Jet's nose cone damaged in midflight

Jet's nose cone damaged in midflight

www.cnn.com

The damage to the plane occurred during the flight, it but didn't affect Flight 478's scheduled 2:30 p.m. landing in Tampa, she said.

Baur called the damage a "minor maintenance issue" and a "rare occurrence."

The nose cone appears bashed in, according to pictures that CNN obtained from a passenger awaiting the plane's next leg, to Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota.

(visit the link for the full news article)

I suspect there is something very odd about this that is not being told. What the heck could cause damage like this during a flight, that would not be obvious? If it was a bird it would have to be made of steel and moving very fast to cause this sort of damage. Nope I believe this plane was hit by something, as to what that was who knows, but I don't think they'll be telling us anytime soon.

Take good look at the damage in the picture. If anyone knows how to enhance pictures to make them bigger please do.

www.cnn.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Nose cones are usually made of fibreglass and not aluminum like the rest of most a/c. Why? The radar is usually housed there and must be transparent to EM radiation.

It was 99.99999% a bird strike

Actually, to me it looks like wear and tear over time allowed pressure to cave the nose cone. Like she says, it's rare, but a good analogy is, you can't crush the dome of an egg with pressure until you've cracked it a little.

Chances are one of those seals wore a little too much, and the high pressure on the nose did the rest.


That, or if it were a perfectly good nose cone, then it was a bird strike... and the pressure did the rest.


I've seen some pretty nasty damage done to aircraft from bird strikes in the past. Some of the smaller, faster aircraft are notorious for having their entire nose cone entirely shattered by simple birds.

[edit on 7-7-2008 by johnsky]

yeah i think it was a bird strike, at those speeds a bird can do serious damage to fiberglass. have you ever seen a bird get sucked into an engine, it completely screws the turbine up and thats what causes a lot of mishaps in the air.

reply to post by FredT


totally agree - very sure its just a birdstrike

very quick to fix - as per these (another aircraft) pictures

photos-a.ak.facebook.com...

photos-d.ak.facebook.com...


photos-d.ak.facebook.com...

and a birdstrike on an engine

www.youtube.com...

I think bird strike is likely, but what bothers me about that is that there is no blood.

If it had been a bird, given the speed and the size of the impact, it would have made a mess of the bird, right?

The nose cone is battered but spotlessly clean!

reply to post by ThrIII

I suspect the reason there is no visible bird splatter is that planes travel at an extremely high rate of speed and was blown off.

My money is on a bird strike, and loss of the nose cone isn't as uncommon as it is made out to be.

If an aircraft gets struck by lightening, usually the nose cone gets it. It either damages it, or it is lost completely.

Im still not convinced this would be damage from a bird. I'm not an expert of mid air plane damage, but it just doesn't appear to be from a bird to me, I could be wrong but thats where I stand as of now.

Originally posted by whoreallyknows
Im still not convinced this would be damage from a bird. I'm not an expert of mid air plane damage, but it just doesn't appear to be from a bird to me, I could be wrong but thats where I stand as of now.

Why? You said you aren't an expert and have nothing to base your convictions on, and when you hear all of the rationale for it being a bird, why do you still think it was something more sensational?

Is it because you need something sensational to make life meaningful?

Just curious, because ,(and I'm not picking on you here), I see this a lot. Someone sees a news story which they have no expertise on, and they see something odd about it. They bring it here, and the overwhelming consesnus based on actual expertise is that it was normal. Then, the OP is still unconcvinced.

Why even post to begin with, if none of the input will impact your perspective?

It reminds me of my cat the other night. A june bug got in, and they tracked it till it went above the refrigerator. I climb up and grab it with a plastic transparent cup, show it to the cats as if to say "Good job, I got it now, all is ok" Then I release it. Yet both cats continue to stare up at the refrigerator for like 20 minutes, expecting I suppose another junebug to come down from there.


We must learn to let things go as quickly as we pick them up.

I say bird strike, and maybe the nose cone was made of something other than fiberglass.

Maybe it had a coating that made it behave like sheet metal.

2 cents

I have to ask how a bird strike can cause 2 sides to be caved in while leaving a raised center. This is illogical.

What kind of bird? The friggin' Thunderbird? That's a pretty big dent.

reply to post by OhZone



This is one of the reasons I'm having a hard time seeing this as simply a bird hitting the plane. They will be talking about it tonight on the local news I'm gonna see what they say then.

That plane reaches 452 km/h (244 knots, 281 mph).

At that speed the nose cone is already compressed from the windspeed. Striking a goose, as I understand it is no different from striking a frozen goose and not much difference from striking a cannonball.

It looks to me like the bird struck right center and the left center inverted from being pulled in by the compression. the torn metal bottom center supports the hypothesis of one side being pulled in while the other is pushed, causing a pull tare in the metal. I am not surprised by this.

People underestimate the force of speed, and the force of slow moving mass. I have seen an oil tanker shred a pier with three foot thick pilings in slow motion, at 2 miles an hour the pier disintigrated from the awesome momentum stored in the ships mass. In this case, a smaller mass but with lots of momentum from the speed.

That looks more like hail damage to me. I've seen hail and even rain do some pretty brutal damage to a plane. We've had them come back missing half their paint on the nose and tail leading edges because of rain.

reply to post by Zaphod58


nose cone damage from hail

and

www.snopes.com...

look at the pictures

[edit on 8/7/08 by Harlequin]

Click here for more information.

Force = Mass * Acceleration. If the plane hit a 12 lb goose which was flying at 30 MPH towards the plane, which was flying at 280 MPH, we can calculate the force thusly.

Screw it, I'm doing this in metric and then converting. I hate force units.)

The acceleration here is huge considering the bird is going from 30 MPH (13.41 Meters per second) in one vector direction to 280 MPH (125.2 Meters per second) in the oposite vector direction. Let's say this happened in a tenth of a second (Physics freaks will wish death on me for pulling that figure out of thin air, but I really don't feel like doing the calculus needed to come up with a better estimate) so we have (13.41+125.2)/.1s equal to an acceleration of 1386.1 meters per second^2 multiply that by the estimated 6 KG goose for a force of 8320 KG*M/S^2 or Newtons.... which is equal to 1,870 lbs of force.

I have no idea what those nosecones are rated at, but I think I'm safe in saying that nobody would be surprised if a madman took a sledge hammer to the front of an aircraft and did major damage... well, aside from the initial surprise of seeing a madman attack a plane, but the resulting damage wouldn't shock anyone. I'm also safe in saying that a man with a sledgehammer isn't likely to generate anywhere near 1,870 LBs of force against said plane. So I think the goose idea is a solid one.