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."

Comments

Re:I wonder if...

[grasshoppa]

No no, this was deliberate.

Re:Well...

[garfnodie]

I know. I've been watching Discovery and other channels like it since before it was cool to watch that kind of stuff, but now the main channels are mostly full of stupid reality crap. You have to go to Science, H2, NatGeo, Green, BBC, Bio, etc to find good stuff, and not all cable or satellite providers offer all of those newer networks, much less offer them on the lower packages.

Re:Decadence

[Firethorn]

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.

Piloted plane?

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:Piloted plane?

[garfnodie]

I know the FAA crashed a plane on purpose years ago, and they piloted it remotely. Remember though, this plane is being crashed first and foremost for a TV show, so having a human pilot who has to escape will allow them to add some drama. I would imagine though that they had to get the FAA involved pretty heavily in this project, so I'm sure all the safety regulatory agencies had all kinds of monitoring equipment on board along with all of Discovery's camera's and such.

Re:Piloted plane?

[icebrain]

The actual stick manipulation for basic flying doesn't take much additional equipment, but running all of the systems does. Remember, the 727 is a relatively old design, requiring a three-person crew. The third person is a flight engineer, whose job is to monitor and run the hydraulic (flight controls, brakes, landing gear), pneumatic (pressurization and deicing), electrical power, and powerplant (engine) systems. These functions are much more automated on newer aircraft (compare a modern computer-controlled car engine to one from the 60s), but older ones like the 727 require a human to monitor the analog gauges, control the systems, and prevent them from exceeding limits.

Trying to automate all of those things for a one-time flight would be simply cost-prohibitive. I know some of them wouldn't be necessary for the flight in question, but you couldn't just wave them all away, either.

Distributed costs

[Firethorn]

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.

Re:Distributed costs

[TubeSteak]

have the ejection seat installed by one of the companies that do such things for research/advertising purposes, etc...

I feel like "eject" was the wrong word for this article (which was probably poorly transcribed from a press release).

727s don't have ejection seats.
Commercial airliners in general don't have ejection seats for a host of reasons,
some of the structural, but mostly to keep them from abandoning the passengers.

The likeliest scenario is that the pilot cracked open a door and jumped out.
And it's no trouble at all to open the doors on an unpressurized airplane.

/The most (in)famous person to ever jump out of a 727 is D.B. Cooper

Re:Distributed costs

[AK Marc]

I agree, he might not have actually ejected via an ejection seat, but then again, he might of.

"might 'ave" (to say it the way your wrote it) or "might have".

Re:Decadence

[DarwinSurvivor]

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.

Re:Decadence

[guttentag]

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.

Re:Decadence

[Alioth]

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.

are you sure this is the Discovery Channel?

[binarstu]

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.

Re:Poor dummies

[fullback]

Yes. Remarkably, many of the surviving dummies have been elected to congress and others work for the TSA.

Forget the ejection seat.

[Catmeat]

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.

Re:Forget the ejection seat.

[Alioth]

The 727 has also been used as a skydiving jumpship. A friend of mine has jumped from the 727, and she said it was somewhat painful hitting the air at that speed (they are actually above terminal velocity when they jump, and can climb a little until they are higher than the actual jumpship before starting their fall)

I loved Shark week

[maroberts]

Until it jumped the human

Video of the 727 crash

[clarkes1]

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/

Re:Well...

[atomicxblue]

I'm not really sure.. THEREFORE ALIENS!!! Did you see the promo for next week with the UFOs shooting dinosaurs like Sarah Palin hunting moose from a copter?

I don't ever remember seeing the Nat Geo special when they found the dinosaur bones with phaser fire marks.

Re:Well...

[Fished]

I happen to be expert in one particular area of history (Ph.D. in New Testament and Early Christian Studies), and when I watch programs related to that area on the History Channel, I'm astounded at how uniformly awful they are. They seem determined to present any and every wacky theory, and to distort every recognized fact. While I'm not expert on other areas (e.g. American history), I also find their reporting in these areas to be... idiosyncratic?