed that it turned up now in the media. I guess that there are quite a few more of these videos. They are also trying to read out and reconstruct a lot of cellphones and cameras from within the airplane.
It is not really clear at what height about terrain the loss of control occurred. The crash site is at approximately 2480 m MSL. The pass they wanted to cross has a height of 2625m MSL. Estimates were that they were cruising at approximately 2800-2900 m AMSL, so there was a height over the crash site of maybe 300-400m at most. That is not enough to recover from such a situation.
The movie unfortunately does not show the actual loss of control.
Peter wrote:
A plane will not fly nose down like that by itself.
I think that is a sweeping statement. Its been my experience of the dynamic nature of spin entry, exit, the cycles within a spin and its relationship to a spiral dive, that it may well have flown like that for the very short period of time covered in the clip (even with pilot input). Given the trimmed condition was probably cruise, and recovery from a stall still requires a reduction in AoA regardless of aircraft attitude.
Pretty horrible regardless.
It looks like it have negative G at impact, or rotating with negative pitch. Kind of odd. would be interesting to see what happened earlier in the flight.
New development and one which goes much further than expected.
The Swiss FOCA have announced today, that Ju Air will not regain their AOC. They will instead be allowed to conduct pax flights as a club, like the Super Connie had before it was grounded.
What is rising my eyebrows is that the FOCA sais that this is corresponding to upcoming EASA regulation about the use of oldtimers as commercial airplanes. Now what the heck is this all about? And why now?
To me it looks like EASA feels free to act now on something which has been bothering them for a while but now that Lufthansas prestige project Super Star is out of the way as well as the Lufthansa Junkers is also grounded, they won’t step onto too many toes.
Will be interesting what the EASA rule on this is going to be. But I suppose it is the end for a lot of older airplanes.
Here in Switzerland the future of the Connie is desperate, it looks more and more like the Vulcan case where support has been withdrawn from all sides. They need 20 mio Euros to fulfill the (current) requirements and nobody knows whether they will change again. The former Breitling DC3 has been sold to Turkey already. Currently only a N-reg DC3 which is operated privately remains.
Another update to this sad story.
Ju Air and the associated Nef Motors have been stripped of their license as maintenance organisations after some audits. While Ju Air sees it as a suspension, it looks more like a further nail in the coffin of Swiss antique aviation. Following the rather disastrous interim report by the STSB I suppose the FOCA had to be seen “doing something”. That they were not aware of how the maintenance organisation worked (and quite successfully so one may add for 30 odd years) with the special needs of oldtimer airplanes where you can’t just order new parts off the shelf, it now appears they want to see something else.
JU Air have announced that they will take a hiatus of 2 years to totally rebuild the 2 remaining airframes, but that work is now suspended as the organisation doing it has lost their license. Also the future of the Junkers F13 may well be in doubt as if I remember right JU Air was the ones taking care of this airplane as well.
On the sidelines, the Super Constellation Assoiciation has folded up and the Connie is either for sale or facing disposal. This after the FOCA demanded a reconstruction of the wing structure worth about 20 million CHF.
Looks like Europe is going to loose quite some aviation heritage here and the rather positive attitude by the Swiss FOCA towards antique airplanes in the past has come to an abrupt end.
Not just in Switzerland – the Dutch authorities are determined to make life difficult as well. The Dutch Catalina is US bound at the end of the month ☹️
Peter_Mundy wrote:
The Dutch Catalina is US bound at the end of the month ☹️
That is really sad, but inevitable I suppose. The cost of keeping these jewels flying is now so prohibitive and with the authorities (Europe) risk averse to the point of stone wall, what else can these people do.
Not sure what the position is in the States, I assume there is still the can do spirit, but that died out here years ago.
The only saviour is the UK’s bizarre obsession with all things War, so the Spits/Hurri/Lancaster will continue come what may to remind us of how great we apparently were 
