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Discovery Channel Crashes a Boeing 727 For Science Documentary (latimes.com)
A Boeing 727 passenger jet has been deliberately crash-landed. The pilot ejected just minutes before the collision. The plane was packed with scientific experiments, including crash test dummies. Dozens of cameras recorded the crash from inside the aircraft, on the ground, in chase planes and even on the ejecting pilot's helmet. All of this was done for a feature length documentary to be shown on the Discovery Channel later this year."
First cool thing Discovery Channel has done in like... 10 years?
No no, this was deliberate.
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Cave Johnson: The enrichment center reminds all test subjects who opted for the 727 crash test to fasten their seat-belts. Cake will be served on board. It will be fucking awesome. For science.
It's not a 747, it's a 727. A quick search of www.aviatorsale.com shows you can get one for ~$5M, not $800M. Some prices are less than a million, but I figure those are for non-operational planes. Production stopped in 1984, so you know they didn't bust up a new one. I figure they used a plane equivalent to the junker cars mythbusters and such destroy regularly.
Then you turn around and contact various agencies to get them to 'sponsor' the crash, allowing them to place scientific experiments(like the crash test dummies) on board for a share of the overall cost.
Done right, Discover could have gotten it's cost of the documentary down to the cost of the film crews.
I don't read AC A human right
I assumed the same. And they're not new to this. If they were going to lose big money on it, they wouldn't have done it.
Why risk human life when you can fly it via remote control? There are some *very* good RC pilots out there who would have creamed their shorts to get a chance to auger one of these planes in!
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Leonardo Di Caprio --- 5.5
Daniel Radcliffe -------- 5
Robert Downey Jr ----- 4.5
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Indeed.
Let's say the cost getting the plane and refurbishing it for this cost $6M. A 727-100C could carry 94 passengers, and/or ~17k kg of cargo. So you charge $64k per 'seat' for experiment space or $353 per kg of experiment, which ever is greater. The actual research could be extremely wide - testing new airline seat's crash-worthiness, validating the current crash models, crash dummies in general, cabin air samples during/after a crash, etc...
You get a grant from various governments for the environmental study involving the clean up of the crash site, have the ejection seat installed by one of the companies that do such things for research/advertising purposes, etc...
Being interested in 'just' making the documentary, they're providing a rare opportunity for research at a good discount without stepping on the toes of various research organizations that couldn't cooperate on their own to get this done.
I don't read AC A human right
I wouldn't be surprised if Boeing themselves didn't invest a bunch of money in the crash. Car companies test-crash automobiles on a regular basis, Boeing probably got some VERY valuable information that can help them make planes safer in the future.
Discover could have gotten it's cost of the documentary down to the cost of the film crews.
If you're suggesting that the Discovery Channel exec used her Discover card to drive her costs down to the break-even point, I think you're overestimating the value of the rewards program. They only give you one percent back, and the purchase protection only covers domestic airline crashes (this one was in Mexico). When you factor in the annual fee, she probably lost money!
Or perhaps you just confused the financial company with the media company.
I don't know about you, but I'm kind of excited about the thought of a small third world nation having a nuclear bomb dropped on it, so that I can be entertained. I'm not heartless. The people would be evacuated first, of course. All of this would be captured by an award-winning director (I'm gunning for James Cameron), who would be free to add some drama and story to the action. If we find a poor enough nation, we should be able to pull this off for around a billion US dollars. Seeing as how Cameron has proved that he can pull in a billion dollars already, this should be doable.
I say, if we're going to be decadent, it's time to go all the way.
With all the risks associated with ejecting, and the long-established tech to fly/land aircraft remotely (or via autopilot) why even put a human on board?
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We've already done that. The US, USSR, French and British have all exploded nuclear bombs, and the footage is available on YouTube. The USA even seriously irradiated a Japanese fishing vessel in one of these explosions, and some of the crew died from radiation sickness.
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I don't know about you, but I'm kind of excited about the thought of a small third world nation having a nuclear bomb dropped on it, so that I can be entertained. I'm not heartless. The people would be evacuated first, of course.
You're a bit late, we already did that. But you can still watch the footage if that's what floats your boat.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
You mean to tell me that the Discovery Channel is producing a new show that is something other than watching fisherman, lumberjacks, gunsmiths, gold miners, auctioneers, motorcycle builders, or used car salesmen as they go about their daily jobs and argue with one another??? I'll believe it when I see it.
Rather than worrying about how to survive a crash retire planes after their projected life has been reached. A disturbing number are still in the air years and in some cases decades after their operational life has been reached. They do receive major overhauls but the airframe is the same and they do get stress fractures. Weakening structure has caused some dramatic failures including large sections of the fuselages tearing out mid flight. A large number of planes still in the air are older than most people on this web site. The fact some of these planes haven't been built in decades should be your first clue.
Non-destructive testing has been done on airframes for a very long time and points where expected overloads or fatigue are likely have been identified fairly well since the 1950s.
There's a movie out there called "The Thing From Outer Space" filmed in 1951 which heavily features a ski equipt DC3, and today (2012) there are two DC3's that are very similar to that one which fly from South Africa to Antarctica each year. A section in front of the wings which is prone to fatigue has been removed and replaced with a longer section, and they have turboprops, but the airframe is out of the 1940s.
Remaining life assessment of aircraft is something that has been going on for a long time, and it's hours of flight instead of physical age that is the important thing anyway. A lot of factors determine whether an airframe gets retired at a certain age or not instead of them all having the same use by date.
well, the fishing boat thing was a miscalculation... they weren't to know that lithium 7 could be just as good as lithium 6.
well, they might have had a hunch.
Get more valuable data from a design standpoint doing that. Like every plane gets its wings bent way beyond normal tolerances to see what they can survive. There's a cool video of the 777 being tested (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRf395ioJRY) where they push its wings to 154% of their designed load capacity (they are bent way up) before they shatter. Since it is being subjected to kinds of stresses almost impossible in the real world (the 100% number is set by the maximum expected real world stress).
The problem with an actual crash is that things are highly unpredictable. So maybe you go and crash a plane, and you probably only do one they are hundreds of millions of dollars, and everything looks fine. No major damage, people inside are good, etc. Wonderful... Except you later discover that the crash was just lucky, or unlucky depending on your view. It just happened that nothing got subject to very severe stress and that only because of that precise kind of crash was everything so tame. In another crash everything goes to hell because shit was slightly different.
Better to spend time and money doing specific stress tests.
Yes. Remarkably, many of the surviving dummies have been elected to congress and others work for the TSA.
I call bullshit on the word "ejected". Installing a seat would be a massive amount of hassle - cutting a hatch in the roof of the cockpit would be a major modification of the airframe. I'm no airplane geek but I bet the airframe would need FAA recertification after that kind of modification, plus a massive amount of testing to make sure it all worked correctly (you really don't want the situation where the seat fires but the hatch remains locked in place). I admit I'm pulling a number out of the air, but I'd be unsurprised if there was little change from ten million.
Forget the ejection seat. I bet the reason they used a 727 is that it's fitted with an Airstair, a combined hatch/stairway at the very rear of the aircraft. The Airstair makes the 727 one of the few airliners that it's possible to parachute from without the risk of being hit by the engines, wing or tailplane - a person known as "Mr Cooper" proved this was possible in 1971. The only modification needed to do it again is the removal of the Cooper vane, a small aerodynamic device fitted to 727s after the DB Cooper hikack, intended to stop the Airstair being opened in flight.
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A video of the 727 crash can be seen here: http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/video-boeing-727-deliberately-crashed-in-desert-for-tv-371267/
I'd guess "ejected" was probably the wrong term to use. More likely, the pilot bailed out (jumped) from the tail airstairs like D. B. Cooper, or went out through a specially-rigged baggage door hatch (an installation common on airliner test aircraft).
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They purchased carbon credits to offset all this.
Usually in craft such as these, during flight testing, there is a chute behind the cockpit that allows the crew to just slide out underneath the aircraft, missing engines and the tail. It is preferred to the awesome-yet-nonsense manually-fitted rocket-propelled ejection seat as those require extensive modification to the cockpit, rendering flight testing useless (as the test pilots are essentially flying a different plane at that point), and are a damn-sight more expensive than a simple hole in the craft. Rocket engines are entirely overkill. There is a *lot* of space in these passenger planes, and they fly slowly and usually at great altitude. That combination makes egress incredibly easy with a chute. With all due respect, I have no idea how your post was modded +4, Informative :)
Do you happen to have a quote on the weight? The closest I could find is 496 pounds for an ACES, 450lb(205kg) for an ancient Russian K-36 which should be within the design tolernances of a cockpit originally designed for three, at least for limited use. (Note: the K-36D may have gained weight, it was listed as 'noticeably heavier than the ACES II')
Heck, that site says that a lightweight model suitable for trainers was developed - don't need to deal with significant slip-stream or ejection speeds over 510kts(727 cruise is 521kt)? 110lb with the K-36LT-3-5. Need that extra bit of speed capability? The K-36D-3.5 only ups that to 156lb giving you safe ejection up to 595 kt.
As for the rockets disfiguring the hole, that's why I said 'appropriately sized'. He's not going to be mangled if he's already OUT of the plane by the time the rockets mangle the exit with their exhaust.
Per the RAF and 'limited number of ejections' comment, well, my research shows that ejection seats have drastically improved from the '80s. I was thinking something modern, like an ACES II, would be used. The ACES II seat keeps maximum ejection forces between 12 and 14 G, a far cry from the 25+ seen with early seats which often seriously injured the one using it, sometimes even killing them.
After all that, I'll note that in retrospect I'll agree with most of the other posters-an actual ejection seat was unlikely to have been used. At this point the logistics of fitting a 727 with an actual functioning ejection seat is more an interesting mental exercise.
I don't read AC A human right