View Single Post
  #10  
Old February 2nd 16, 02:59 PM posted to rec.aviation.soaring
Dan Daly[_2_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 718
Default Accident in Namibia, SH Ventus 2cxm

On Tuesday, February 2, 2016 at 8:48:43 AM UTC-5, Tango Whisky wrote:
Le mardi 2 février 2016 13:41:43 UTC+1, Dan Daly a écrit*:

You may recall the ETA spin test with one wing full/one empty led to a crash. Both CS-22 AL1 and the ETA test are available by mr. google.


No. The Eta crashed when trying to recover from a spiral dive (dry). The load on the rudder simply snapped the tail boom.

The ASH25 did crash during flight testing when spinning with water in only one wing. The centrifugal force of the water made the wing skin pop, and Martin Heide had to parachute down. He had been suspicious about this outcome beforehand and had tried to talk authorities into dropping this part of the test, but to no avail. So he did the test starting at 10'000 ft.


******
According to the Oct 2009 BFU Investigative report 3x221-0/05, the test was a spinning trial with asymmetric fuel (not water as I said - you are correct on that) - page 1 (History of the flight). According to the conclusions, the spin changed to a spiral dive and the use of rudder for recovery broke the tail (page 5). I guess we are both right, and both wrong in some parts! The asymmetric condition was not noted in conclusions, so probably not critical in comparison to the engineering conclusions.

I didn't say anything about ASH25 but it sounds interesting... I did a brief search but couldn't find it online. When did it happen?

Thank you for the correction.