The Swearingen-TEB incident: control issues with twins

"Corky Scott" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 01 Jun 2005 15:03:52 GMT, "Mike Rapoport"
wrote:


Snip Great History Lesson

I have a video at home about the B-26. In it a veteran instructor was
interviewed and he spoke of being sent to Tampa to investigate the
very high accident rate. He arrived, spoke with the commanding
officer and requested their very best B-26 pilot trainee. They took
off and climbed to 8,000 feet (I think, could have been 12,000) where
the instructor told the pilot to configure the bomber as if he were
taking off. So the pilot slowed down, dropped flaps and gear, pitched
up and advanced power to takeoff settings. At that point the
instructor told the pilot he was going to chop power to one of the
engines, and told him which engine it would be. Then he cut the
power.


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Corky,

IIRC, the "instructor" they sent down was Jimmie Doolittle, was it not?

Jay B

On Wed, 1 Jun 2005 11:59:45 -0700, "Jay Beckman"
wrote:

IIRC, the "instructor" they sent down was Jimmie Doolittle, was it not?

Doolittle was put in charge of demonstrating the airplane to prove
that it could be flown safely, but he wasn't the guy who did most of
the flying. According to my information:" General Doolittle sent his
technical adviser, Captain Vincent W. "Squeak" Burnett" to do the
demo flying.

I watched in the video as he (I assume it was he) brought in a B-26 on
one engine. The final approach was incredibly steep, and the pilot
pulled the nose up at the last second and greased it on. From what I
could see, this was a do or die type of landing (given the approach
speed): pull up too late and the landing gear is history (given the
rate of descent I saw), pull up too early and the airplane would
instantly stall to the runway wiping out the gear again.

Corky Scott