Quote: (05-02-2013 03:35 AM)Travelsick Wrote:
Doesn't a plane primarily stall when the nose is too high up?
That's what a stall means. An airplane stays in the air by pushing air down with its wings and how effective they are at that depends on the angle of the wings. At a too high angle the wings begin to lose their effectiveness at that job and the plane begins to fall from the sky even if the engines are working just fine, that is what's called a "stall" in aviation.
Normal commercial flights will always keep a large safety margin on this ie the pilots keep the plane far from the stall angle during take off but since this is a military chartered plane in Afghanistan they were most likely afraid of ground-to-air missiles. In those circumstances pilots will often discard that safety margin in favour of climbing as fast as possible to quickly gain the altitude that gives safety against missiles. If they were trying to climb unusually fast then they were unusually vulnerable to any unexpected event that could have tilted the plane towards the stall angle.
Quote:Quote:
As a layman it looks like they lost all thrust.
No, the video shows a very obvious stall. You can't tell whether they had engine problems from the video but they clearly had some thrust right up to the end there. You can see them almost recovering (the pilots manage to turn the wings almost level before hitting the ground) but they just weren't high enough to have the time for recovery manouvers. As scary as the plane "stopping" and "hovering" mid-flight looks like, it's something that any perfectly functional plane will do if you stall it and all pilots are trained to recover from that - the only thing you need is enough altitude and that's what they didn't have.
Loss of all thrust right after take off is actually much less dangerous than stalling and in loss of thrust incidents people generally have a good chance of surviving as the plane can glide and the pilots can do a controlled crash landing. Stalling at a low altitude meant this plane just smashed to the ground and even if someone managed to survive the impact, the smashed fuel tanks mean everything is covered in a cloud of jet fuel in an instant.