Yup!

Was a float plane, he crashed it on the highway...

Wife could not undersatnd why I was laughing...

Stupid... no wonder the public thinks that way...

Dave


aOn Sun, 22 May 2005 12:32:00 -0400, "Guillermo"
wrote:

"Gary Drescher" wrote in message
...
"Ernest C. Evans" wrote in message
...
I'm not a pilot but I was wondering why this plane went down "nose
first"
??? I'm thinkin', don't these things have some gliding ability ???

i guess the pilot must've been too low to recover ..... Having an
engine
quit on you is bad enough luck ..... but having it happened when you
just
happen to be at a low altitude is even worse luck ! (

Actually, having an engine quit would *not* cause a plane to fall. As you
say, it would just glide instead.

Speaking about common misconceptions, yea, unfortunately a chunk of people
seem to believe that the airplane is being held in the air by the propeller
itself.
I remember I once saw a movie (a few years ago; I thought the name was
"trapped", about a girl who gets kidnapped, but I cannot find it with that
name).
In this movie there was a scene where some people were flying in a seaplane,
and for some reason they needed to turn off the engine of the plane for a
few minutes. This was a ridiculous scene because once they shutdown the
engine the airplane just started falling off the sky. There was a shot of
the altimeter and it showed a descent of about 500 ft/SECOND!!!! (the pilot
tells the passenger that they have about 2 minutes to make a phone call, but
this means that they needed to be at about 30000 ft at that descent rate).
Then when they are done, he turns on the engine about 200 ft from the ground
and the airplane immediately goes into straight and level flight. The movie
was being pretty bad, but after that, I just started laughing, concerned
though, that it'll feed common misconceptions that people have about engine
failures in airplanes.
Has anyone seen that stupid movie or remembers the name ?