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F-16 Lands Dead Stick (Engine Out); cockpit video


Supreme Cmdr
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Looked pretty unspectacular. Night landings on a carrier have the pilots breathe a lot harder.

Glider and space shuttle pilots do this all the time. Piece of cake.

He was lucky to have the runway close by. He did save a $35M plane from becoming a smoking pile of junk, so he certainly deserves to get a bonus.

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Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't high performance aircraft turn into falling rocks when they suffer engine failure?

F-16s are fly by wire, so he wouldn't have been in real trouble unless he lost all power to his avionics. Then he'd be "deadstick" for sure.

I once witnessed an F-4 Phantom crash after takeoff and a flameout. The pilot was lucky enough to bail out well below the minimum safe altitude and live to tell about it. He did manage to steer the plane into a drainage ditch and not the long row of apartment buildings next to the ditch.

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The term 'dead-stick' refers to landing without power (flame-out or engine stalled...), it is a bit misleading.

Wolferz, you are pretty much correct. Without power any high-performance jet is in trouble, but is able to fly as long as they maintain airspeed.

Found this, Simhq has a discussion on this as well.

And here is a discussion about deadstick landings in general.

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I've heard the scariest 'deadstick' landings are helicopter autorotation landings.

The chopper blades lose power so the pilot removes the 'lock' and the blades get to spin freely... the speed of the fall makes them rotate which creates a virtual wing ... but the pilot has to keep the crippled helicopters EARTHWARD speed constantly high to keep the blades rotating.

Talk about messed up ways to try and land.. you have to purposely increase your crashing speed. At the last moment the pilot banks the helo so the belly points at the ground and the remaining rotation of the blades create a parachute effect.

scary stuff.

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In a helicopter engine out, the pilot doesn't bank the helo, he just changes the pitch of the rotor blades.

Like when you are going down the freeway, and have your hand out the window, if your hand is almost paralel to the wind, you feel a little resistance, put it pependicular to the wind, and your hand gets pushed back, hard.

Same with the helicopter. The pilot changes the pitch of the blades, and makes them almost paralel with the ground (less resistance, the blades spin up, and the helicopter falls faster). The faster the blades spin the more stored energy he has, when he gets close to the ground, he increases the pitch of the blades (makes them more perpendicular to the ground) and in turn the blades create lift (push air down, like a fan in your home does, the higher the pitch/speed of the fan, the more air it pushes), slowing the fall of the helo. Just like your hand gets pushed back when you tilt it against the wind, so does the helicopter gets a push "up" (rather slows it's rate of descent) when he increases the pitch of his blades.

As far as that deadstick goes, http://www.mfs.com.au/MFS_Glossary.htm#D

I should've looked it up first.

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