Marvellous Aviators

It looked to me like the pilot put the plane into a heavy right slip on final to lose height. If so that is even more awesome.

They probably have all the equipment required to fix the airplane onboard and the’ll be ready to go in 24 hours.

Huge balls to pull “the impossible turn” at 1800 feet with 84 tons, slip the aircraft down to the runway, with no instruments, and make it too! The pilots in these beasts are probably handflying all the time.

@Dimme, 84 tons of freight so Take Off Weight was probably a lot higher!

Here is my favourite footage of a Russian aircraft. Using 101% of the available runway at Canberra Australia. The laconic Aussie commentary is priceless.

I would say this one goes as one of the absolute highlights of piloting skills, hopefully it will receive the attention it deserves.

Dimme wrote:

Huge balls to pull “the impossible turn” at 1800 feet with 84 tons,

Estimated Take Off Weight was about 375 tons out of calcs done by people who dispatch these things. Landing weight not much less.

They flew a full circuit at about 1000 ft AGL albeit with a short approach. By what comes through the grapevine, Engines 3 and 4 delivered full thrust (hence the smoke), engine one was blocked at about 70% thrust and 2 obviously had gone to pieces.

These crews selected to fly the AN124, 22 and 225 are top notch of their kind. I’d rate them as a quite exclusive group of folk, not unlike the Concorde community was. They have in the past had to deal with some real hairy stuff and most of the time saved the day with superb flying skills.

The other bit is the way these planes are built and system redundancy which is 2nd to none. Which western plane would stay totally controllable with total electrical and hydraulic failure? Not that many I reckon. It appears this huge airplane can continue with full manual flight controls. They also managed to get the gear down, which must have been done by alternate procedures.

Crews flying these planes and other ex Soviet designs have often shown superb flying skills in absolutely massive problems, I do recall the TU154B which departed with a crosswired yaw damper and went haywire or the one who lost all their electrics due to a lightening strike and was landed on a 1000m runway in the middle of nowhere with little damage. Yes, definitly hats of and salute to this crew who celebrated their collective 2nd birthdays that day.

Different people view these things in different ways – as this explosive thread shows

I know a UK RAF pilot who has had some experience of Russian mil jets and he said they were horrible in terms of backup systems, compared to Western jets.

Also there is a generally cavalier attitude (which others could describe positively as a “can do” attitude) towards safety. I don’t honestly think that utterly marginal departure above was as calculated.

Peter,

well, the Antonovs have been known to withstand some absolute abuse of their systems, running way over maintenance and overhaul intervals e.t.c for decades. AN12’s operate under conditions which are deplorable and totally irresponsible.

That however is not with the blessing or consent of Antonov Design Bureau, who have always tried to keep those planes out of the sky but are unable to do so.

The AN124 and 225 operation however is a totally different setup. (And you can count the AN22 into this as well, as it’s operated by the same crews). First of all they know these planes are irreplacable, so they are being taken VERY good care of. Secondly, they are very complex to operate, so you need highly trained people to do so. And finally, they are a money generator for Antonov and the companies who operate them to a degree that nobody involved takes any cavalier attitude. Too much hangs on them.

This is totally different to other outfits which came up during the fall of the Soviet block up until today, who operate delapidated and out of hour AN12’s IL76 and the likes for “a few dollars more” basically everywhere. There are justifyably horror stories about those. The AN124/225 ops is a totally different ballgame.

As for backup systems, obviously this AN124 stayed fully flight controllable despite total loss of all electrics, all instruments and hydraulics. I do not know many other planes that size who are constructed that they can do this. Almost all of them today are FBW and have no connections between the controls and the actual control surfaces.

As for flying skills, well, imagine for a moment to loose all your instruments, everything including airspeed, altitude, stall warning e.t.c. in a medium sized jet. Yes they were lucky to have bright sunshine to pull this off, but particularly without even basic flight information, this was a feat not to be underestimated.