The Discovery channel Crash of a 727

I'd be interested in comments about this program.

It was two years in the planning, but the team didn't figure out that a Skymaster chase plane at full throttle could not keep up with the 727 on approach.

They didn't figure out that you should not fly an approach at typical glide slopes for landing, aiming at the numbers on the pseudo runway if your intention was to increase rate of descent to 2000 feet per minute for the crash. Quote from the guy flying the airplane by remote control in the chase plane "We're goona be short!" Really? Too bad the land based cameras expected the impact where it was planned to be.

The crash went as planned, but the 727 hit nose wheel first -- that increased the stress on the airframe so the front of the airplane broke free -- that seems to happen a lot in real life crashes, maybe a nose up impact would not have made a difference.

The didn't figure out during a practice approach that to pick up the guys who were testing the ability to jump from the 727 that you don't suddenly decide to jump from 2,500 agl instead of 3,000 fet agl if you expect the ground crew to find you!

They did a Rube Goldberg design to turn the 727 into a radio controlled airplane using (no kidding) the same R/C control box the guys who fly R/C aircraft use. That there is a better technology ( they may have wanted to look at some of the drone schemes) did not occur to them.

The good news is they seemed to have gotten some good data. Moral: sit in the back, assume a brace position because it makes you a smaller target for stuff flying around the passenger compartment, and don't hire whoever produced this program to do a program for you!


It would have been a great half hour program. It ran for 2 hours.


Does anyone else have other nits to pick?