New Plan -- Going to Kill Devil Hills

Well, if there is even a slight chance at Chatanooga, do it! There is an
awesome acquarium there with it's beautiful buildings near the river. Quite
a treat to see and allow plenty of hours to do so - you'll need it. If
possible stay in the Holiday Inn made out of the old grand central train
station, complete with the old trains to go inside and see. This city is
quite a treat just for those two items above.

Dang it, maybe we can hit Chatanooga next month, when we're on our way
to Sun N Fun.

We launched this morning with the intent of making it as far west as
possible, so that we could sit out the big storms that are heading
east, hopefully in a place with plenty of things to see and do.
Flight Service gave us little hope of making it much past mid-
Tennessee before the crap hit the fan.

After lunch in Huntsville, AL (Madison County Executive) at Posey's, a
little home-grown place that we discovered the last time we were here,
back in '03, we checked the weather and decided to keep heading west
for Memphis -- a place we've always wanted to visit.

En route we never ran into anything lower than 7 miles visibility, and
were fat dumb and happy droning along up at 6500 feet, cranking the XM
tunes. It was another marvelous day of flying...

We over-flew Chatanooga when it became obvious that Memphis was easily
doable -- XM satellite weather is AWESOME for trips of this nature. We
decided to land at Olive Branch, a very nice airport under the Class C
veil of Memphis International. The guys there were great, helping us
line up a rental car and a decent motel room. We found our way to a
generic-but-nice Holiday Inn Express (yes, the same brand we've made
fun of!), and are planning on hitting Beale Street tonight for some
hot blues, and then we'll do Graceland tomorrow for our Elvis fix...

Anyone got any other suggestions to see in Memphis? We've got all day
Thursday, and I don't want to spend all day in Elvis-Land...
--
Jay Honeck
Currently in Memphis, TN
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

"Matt Whiting" wrote

Yes, it says the design likely broke at very low levels of force.

Planes are designed to be strong in head on collisions, or belly hitting
collisions. They were not designed to be T-boned by a tree.
--
Jim in NC

On Wed, 14 Mar 2007 02:45:00 GMT, Matt Whiting I
would not want to have
an engine failure in that area...

Yes, I think of that every flight as I live a couple of hundred miles
north of there, but have similar terrain although the mountains are a
little bigger and the valleys a little wider.

So do I-- in central PA. But I recall flying over WV, south of
Clarksburg IIRC, that was a lot worse than any thing around here.

The "valleys," if they could be called that, seemed no wider than the
crooked little two-lane roads that wound between the big lumps.

vince norris

On 2007-03-14, Matt Whiting wrote:
Crumple, yes, break, no. A break tends to impose very high acceleration
prior to the break and which time the acceleration changes dramatically.
That is NOT good crashworthiness.

A break would be extremely hard to avoid when being T-boned by a solid
object. It says less about the crashworthiness of the design than the
fact that everyone walked away.

I have some video of a Robinson R-44 crashing, and the tailboom breaking
off. They all walked away from that one, too. The fact that the R-44
broke in half in one particular incident says nothing about its general
crashworthiness, either. The helicopter also experienced a point load
halfway down the fuselage.

I also have some video of the rear half of the fuselage (and entire
empennage) breaking off an (IIRC) MD-80 on merely a hard landing. They
all walked (or hobbled) away from that one too. The crew didn't even
know the back end of their aircraft had fallen off until they exited.

Any light aircraft, when hitting a narrow, solid object on the fuselage
side at even a moderate sideways speed will likely either wrap around
it or break in half. Light aircraft are *weak* side on - just take a
look inside the tail cone and it becomes easy to see in which direction
a light aicraft is likely to be strong and in which it's likely to be weak.

--
Yes, the Reply-To email address is valid.
Oolite-Linux: an Elite tribute: http://oolite-linux.berlios.de