The Man Who Slammed His Passenger Jet Into New York | Alitalia Flight 618
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The pilot who slammed his passenger plane into new york / when impatience rips a passenger jet apart / How Breaking The rules Tore this passenger Jet apart
This is the story of alitalia flight 618. The year is 1970 and its the 15th of september. A DC-8 was operating a flight from rome to italy. The dc 8 had 146 passengers and 10 crew members on board. Hold on a second, they put a quad jet all the way from Rome to New york to carry just 146 passengers? To put that into context a 737 can carry more people. How did they make the economics work for this flight? For context today you do have non stop flights between rome and new york but theyre always served by larger twin engined jets like the 777 or the a350 or the 767 or the a330. Looking back with todays mindset it seems almost comical to put a quad engined dc 8 with just 146 people across the atlantic. Unsurprisingly alitalia has only recorded one year of profit, in its entire history from 1946. Leave your guess as to which year in the comments ill reveal the answer at the end of the video. Questionable route planning decisions aside, the plane left rome at 4;22 am EST or 10 am local time bound for new york. The atlantic crossing was uneventful. As the DC8 was approaching a navigational point about 120 nautical mines northeast of JFK international the controllers cleared the plane to descend from 31000 feet to 20000 feet. By the time the plane was 32 nautical miles from the airport they had gotten all the way down to 6000 feet. JFK radar approach control now had the plane on radar and they gave the pilots the information that theyd need to land at an airport, like altimeter settings winds fog that sort of stuff. Today though pilots got a bit of news that they weren't expecting. The ILS to runway 4R was out of commission. The ILS is this radio beacon that can guide planes right to the foot of a runway. Its not essential but having it is nice you know, like a warm cup of tea in the morning. So the first officer took control of the plane and started following the vectors that air traffic control was giving him to line up with the runway. The controller was giving them all sorts of vectors he asked them to speed up and slow down. By 1:18 pm the controller was almost done setting the plane up for the approach to runway 4R, he said “Alitalia six eighteen you’re three and a half from the marker, turn right zero two zero, cleared ILS four right approach.” But the crew had a problem, they still had a lot of stuff to do and not enough time, so they prepared the aircraft as fast as they could and put the plane into a 1000 foot per minute descent in an attempt to get onto the right glideslope. As the jet came out of the clouds the captain noticed that the plane was way too high and a bit to the right of the runway. He now had a decision to make: he could either go around and try again or he could try and salvage this approach. He chose the latter option. The DC8 started to drop like a stone, it was expected that the plane would ease up sooner or later but it just kept falling and falling. The plane touched down hard and immediately the pilots knew that they were no longer in control of the plane the plane yawed from the left to the right and back again. From the controllers point of view they knew that something was wrong, the landing was so hard that they watched the fuselage of the plane buckle, They saw smoke and flames from a point on the wing roots. Engines three and four were ripped off the right wing as the plane went down the runway. This landing had not gine well the pilots were trying their best to keep this plane on the runway. But it was of no use the plane went off to the left and into the soft mud, the landing gear which were already damaged from the hard landing could take no more and they were ripped off the plane. Not being able to take anymore the fuselage was ripped open as it came to a stop. Seeing all of this unfold the controllers immediately sounded the crash alarm. Incredibly all 157 people survived, 64 people 
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"The fuselage buckled, two engines ripped off and smoke coming from the wingroots, then it snapped in two - this landing had not gone well"
🤣😂 I'm inclined to agree...
Good thing there were no fatalities.
I'd really like to support this channel but I'm in college. So....on a really tight budget.
Please do one on Scandinavian flight 101.
Lost after being unable to land at New York.
Their final transmission was haunting in its desperation.
“For gods sake get your ground lights on”
Quite normal for many Russian planes / pilots to use reverse thrust on the approach, never heard of using it on a DC. Weird. Usually Illyushin, Yakovlev or Tupolev planes, no problem. Part and parcel of planes designed for rough and ready air strips in rural parts of Russia, many of those planes are designed for short runways.
It wasnt until the mid 90s that 2 engine ac could fly across the ocean with pax. Besides no 2 engine a/c like dc9 or 737 had the range to fly that route. Only the dc8 and 707/720b had the capacity. Late 89 and early 90s America West was trying to get faa certification for the 757 200 to fly the PHX and LAS to HNL routes. To get away from the cost of its 4 747 200s.
This captain didn't get the "when in doubt, go around" memo. Amazing that everybody lived
Psh, I never do that in flight sim and I've never died IRL.
That clown would have crashed
Lol, I play MSFS semi regularly and I still do go arounds more frequently than I should, even if I’m getting better at the landings of a 737 max 8.
He probably had the memo "we're still not making a profit, so minimise anything that costs us extra money"
It should have been obvious,going around would have given the crew time to make the necessary corrections…
Are you unaware of that in 1953 the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a rule establishing that two-engine planes should never be more than 60 minutes of flying time away from an adequate airport? ETOPS in 1985 became IOAC regulations and eventually reached to days standard that dual engine aircraft could fly 180 min from a diversion airport. This is the reason in 1960 aircraft with four engines were required it is also the reason 3 engine aircraft were made to bypass the older requirements. Thank you for your video it was interesting.
Of course he’s unaware…why else would he be dumbfounded? Asking “Are you unaware?” Then giving us a history lesson, but thanking him at the end is what we may refer to as talking down to a person or patronizing.
Idk if that was your intention, but my response would be, “Are you unaware that you’re a d*ck? But, thanks for the info.”
thanks for this comment. i wrote a comment asking for confirmation of this very thing!
Hope you're good.
@@jeffrey.a.hanson I think that your conclusion and reaction is incorrect.
@@jeffrey.a.hanson Who is 'we'?
@@jeffrey.a.hanson us? Who asked your for your opinion
Remember that the cost of a plane ticket represented a huge expenditure in those days, well out of reach for the middle class and below. Flying in the ‘60s and early ‘70s before the 747 was still limited to the well-to-do.
We flew our whole 6 person family in 1970 from Chicago to Venice. I don't remember it being that huge of an expenditure
The DC-8 was actually certified to reverse the inboard engines inflight. That was because during testing, it was found that the spoilers caused instability. it's one of the few jets allowed to use reverse inflight. As we see here, like spoilers, its important to remember to clean back up when done needing the drag.
I watched a pilot do something similar to this in the late 1980's. They were flying a Continental Boeing 727. Gold tail, meatball livery. He was WAY too high for the landing on RWY27 at San Diego. He pushed it anyway. Slammed it on the runway SO hard, one of the tires on the right main landing gear truck exploded. He managed to finish the landing and taxi to the gate minus one tire on the right side. I think he should've executed a missed approach.
I flew Delta from Frankfurt to Atlanta in an almost-empty jet. It was great! It was some wide-body, and I was in the middle set of (I think) 4 seats, but I had them all to myself, so lots of room. Such flights are occasionally necessary to reposition planes for more profitable legs. It might be that the return flight from Atlanta to Frankfurt (if that was the plane's next destination) was full, and so very profitable.
I flew the same route as an army brat moving back stateside in 1988. The aircraft was a TriStar.
@@grahamjohnson7412 My flight would have been about 10 years later.
@@christosvoskresyeStill might have been a TriStar. The last Delta L-1011 was retired in 2001.
What caused this crash was the captain forgetting to get out of reverse thrust, not using the reverse thrust in the first place. As you pointed out correctly, the DC-8 is rated to use reverse thrust in flight (albeit not under these conditions). The landing would most likely have been fine if the captain hadn't forgotten to push the levers back to idle.
Reverse is not permitted with any flaps and not below 190 knots. Both limitations were violated.
A modern 737 is much bigger, and has a far greater range than what was available back then. In those days, the only way to cover that distance was either a DC8 or a 707. 747 wasn't out yet, although it was about to be. Those old aircraft were really small compared to today.
Dc8s were bigger than most 737 variants, especially the Super 60 Series. 707 too. Additionally, the 737 shares basically the same fuselage as the 737.
@@BobbyGeneric145 The 737 shares a fuselage with the 737? Holy feck
@@samhaswell648 I think he meant 707 which is what is certified. Boeing is not longer capable of designing new planes it seems.
Kevin Barry
You're wrong, the Boeing 747 went into service on January 22, 1970
One other factor might be psychology / reliability of the engines. At least I would feel safer crossing the Atlantic in a quadjet, especially back in the day.
Reason behind using a 4 engine jet during the 70s was because of a rule (ETOPS or Extended-range Twin-engine Operating Performance Standards) that prevented 2 engine aircraft from being further than 60 minutes flying time from an airport at any time. Unfortunately there wasn't a way of doing that while crossing the Atlantic, so all trans Atlantic commercial flights at the time HAD to be serviced by either a tri or quad jet.
As jet engines became more reliable throughout the later 70s and into the 80s, that time was adjusted to 90 minutes, and it has been revised further since. It now stands at 300 minutes.
If interested in finding out more about ETOPS, the channel airspace explains it very well in their video on why wide body quad jets like the 747 are becoming a thing of the past.
The author of this video is not taking into account 1970 was a different time. Back then, the fact they carried 143 passengers non-stop from Rome to New York was a miraculous feat. Also, fuel prices were pennies on the dollar compared to today.
Same with crossing the Pacific
Actually, it can be done. I flew non ETOPS 737s to Europe on military (CRAF) charters during the gulf war. The routing takes you over Goose Bay NFLD, Sondrestrom Fjord, Greenland, Reykjavik, Iceland, the Faroe Islands and Prestwick Scotland. Always well within an hour of alternates.
@@davidbeattie1366 etops was more for commercial airlines and for some companies it was cheaper to fly it as a tri or quad jet as opposed to routing the flight so far north as they likely would have needed to make refuelling stops. We are talking about a flight from near the equator here. Its also possible that alitalia, knowing about etops restrictions in the 60s, made the decision to invest in some quad jets specifically to service trans Atlantic routes non stop, which at the time would have been a commercial advantage as it offered the passengers a faster and more direct service than routing up to the north
I was on a Pacific East Air DC-8-63 approaching HNL runway 8R (reef runway). We were so high that I assumed we must be going around. Much to my surprise the inboard engines went into reverse thrust. We descended very steeply, but the flare to landing felt normal.
I would have lost my lunch!
"Engines 3 and 4 were ripped off, the landing did not go well" 😂 a bit of an understatement!
Are you talking about El Al 1862?
That and the fuselage snapping in half... not good either.
When flying the SAAB Viggen you can enable the thrust reverser whilst in the air before landing however it only engages once you land which is a really convenient way to setup for a quick landing seeing as the Viggen is known for its STOL ability.
Ahh, the beauty of Swedish engineering.
No other channel which primarily deals with these types of incidents, touches Mini Air Crash Investigation! I'm still catching up on the back catalogue and haven't watched regular TV or Netflix for ages!
I love this channel and I think it's quite good, but if you like this you should also watch Green Dot Aviation (best reconstructions), Mentour Pilot (best in-depth analysis from a pilot's perspective) and, if you like videos about small crashes as well, the Air Safety Institute (they're mostly inactive now). But yeah, this channel has come a long way, his narration is great and the reconstructions are definitely improving. Overall it's a great channel!
Guys, this is basically the 1960s, when the jet age was still relatively new, and a number of jets were designed with the possibility of using thrust reversers in flight, cue the HS Trident, and the IL-62, so not a totally uncommon thing in those times... do cut the captain some slack!
Could you explain why thrust reversers would be used in flight, instead of e.g. speed brakes? and why above a specific speed?
@@KingJellyfishII The DC-8 didn’t have speed brakes.
@@davidbeattie1366 ah, that would explain it then. thanks
I worked for BOAC at the time and remember that the seating capacity of our Boeing 707 and Super VC10 aircraft was typically 16F 123Y. The Standard VC10 was 12F 99Y ... truly a different era before the arrival of the 747.
Super VC-10, there's a blast from the past!
Always thought those were the most beautiful looking airliners.
Got to agree I flew VC10. Amazing aircraft.
Used to have to fly out to HKG…..remember the old airport there??
Here in Italy we fail at Math a bit too much. Both when it comes to profits, and when it comes to making sounding decisions...
You guys are the coolest country in Europe though.
@@DanEBoyd Yes, but management still is our weakest skill...
I think one motivation for not go around could be, that going around felt like confessing that he made an error, so he wanted to correct the landing even if it was too late.
Sad...ego threatening lives
I think that the captain used the thrust reversers improperly for one big reason. In the video, you said that the airline was not profitable except for 1998. Perhaps the crew was under pressure to save money. The captain then felt he had to get the aircraft on the ground. Also, the pilots seemed to be good aviators as evidenced by everyone surviving the crash.
Uh, if they were good aviators they would had gone around instead of crashing.
Jackie Howard
The pilot didn't know what he was doing, he was panicking and the passengers survived by chance.
@@redblade8160 True. I shouldn’t type before coffee.. lol
@@AudieHolland Right, I shouldn’t type before adequate coffee
@@AudieHolland Also, they could have been under pressure from the airline to land and save money. That would have contributed to pilot stress.
I'm surprised you are surprised at the equipment type in use. There was no ETOPS back then. The 707 or DC-8 were in common use on transatlantic routes well into the 70's. I flew a DC-8 from JFK to FCO in 1975 thought it had been stretched a fair amount by then.
I’m surprised you are surprised that he is surprised
I love this channel check for a video almost daily! Thank you for the video!
On July 5th 1970 in Toronto, Air Canada flight 621, a DC- 8-63 encountered a very similar situation on landing. The outcome though was very different. All on board perished.
You talk of the economics of flying vs passenger numbers. I recently flew Aer Lingus Orlando to Manchester, the A330 was less than half full. The return flight was nowhere near full also.
OMG, the moment I heard he used the thrust reverser I knew they were in trouble
Those of you who only know flying in the de-regulated era, might be surprised to learn that flights were rarely canceled in the old days simply for lack of passengers. The big “National” carriers felt it was their responsibility to fly that plane regardless of the passenger count. I recall one time on the Washington DC to Detroit leg of BA 215 (?) when there were 17 of us on a 747, including the cabin crew.
In those days it was ALL quad jets doing long distance flying. Twins are relatively recent.
Fascinating as always !
I try to look this up & the results largely reference a 26 February 1960 flight of the same name, a Douglas DC-7C aircraft crashing near a cemetery in Shannon, Ireland. 34 killed & 18 seriously injured survivors. This flight you cover seems forgotten in comparison. Nice work digging it up!
Another element that saved lives was that the Douglas DC-8 was a solid and well built aircraft.
He might have pulled it off if he turned the thrust reversers off before the plane hit the runway. If they had gotten away with it before, this time the envelope was pushed too far. He still had enough presence of mind to cut off the fuel supply and keep the plane from erupting into flames during the crash. No one was injured seriously and we are all glad for that. 🙂
I'm a little late as usual As always excellent work!!! Keep them coming...
Fantastic video!
man, we DO like a story where everyone walks away over here, and that's why I like _over here_ so much, lol.
honestly I'm just a slut for accident investigation procedures and big jets! people dying is _sad!_ I love that you find so many accidents where people hobble away 🥰
Same here. It's nuts the pilots broke the plane in half and no one died
Same! OMG that Alaska one where the prop blew apart and tore a hole in the plane, and the pilots had almost no steering, AND THEY STILL MADE IT! Got to love Alaskans. Mfrs are made of freaking steel.
It’s actually why I hated “Air Crash Investigation” documentaries as a child and young adult. Even though I knew it was just a recreation by actors of a long gone incident, a strong part of me still felt compassion towards the pilots and would want them to “win” and survive.
It remains to this day, even now as an adult that works with and around pilots every shift.
@@mikoto7693 yeah, I am really not a fan of those shows, especially considering I mean... the same massive corporations that make those shows have a _massive_ vested interest in protecting their investments. and they invest in airline companies, and airline manufacturers, not airline pilots. so the story you get with something like "mayday" is skewed _extremely_ heavily towards blaming things like:
• pilot/crew's moral/physical failings
• "totally unforeseen" weather
etc and extremely heavily against things like oh idk, manufacturers colluding with the FAA to bypass critical safety inspections, or the other factors that often get explored in actual NTSB reports (crew fatigue lol)
idk where I was going with that really, other than I guess I really genuinely prefer this format to "diesel flames, extras with fake blood on them, bad acting, and that one guy who _always_ plays an NTSB inspector," lol
@@elen5871 Yes, all a huge Capitalist plot! Time you moved to Venezuela! Cuba nice too!
Twin engine trans Atlantic flights is a relatively new phenomenon.
I raised my eyebrows at your comment in the beginning. Like, "is this guy serious???" Hey, it was 1970, a DC-8 or a 707 was what they had at the time to fly between continents, and Alitalia (not two words, just one) wasn't the only airline using them --- ALL airlines flying across the Atlantic used quad-jets that were relatively small by today's standards, because that's what they COULD fly with and the ONLY long-range jets available at the time.
The 737 versions that already existed back then, like the 737-200, could carry only some 110 passengers as far as a couple thousand miles at most, and the first widebody jet was still about to debut --- and it was the fuel-guzzling, also quad-engine 747. Using twinjets on long-range routes over water was FORBIDDEN because it was considered unsafe before ETOPS (which would only appear over a decade later), and Airbus was still a pipe dream. In fact, long-range twinjets were a practical impossibility because only two of the low-bypass engines available at the time wouldn't have enough power to carry the fuel load required for a transoceanic flight, so a quad-jet was a NECESSITY. Only a few years later the DC-10 and L-1011 started doing it, but they were still trijets.
Additionally, you also obviously aren't aware that oil (and hence fuel) was dirt-cheap before the 1973 Yom Kippur war (cheap as in $1 a barrel of crude oil!), and fuel consumption wasn't a very significant cost to airlines back then. Your comment sounded as if you were talking about the 17th century and being unable to understand why they used carriages pulled by horses to travel instead of SUVs on motorways, which everybody knows are sooooooo much faster and better...
Some of these comments don't pass the "smell test". While I was with Flying Tigers, we leased an Alitalia DC-8-62 (N3931A) with JT3D-7 P&W 19,000# thrust engines, which is what's being depicted here. The 62 had the long range -63 wing, but was between the series 50 and series 61/63 in length (think Boeing 747 SP). It had a max ramp weight of 353,000, and a break release weight of 350,000 (very close to the -63). It seated 189 passengers at a range of 5200 miles, with a max landing weight of 275,000. So comparison with the 737 is probably not the way to go.
"The long-range DC-8-62 followed in April 1967, stretched by 7 ft (2.1 m), could seat up to 189 passengers over 5,200 nmi (9,600 km) with a larger wing for a MTOW up to 350,000 lb (159 t)." source Wiki.
Even the 737 Max can't match the range passenger load capabilities of the DC8-62. Where they differ, is that at .80 mach cruise, the -62 had a fuel burn around 12,000 #/hour, while the far more efficient Max series burns around 4000# / hour with +/- the -62 pax load. When we said "Filler up", you'd be looking at 169,000# of fuel. or around 26,000 gallons. By comparison, our 747s could carry 350,000# of fuel (and about the same payload), or around 53,000 gallons of jet A. Can I borrow you credit card???
As to inflight reverse, we had unlimited 4 engine reverse until we went into landing configuration, then only limited reverse would be available. The -62 & -63 series had the most effective inflight reverse, and it really shook the plane. I crewed a bunch of empty flights to the Douglas facility in Tulsa, OK., where a pylon mod had to be done due to cracking in the engine pylons, due to this stress.
Sorry folks, but watching the video, and reading some of the comments was like fingernails on the chalkboard.
As with the aforementioned range and ETOPS for the justification, fuel back then was also wasn’t much of an issue. It’s not until the 70’s oil crisis effects hitting the airline industry full swing that airplane manufacturers started toying with wide-bodies and planes with less than four engines.
Also, fun fact: Boeing and Douglas wasn’t the only ones in the pool with four-engined, narrow-bodied jetliners. Vickers, Convair, and even Ilusyhin also dipped their toes as well.
ETOPS?
@@K1OIK Extended Range Twin Operations, or it’s other more commonly known moniker “Engines Turn or Passengers Swim”.
Basically before the introduction of the Airbus A300, airplanes with two engines must be within 60 minutes from the nearest airport for safety reasons. This meant that any airline with two-engined airplanes would have to deploy multiple stops in their routes, which added costs into everything. Despite the A300, and later the Boeing 767 having enough fuel to do transatlantic routes they were only granted an extension for a 90-minute rule until the mid 80’s.
My mother was born 40 days after this incident. Time flies !
Dang. I'd never heard that about Alitalia's lack of profitability before.
The thing that finally killed them, or so I heard, was that Italy set up a state of the art high speed rail system, with the result that Alitalia's domestic market collapsed.
I can say that the high speed rail in italy is honestly amazing, I used it all summer & had much less issues with it than I did other countries. Good high speed rail was amazing this summer when the airports were all a nightmare
From the my observations years ago there was far more of an anything goes approach to flying (and the roads) as there is now. I am sure that the pilot was attempting to bring it in as steep as possible and plainly misjudged it by a few seconds in attention.
I remember being in planes doing all sorts of things years ago that just wouldn't happen these days. For example I was once on a 737 where the pilot decided to do a secnic pass through valleys and around mountans because it was the first day of the school holidays. It was very spectacular and lots of fun...
OMG...what year was that?
I Have Not Even Seen The Video And I Alredy Know That The Video Is The Best
Like a nice cup of tea in the morning?
@@Rodhern Yeah
Different economics, back then. Airline tickets were expensive. My father bought a ticket to Europe in 1970, to attend my grandfather's (his father's) funeral. It cost $1000, back then. You could buy a new compact car for $2000 or a house for $20,000, at that same time.
Any landing you can walk away from, is a good landing.
Was it true at one point that a go around was something that pilots were criticized for in the past? If that was the case then, perhaps that is why they chose not to go around.
Company culture at one point in some airlines did penalise pilots for go arounds due to the cost to the company. Between the delay and the extra fuel it used to perform a go around, some companies (especially smaller, low cost carriers) strongly discouraged go arounds, some through threat of disciplinary action and/or furnishing the wages of pilots to pay for the inconvenience.
thjs was pre-ETOPS. Even if they had 10 passengers, regulations required them to use a quad engine jet for Atlantic crossing
First of all, another great video. The fact that everyone survived, looking at the pictures from the crash, is impressive all by itself. But I think that in those days it was perceived as a "bad thing" for a pilot to do a go around, so that's probably why they didn't do one. Also, I think there was a regulation that prevented twin-engine jets from doing a trans-Atlantic flight, so tri and quad engine jets were necessary. But looking at it from a modern standpoint, it does seem ridiculous to use a quad engine jet to do those kind of flights like the one mentioned.
ETOPS.
Using quad jets was resumably one of the reasons Alitalia was doing badly!
@@smorris12 yeah that's true...coupled with the fact that it's a government entity, they're not necessarily required to turn a profit, just provide the service that they're supposed to provide.
Have you ever heard of the concept of flag carriers? They're state run operations, run from a perspective of national pride rather than profit. For a smaller country, it can be economic sense to run unprofitable routs because the societal benefits are more important in a larger perspective.
If you didn't have a triple jet (the DC-10 was introduced only in 1970) you needed a four engine jet to fly over the ocean due to regulations. Combined with low fuel costs and probably expensive tickets it would've been sort of okay.
I did not know about this accident. No fatalities. That provides buoyancy.
Buoyancy? 1970s Italians were into larceny.
It's 1970! The DC-8 and 707 were the main long distance airliners during that time. The 747 was just getting in and many airports infrastructures were not ready for the 747 yet. In 1970 Newark International Airport Term A, B and C were still in construction. So yes many DC-8's flew international flights....
An approach that is not stabilized is a go around. This aircraft was not only "not stabilized" it was out of control.
I don't get the questioning about using a DC-8. It was 1970 and as far as I know almost all transatlantic flights at that time were flown with the DC-8 or the 707 (excepting Icelandic Air which used props and made a stop in Reykjavík). I've flown across the Atlantic a few times when the plane wasn't nearly full--one time on a Delta flight where just about every passenger was able to stretch out across three seats. The 737 didn't begin flying until 1968 and it wasn't capable of transatlantic flight at that time. Alitalia has never been a great airline but that's probably more attributable to the rapid-fire flip-flops in the Italian government so that nobody ever knew which end was up. 😄
A podcast I listen to called Cautionary Tales talked about reasons why pilots don't divert even when every indication says they should.
There was an interesting little part where I believe it was an NTSB report discussed how when a storm is coming into an airport pilots will keep landing and pushing the envelope as conditions worsen but as soon as 1 pilot chooses to divert every plane after them diverts as well.
They called the phenomenon Get-There-itis
Well think about it it might have made sense then because there are only a few jets that could cross the Atlantic at the time. and those were the quadjets. The Dc10 wasn't released for service until 1971 and the L1011 in 1972.
4:40
"WE LIKE A STORY WHERE EVERYONE WALKS AWAY, OVER HERE"
so do i.
(and i like turning the caps off too. damn it ! 🤣)
The Hawker Siddeley Trident, a 120- to 180-seat airliner, was capable of descending at up to 10,000 ft/min (3,050 m/min) by use of the thrust reversers in flight.
Bruh what are these FS2002 graphics 😂 Love the content nonetheless
Curiously 10 years before there was a fatal crash of the DC-7 and it had the same flight number: Alitalia Flight 618.
I saw that too!
I flew on a 747 from the international airport in mainland Japan to Hawaii... with only 34 passengers. We were all setting up the center seats, lifting the armrests up to make beds. But, the turbulence was so fricking bad... we all ended up sitting with our seatbelts on the entire flight. Can you imagine how much money they lost??? With only 34 passengers on a 747???
It's worth mentioning that chasing profits with jet engines has LONG been a dubious gamble. In the earliest days, the "buzz-jet" was designed with (essentially) venetian blinds at the intake, a fuel injector and ignitor cluster in the middle, and a narrowing (Venturi) tube at the output/thruster... It literally drew air by pure ram-induction, shot fuel into a mist that then exploded on the ignitor sparks, "blowing" the blinds closed and forcing most (probably 70-80%) of the useful explosive thrust out the rear to achieve forward momentum and repeat the process...
Turbines led to the Turbo-Jet engines... with RAM-jets becoming denoted to "After-burners" (popular on aerobatic and fighter craft) which were a remarkable upgrade in power and efficiency, and we had to progress through this technology for a sufficient study and understanding before moving on. These monstrosities, still sucked in air from the front, only they could be started with electric motors spinning the main-shaft(s) and progressively aggressive turbines in the front forced air into the combustion chamber at the core, inducing a direct constant flow. Into this flow, fuel was injected and an ignitor cluster again applied spark, but with so many internal components, heat could be retained to a point of "thermal run-away" where the fire was self sustaining... AND the ignitors could be allowed to shut down. This still used a LOT of fuel, since 80-ish% or more of the air was being burned in the production of direct thrust, and this was still forced through the narrowing (Venturi again) tube to focus thrust out the back, much like getting higher speed water out of your garden hose by putting a thumb partially over the end... Faster thrust created more reaction by Newton's laws (action-reaction)... AND the engineers could design the system to reach a balancing point of operating temperature before they melted out or burned up the internal moving components (like the core compressor turbines)...
Thrust would be driven through a series of somewhat less aggressive turbines which acted sort of like "pinwheels" in children's toys. Only the rear turbines were firmly attached to the shaft(s) in the core the same as the front turbines... This takes just a little of the thrust output to turn into torque, useful for pushing the forward turbines around to force more air through the system... SO at the throttle controls, the pilots are simply adding fuel or starving the engine to achieve more or less thrust, and once at operating temp', the self sustaining burn would keep running reliably until fuel was cut-off, which is how you shutdown a jet engine, by switching off the fuel pumps altogether...
For the "After-burners" The Ram jets were just a second stage burn, catching a little of the unburnt fuel from the first stage and adding some of the "bleed-air" that circulated around the combustion chamber(s) at the core, usually for cooling on other (unequipped) engines, and with a little addition of fuel and ignition, they'd add a significant boost to the overall thrust output, while allowing open flames to exit the engine at the thrust nozzle in the very rear... As you can imagine, the boost is phenomenal if done well, but remains an expensive commodity and only really has a place in craft that MUST be capable of near ludicrous acceleration.
BUT then we (talking about humans in general) discovered that all those moving parts in the turbines, compressor stages, and the receiving turbines in the rear, all that mass whirling about produced a LOT of unused torque... SO the engineers did some really clever math and through experiments and occasionally spectacular failures, they figured out that you could attach propellers to the front of the thing and make a "Turbo-prop" driven craft... AND later a "Turbo-Fan Jet Engine"... Where only a relatively small amount of the air from the intake is actually forced into the Core of the engine and the combustion chamber. The majority of the air can be vented around through the cowling to be heated by the burning fuel-air mixture and a VERY MUCH more efficient engine can produce a MUCH more powerful and consistent thrust for a LOT longer. Furthermore, since less fuel and air were being actively burned, the engine's moving parts could last a lot longer. The only downside was that "spooling up" was noticeably more sluggish than the older fashioned Turbo-jets...
In the 60's and 70's a majority of civilian craft relied on the "tried and true" technology of the Turbo-jets. They're characteristically long and slender shape was graceful and the rapid response to throttling up was comfortable, even at the added cost. However, as remarkable as the shear quantities of fuel they required were, range was another dubious mathematical issue. More fuel meant more range, BUT also required more power... You can look up all the mathematical hooey NASA went through just figuring out how much it would take to put a man on the moon, if you want to be truly impressed... In any case, there were a few mathematical phenomena that came to prove two small Turbo-jet engines could be both more powerful and more efficient than one GREAT BIG one... SO that's how you get a four-engine passenger liner that's only carrying about 100 people over the entire Atlantic Ocean...
Sorry for the length... (and if you made it this far, you're a trooper, so THANKS FOR READING!!!)... However, I felt it necessary to include the jet engine progressions, and this IS the "over-simplified version" so don't expect this to win you awards in Engineering School. It won't. It's just enough to get a picture of how and why things developed as they did. It's also why so many pictures of B-52's retro-fitted with jet engines have twin engines on their pylons instead of bigger singles that probably could've been developed at that time... In any case, I hope this helps make sense out of what seems like nonsense... ;o)
this reminds me of a landing that was performed in the German Democratic Republic where they were putting down an old Ilyushin-62 in 1989 on a field that was just 860 meters long, and not paved. It was meant to be put there as a museum piece. They pulled the inboard engines to idle, and used the outboard engines for thrust reversal while in the air. It came to a stop at around 850 meters down the runway.
Here's the excerpt from the German Wikipedia article for those interested, you can just put it into Google Translate I guess:
Erfolgreiche Landung
Am 23. Oktober 1989 startete das Flugzeug zu seiner letzten, etwa 100 km kurzen Reise auf dem Flughafen Schönefeld. Nach zwei Probeüberflügen wurde das Flugzeug um 13:03 Uhr erfolgreich auf dem Flugplatz Stölln/Rhinow gelandet. Die Besatzung steuerte die Maschine mit minimaler Geschwindigkeit, knapp vor dem Strömungsabriss, auf die Piste zu. Die beiden inneren Triebwerke wurden deshalb bereits in der Luft abgeschaltet, um deren Restschub zu eliminieren, und die Schubumkehr, die von Einschalten bis zum Aufbau des vollen Gegenschubs etwa sechs bis acht Sekunden benötigte, deshalb bereits in 50 Metern Höhe aktiviert. In der Zivilluftfahrt wäre so ein Manöver strikt verboten.[8][6]
Nach dem ersten Aufsetzen auf dem störenden Hügel am Beginn der Piste hob die IL-62 noch zweimal kurz ab. Durch einen hohen Anstellwinkel bei der Landung sorgte der entstehende Luftwiderstand für zusätzliche Bremskraft. Nach dem Aufsetzen fuhr der Pilot sofort die Bremsklappen aus und behielt den Anstellwinkel solange bei, bis sich der Bug durch das Unwirksamwerden des Höhenruders bei etwa 140 km/h nach unten senkte.[2] So konnte das Flugzeug nach rund 850 Metern erfolgreich zum Stillstand gebracht werden, wobei eine große, nicht einkalkulierte Staubwolke durch den Gebrauch der Schubumkehr entstand und der Besatzung gegen Ende des Ausrollvorgangs vorübergehend die Sicht nahm. Nachdem sie die Umgebung wieder sehen konnte, ließ sie die beiden für die Landung ausgeschalteten, inneren Triebwerke an und überführte die Maschine damit zum jetzigen Standort.[4] Am Boden warteten bereits Menschenmassen, die Bürgermeisterin der Gemeinde Sybille Heling gratulierte der Besatzung als eine der Ersten. Die Landung wurde in das Buch der Guinness World Records aufgenommen.[3] Schließlich wurde das Flugzeug auf den Namen Lady Agnes getauft, in Gedenken an Agnes Fischer, die Ehefrau von Otto Lilienthal.
I can't believe reverse thrust would ever be considered in the air!
Not only "one year of profit since 1946", one year of profit _ever._ Alitalia went bust in 2021, and the wreckage was partially re-constructed into a new Italian flag carrier.
Besides aircraft being much different back then, so was airline fare regulation. You got all kinds of weird things happening in those days so I'm not surprised that they made the flight with so few passengers.
"Inboard eng's, max reverse" was the 3rd, or 4th, memory item down on the EMERGENCY decent checklist on the -8s. A long time ago, now.
I think a big part of the captains decision to proceed with the land might be a feeling of sunk cost. Ie that he already had made a bigger than normal effort in time and concentration to get that close to the run way. If he went around he would have to make the same effort again to possibly be in a similar position.
It was probably fatigue or get-there-itis. In addition, a go around would resequence him pretty far away most likely in such dense airspace.
As others have said, back in the day twinjets weren't as solid on range as quadjets and tri-jets; they also weren't wide-body (jet engines did not yet exist that could economically lift a widebody hull with only two).
Additionally, for some time any jet flying intercontinental was *required* to have at least _three_ engines - better odds of not losing all engines while over the ocean that way. EDIT: Yeah, after checking, twinjets were very range-restricted at the time. Tri-jets weren't really a thing yet, so a quadjet would have been the only sort legally permitted to make that flight.
Not knowing this feels like a pretty significant gap in your research, which is usually good; it's enough to make me bail about a minute in. I think you should re-do this one.
You're right that 146 passengers was a bit of a light load, a little half of the DC-8-62's capacity of 259. But air travel and especially _jet_ travel catered largely to the well-to-do prior to the 747, so...
Another excellent and informative video by Mini Air Crash Investigation. The pilots should have gone around, because their first approach was not stabilised - and clearly, using reverse thrust should not have been used in the air.
Alitalia is an undying meme here in Italy.
Reverse thrust in mid air ! That's me in a flight simulator !
Comment about 4 engine 150 seaters crossing the Atlantic back 50 years ago was naive, to say the least. Only DC 8 & 707 had that ability back then. Also, the DC 8 would be, structurely the strongest airliner built back at that time, which would have helped save a lot of lives in this case
This guy should know that in 1970 the DC8 was the flagship of most of the airlines and it was perfectly normal transporting 140 or something passengers across the ocean on a four engine jet. (The cost of the tickets was much higher) Beside 1970’s ETOPS restrictions that he doesn’t know about, he forgot that within a few years the North Atlantic tracks were filled with 747’s which obviously are running on four engines…
Alitalia employees went sometimes/often in retirement/pension with 40 years or less (age not working years) They were "posto fisso" employees which means they could not be fired. Even if they showed gross missconduct like faking having worked. To this day there are many such jobs in Italy which contribute to the enormous debt and inefficiency of Italy. Millions of jobs are purely created to maintain a semblance of economy in the south
I saw that plane after the crash at JFK in 1970!!! I was a new flight attendant for United Airlines. All I remember is seeing parts of the plane off the side off of a taxi way or somewhere.It was a long time ago. We were either taxiing out. Not sure, but I do remember seeing the crashed plane out the left side of our aircraft. I could read what Airline it was. I wondered why they didn't get it out of sight , it was so depressing and didn't cheer up the passengers, or me. I was 20 years old. when I flew to Italy for vacation, I took TWA. I can't believe I saw this video. Awful sight. Shocked all survived.
Couldn't find reference to this accident - can you link a source?
The engines look like the Convair 880.
Well to keep things in perspective while it seems like it doesn't make sense to carry so few pax transatlantic, just keep in mind the time.The 747 just came out and other widebodies were a few years away, ie DC-10, L1011, Airbus and the 757/767 fam were over a decade away. So apparently the 8 and 707's were the best options at the time.
The Captain didn't go around because he is a Macho. Going around means admitting a failure, Machos don't fail, they are always perfect.
The flight using a quad jet was part of the ruling of Atlantic crossing, that same rule also led to the creation of tri jets. Kiku Futaba mentions in comments, and reminded me of the ETOPS regulation after I originally posted). You mentioned yourself that this aircraft was only carrying 146 passengers, so a go-around would have added to cost, something that Alitalia was obviously not very good with. It's amazing how often pilots seem to be put under pressure by company rules, rather than safety rules. This happens in far more industries than just air travel. Companies add 'unwritten' rules to suit themselves, knowing the responsibility lies with the employee, and that in the event that it goes wrong, they can suddenly blame the employee for not following the actual rules, as laid down. Of course, in air travel this often leads to loss of life.
Question about thrust reversers. If the engine puts out 1000 pounds of thrust, and that energy is 100% efficient in being redirected to help slow the plane, you still have 1000 pounds of thrust pushing the plane forward when the thrust exits the engine.
How does this work? Hopefully my question makes sense lol
I think in those days they were not allowed to use twin engine planes for such a flight because of limited diversion options in the event of an engine failure.
Am I remembering incorrectly, or back in the days was mandatory to use quad-jets on transatlantic flights?
I doubt too many pilots want to do a go around at JFK even though it's clear he should have...like any accident it will be a combo of factors.
At the time, the fuel was cheaper than water, which would’ve helped somewhat, I imagine.
Quad keys were required by the FDA. Then came TTI-jets. It wasn’t until the twin jets 767 and 757 that twin jets were allowed to fly across the oceans.
Get there it is!
In the 90s there was a joke, that the pope using allitalia was kissing soil after landing was not a religous thing but he was glad he survived
quad jets were what they had back then. and air travel was far more expensive and exclusive. twin engines weren't good enough or allowed to cross the ocean
I thought during that time, to travel over water for extended periods, they had to have more than 2 engines, hence the tri-jet era to save fuel.
That was what some major airlines did only putting just over 160 passengers on a quad engine jet.
Think about Twa/united did it often enough in the 70s through to the late 90s so yes it don't make sense but they get their revenue from other areas to make up for it!
Any landing you can walk away from is a good one.
A plane breaking in 2 or 3 intact pieces usually saves lives by absorbing all the collision force
I think the Alitalia pilot went ahead with the landing instead of going around due to the long flight. He was tired, and didn't feel like staying in the air any longer. Fatigue is often a factor in poor decisions.
ETOPS would have prevented a twinjet from serving that route in 1970
Why is the Wiki page on this flight a completely different accident? Was there 2 Alitalia flight 618 accidents?
I'm confused. In the early portion of this explanation, you said the 4 Right ILS was out of service yet you said controllers cleared the flight for the ILS runway 4 Right.
I flew on a 707 to Germany in 1963 the plane was half empty but the the flight cost $650 or so per person do a little calculation to figure out what that would cost now also most airlines were subsidized (or were government owned) to encourage tourism and for prestige
Regardless of fuselage size or ETOPS regulations, twin or even three engined commercial aircraft simply did not have the range for transatlantic flights in 1970. 146 pax was actually considered a ‘reasonable’ load. Outside peak periods it was by no means uncommon for any airline’s 707s or DC-8s to carry loads of less than 100 pax across the Pond. Not profitable but not rare either. Fares were high back then.
The only choices that they had back in those days was DC8, 707, 720, 747 Convair 880 or 990 and the Convairs were fuel thirsty jets..