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African Airline Reports Drone Collision With Passenger Jet (airlive.net)
McGruber writes:
Airlive is reporting that a drone collided with a Boeing 737-700 as it was on approach to Tete, Mozambique airport on Thursday. The 737 landed safely, but the right-hand side of the nose dome and fuselage were badly damaged.
The plane was carrying 80 passengers and a crew of 6, according to the Aviation Herald, which has more pictures of the damaged nose dome. "The crew heard a loud bang," they report, adding that "no abnormal indications followed. The crew, suspecting a bird strike, continued the approach for a safe landing." But USA Today notes that "While pilots have reported hundreds of sightings of drones near planes, previous suspected collisions have been debunked."
The plane was carrying 80 passengers and a crew of 6, according to the Aviation Herald, which has more pictures of the damaged nose dome. "The crew heard a loud bang," they report, adding that "no abnormal indications followed. The crew, suspecting a bird strike, continued the approach for a safe landing." But USA Today notes that "While pilots have reported hundreds of sightings of drones near planes, previous suspected collisions have been debunked."
It lacks the scratches to the exterior paint and a large hole that aluminum, carbon fiber, battery packs and other hard man made and heaven materials would leave. I suppose it could actually be a bird but it just looks like a low speed collision with something like a stairway.
I've hit probably 20 birds at 200-300 knots and have had some sort of bird guts smeared on the aircraft each time.
Actually, the damage pattern looks almost exactly consistent with a ground impact.
It is reasonably clear from the images that the impact came from the front right, not straight on, and any
drone moving fast enough to create that impact vector at approach speed would have punched straight through,
not made the distributed damage we see - this was quite clearly a low speed impact.
The pilots 'reporting a loud bang' on approach makes it sound like a good dose of arse-covering, something
endemic in Africa when costly damage happens.
You will note there is no evidence given of drone remains, etc. Something that would most certainly have been
chased down immediately if this was actually a drone strike.
A bird strike (which would do less damage that a drone of the size they are claiming) looks like this:
http://www.birdstrike.it/birds...
Very VERY different.
Retired senior avionics tech here that's seen plenty of damaged radomes over the decades on a wide variety of aircraft at various FBOs, resulting from a wide variety of causes. You're pretty much spot-on. This was almost certainly a very low speed impact IMHO.
Perhaps it was a ground service vehicle (cargo or passenger conveyor/stair vehicle, service/maintenance stairs, etc). I've seen damage quite similar occur in crowded maintenance hangars resulting from moving aircraft around carelessly, recklessly-driven ground service/maintenance vehicles, and from accidents on crowded & busy taxiways under poor visibility conditions.
I'd put $50 on this "story" being just that; a story to cover asses with.
Maybe they were attempting to reenact the "stair-truck and passenger-jet chase scene" from the Jim Cary movie "Liar Liar" and had an [Jim Cary] "oopsie!" {/Jim Cary].
Whatever it was, chances are extremely tiny it was from a drone impact in flight.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.