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Personal Airdrop


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As I know, all operational safe speeds are established to provide adequate margin above stall speed as well as above air minimum control speed.

Some examples of using the “stall speed†(Vs) as a reference of safe speed:

1) Normal take-off speeds are established -by engineers through flight test- to be higher than stall speed by 10%. = (take-off speed is equal to 1.1 times the power off stall speed).

Meaning, if the stall speed found to be 100 knots then the take-off speed should be 110 knots; these 10 knots extra is enough to provide an adequate margin of safety.

2) Normal obstacle clearance speeds are equal to 1.2 times the power off stall speeds.

3) Threshold speeds for normal landing are equal to 1.35 times the power off stall speeds.

4)Touchdown speeds are equal to 1.2 times power off stall speeds for each flap setting.

During personal air drop, troopers prefer to have as lower speed as possible, but the red line of entering a stall is there; so the 1.2vs in the opinion of test engineers is a figure of satisfaction to both, those who will leave and those who will keep their axx on the seats.

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Brings up a question, I was sitting in the same recliner, in the same den, here in Dallas in 1985 and saw on TV news about a crash at Ft Hood. 64-0549 from the 62nd at Little Rock. Killed some folks as I remember. Story I heard was IP was standing up with students flying and they stalled on a drop and crashed. Question, How did they do that? Asleep? Turbulence? Should have plenty of airspeed min 125-130, and altitude 600 to 1000 feet?

Anyone know the Que Pasa?

Bob

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A side from what happened in “Fort Hood Accidentâ€; for certainly I am not the proper one to talk about this issue; but I am looking for a highlighting to the following two statements from a pilot’s point of view.

1)Stall or Fin Stall during low altitude with a wrong or delay on the recovery procedures is a well-known killer.

2)Turbulence during low speeds will mislead crew on reading the actual indicated speed, and farther more might hide the sign of entering the stall boundary.

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Brings up a question, I was sitting in the same recliner, in the same den, here in Dallas in 1985 and saw on TV news about a crash at Ft Hood. 64-0549 from the 62nd at Little Rock. Killed some folks as I remember. Story I heard was IP was standing up with students flying and they stalled on a drop and crashed. Question, How did they do that? Asleep? Turbulence? Should have plenty of airspeed min 125-130, and altitude 600 to 1000 feet?

Anyone know the Que Pasa?

Bob

Hi Bob,

I was in the 62nd at the time and we were flying in a 8 ship formation, I was the FE in the second element lead. As I recall, we were doing a simulated CDS drop. I might be wrong about the type of drop as it has been 27 years now. Even if it was a The airplane that crashed was #2 in the first element and was stuck in prop wash. The student AC did not want to give up formation integrity which was one of the contributing factors in the accident. Another contributing factor was the FE who was receiving his annual qual called out that the acft was in a Fin Stall, which the pilot corrected for. At the time of the accident policy was to have both students in the pilot seats and the IP standing. Both the IP and EF survived the crash.

Bruce Soto

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  • 10 years later...

You recall correctly Bruce. It was a sandbag drop simulating CDS. 12 March 1985. As a result of this accident, C-130 formation airdrop procedures for CDS were modified requiring each aircraft in an element to establish greater spacing. I think it was a minimum of 1 minute spacing to avoid prop wash. I was a student Nav during that deployment. When I finally got to Elmendorf (17 TAS) we accomplished spacing at the IP by #2 and #3 doing 360s over the IP at stacked altitudes. I left Tactical Airlift for SOF after that assignment so I don't know if that modified procedure was ever lifted.  

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