The Wild Ride of 106

Here's another one I hadn't heard about. The airmanship demonstrated by this crew is incredible.

It appears to have happened around April of 2006, on a routine flight of a KC-130T (NY106) from NAS Pax River. The crew had been testing an electronic propeller control system, and was transiting to 29 Palms to do the last of the tests, the low level flights. There were 11 people on the aircraft, a Marine test pilot, four contractor aircrew from VX-20, and a GS flight engineer. There were five passengers, including four contractor maintenance techs, and an active duty tech.

An hour and a half into the routine flight, at 24,000 feet, the aircraft suddenly pitched up and rolled left. The Aircraft Commander (AC) and copilot both hit the autopilot disconnect, thinking the autopilot had commanded a pitch up for some reason. They both pushed forward on the controls, but the aircraft kept pitching up, and rolled harder left.

The AC took the controls, as the aircraft rolled onto its back, and went into a nose down attitude. The Flight Engineer had just loosed his seat belt to do a fuel pane adjustment, and was thrown into the ceiling. No one in the cargo area was belted in, and they were all tossed around like rag dolls.

The AC attitude indicator went non-functional and was flopping around. The copilot attitude indicator went all brown and started spinning, indicating they were in a bad way (brown means nose down, pointed at the ground). The airspeed indicators hit 350 knots when the copilot pulled the throttles to idle. At some point they noticed #3 was operating at 106% power.

The AC was finally able to stop the spin, and eventually get the aircraft back under control, at 15,000 feet. After they recovered control, the navigator announced the pilots attitude indicator was in INS mode and the gyros couldn't keep up with the spinning. The copilot's INS was in gyro mode and kept up.

The back of the aircraft looked like a bomb had gone off inside it, debris was everywhere (including a chock that flew into the cockpit). The passengers were piled on top of each other with injuries ranging from broken bones, to cuts. The flight engineer had cuts arrayed like the switches on the panel that he hit when he was thrown to the ceiling.

The crew was able to land the aircraft safely, and upon landing found that both the left wing rafts had deployed, and one had become tangled around the horizontal stabilizer, pushing the elevator full up. This was the seventh such incident in a C-130.

Due to the test instrumentation on board, they were able to determine that they had rolled over at least twice, dropped 9,000 feet at a rate of 29,000 fpm, and probably exceeded four positive Gs, and 3 negative Gs (limits for the aircraft were +3/-1), while reaching speeds of 460 knots.

www.mcata.com...

right. that's it.. i'm never getting on a plane.
thanks zaph

Impressive that they never gave up, pure skill a total professionalism.

reply to post by macpdm


And that the aircraft held together. They said the people in the back could hear it groaning and straining as they were thrown around.

Impressive testimonial to both the training of the aircrew and the engineering of the aircraft.

Life raft hung up on the elevator, who would have thought.

I think it is a safe bet that out of every possible emergency scenario they ran through trying to regain control of the aircraft, inadvertently deployed rubber dingy fouling the control surfaces wasn't on the list.

Also a good example illustrating why when flying on a commercial flight its a good idea to keep your lap restraint latched even after the fasten seat belt sign goes off. That must of been an especially wild ride for the poor sods in the cargo hold.

Thanks for posting this tidbit

reply to post by Zaphod58

The crew was able to land the aircraft safely, and upon landing found that both the left wing rafts had deployed, and one had become tangled around the horizontal stabilizer, pushing the elevator full up. This was the seventh such incident in a C-130.

I would think that after two events like this they would have found a reason why it happens before a plane actually crashes or has there been one because of it?

reply to post by tsurfer2000h


There haven't been any that I know of off the top of my head. When we get somewhere I have a more stable net connection I'm going to look into it.

The J model uses a different raft system and many units have taken money from their budget to refit their older birds with the new rafts, to keep it from happening again.

reply to post by Zaphod58

The J model uses a different raft system and many units have taken money from their budget to refit their older birds with the new rafts, to keep it from happening again.

That's good, as that size bird coming down makes for a very bad day.

At least they found the fix before it crashed one.

And they say a C-130 can't break 450 knots....



Edit: A/R speed with a KC-135 and a C-130 (non j model) was between 200-210, right about the stall speed of the tanker!

reply to post by tsurfer2000h


Looking through the list of losses, it doesn't appear that there were any related to raft deployment. Some scary moments, but fortunately no losses due to it.