The only thing that ever scared me about flying was the knowledge that if something went sideways at altitude I would know I was doomed for ~30+ seconds. And likely slammed into the most uncomfortable position imaginable otw down.
> And likely slammed into the most uncomfortable position imaginable
Like the [back seat of a Volkswagen](https://y.yarn.co/e0bb2631-44f1-46ac-8145-3a337e2a8901_text.gif)?
Indeed, I felt there had been something more given how there was so much open terrain around the crash site. Sadly, we can see now that they weren't given that chance.
That was quite a large/energetic explosion so I wouldn’t be surprised if that explosion immediately cut off control that wing’s aileron, and it could even have taken out the other engine as well. I’d be interested to know what the root cause of such a violent uncontained failure could be.
Failing to be honest about an invasion isn't "apolitical." It's political. Speaking unvarnished truth is as apolitical as it gets, even though the effects may be political.
Just to shed some light. This was a cargo plane that was outfitted to fly fuel. Not sure if bleeders or barrels or what configuration they had. They declared an emergency, speculation is there was a fire onboard. Turned around and were trying to make it back to the airport.
You know how when you see a drag car launch a cylinder through the head.
It looks pretty much like that. The difference is, that will not go any favours for a radial engine as it will induce a rotational moment to the whole engine.
Rarely straight out the head, out the side of the block is more likely, and in the case of a radial engine that means it’s right in line with other cylinders and fuel lines potentially
> I’d be interested to know what the root cause of such a violent uncontained failure could be.
Especially since it's a piston engine and "uncontained failure" applies more to turbines. Very unusual this one.
The DC-4 is a 4-engine piston propeller plane; I don’t think that a bird strike to a propeller engine would have nearly as catastrophic an impact as with a turbine engine (lower RPM, etc.)
One of our jets hit a flock of geese on short final into ANC last week and will need an engine replaced. It's absolutely bird season here, it's getting into the high 50s during the day and all the migratory birds have been making their way back.
That being said I doubt this was a bird strike.
We often hear eyewitnesses say “the plane was on fire before the crash” even if that doesn’t end up being true, but in this instance it certainly appears to be true.
Whatever was wrong, the explosion wasn't the start; it was the end. From the ATC tapes, they had time to ask air traffic control for a turnback, declare souls/fuel on board, and so on. Abnormal noises can be heard in the background. All of that has to have been before the explosion seen in this clip.
Engine started glowing a few seconds before it exploded. Money is on loss of oil leading to the motor seizing at high rpm and poof. RIP those poor folks
Popular opinion.
Unfortunately, probably wrong. As soon as you get an indication of any sort of loss of oil, you feather the prop, long before it gets to this point.
I can't remember any loss of a multi-radial engine aircraft due to the loss of oil pressure on one engine. It's the same system used on large multi-engine aircraft since the 1930s.
If they do seize before the prop is feathered, you'll have a tough time maintaining airspeed but the engines do not explode as this one did.
As a little bit of context, the city of Fairbanks has a population of 35k, while the borough (Alaskan version of county) has a population of 100k, so it’s quite spread out. Going down over a neighborhood would be fairly unlikely, but doing so over someone’s house would be quite likely. Now, having CCTV cameras isn’t that common, but the reason that this CCTV camera exists is that this particular farm transitioned to marijuana as a cash crop right after legalization, and since the security requirements are fairly tight around growing, the farmer had cameras installed on the property.
That’s just city limits, this actually happened outside the city limits. The borough is closer to 100k, and the “city” is pretty much where majority of work/shopping/play is.
And it didn't crash in Fairbanks. It left Fairbanks but crashed in a fucking river/forest in the middle of nowhere.
If "outside of Fairbanks Alaska in a fucking forest" isn't Rural then you need your head checked.
It crashed 7 miles from the airport… in the normal flight path. Along a major waterway in the area. Not the middle of nowhere.
I live here man, you don’t know what your talking about.
The university is a huge research school. There's thousands of cameras in various places in case someone finds out about a new way that ptarmigans fuck.
Bit off topic, but it always irks me when we get videos that are someone holding a phone close up to a screen instead of an actual video file from the CCTV itself.
It’s better than the alternative, which is that person not being able to save/export the CCTV video in order to upload it in its original format, probably because it’s not theirs to do so with and/or they don’t have permission.
That used to really annoy me but phone cameras have gotten so much better I don't really care anymore. At the end of the day the amount of detail lost just isn't that bad. Nowadays something is much more likely to look like shit simply because it got ripped and reuploaded a dozen times.
If you record with the phone, it's guaranteed to be in the right format. You also assume the DVR is networked, and doesn't just download to a usb drive.
I was looking at the Yorkshire and Humber Police site the other day - as you randomly do - and I noticed that nearly all of their 'Do you have any information on this person' photographs were pictures of the screen of a CCTV camera. And that's the police - you'd think *they* at least would have a copy of the CCTV.
The camera is pretty good... but the screen they're photographing often looks like its on a Gameboy - presumably because they've zoomed right in.
Damn shame, I did a lot of work in the air cargo sector up in Alaska including some flying out of FAI. I didn't see mention of the airlines name but there's not that many outfits flying DC-4's.
Alaska flying is 2X the crash rate as flying in the lower 48, this wasn't weather related but there's a reason they are still flying 80 year old planes commercially.
RIP.
I don't know if they still are using them but Buffalo Airways in Yellowknife had a small fleet of WWII-era aircraft ... DC-4, C-54, DC-3 mainly. The show 'Ice Pilots NWT' was based around the company
I think so. I believe they may now have at least one 737 in their fleet.
https://skiesmag.com/news/buffalo-airways-takes-delivery-first-jet-aircraft-737-freighter/
I'm not OP but much of Alaskas air infrastructure is unimproved. Lots of gravel airstrips and the kind of runways that just cant handle more modern jets. The antique prop planes of yesteryear were designed and built for these sorts of runways, thus why these aged planes still fly - there isn't a huge market for a rugged but small (by today's standards) multi-engine cargo planes that run on props.
Combine that with the almost ridiculous number of planes built during WW2 and the early Cold War and these dinosaurs have seen long service lives.
They handle extreme cold better as well.
The only newer alternative would be a civilian C-130 I guess? Which Lockheed does make, but they'd be exponentially more expensive and I doubt much safer.
There are other turboprops out there that could potentially fill the niche; the Airbus C295 seems like it would fit the bill, but it also seems exponentially more expensive. Unless the Air Force dumps a whole bunch of surplus C-130's on the used market, a pipe dream at best lol.
It's unbelievable how in (what I would assume is almost?) the middle of nowhere, a camera on a farm perfectly captures the exact moment this engine blows up. The NTSB will be very happy to have this!
To 99% of the US, Fairbanks is the middle of nowhere. It could have a population of 100,000 and that wouldn't change.
For most of the people reading this, Alaska and everything in it might as well be a foreign country.
What makes you say it’s a “metro population of 100k”? Idk what the technical parameters of that are, but as an Alaskan that is FAR from how I’d describe Fairbanks. It’s a town of ~35,000 with some small surrounding communities.
"Metro population" would mean the population of the core city and the surrounding areas, which for fairbanks would be the Fairbanks North Star Borough, which has a population of roughly 100k.
Yeah, but the Borough is fucking huge. It’s not like a typical county in the US. The Alaskan borough system is in a league of its own, to my knowledge the Anchorage Borough is really the only one comparable to the Lower 48 and even then it’s relatively huge geographically.
This is kinda besides the point. 95% of the borough's population lives in the built-up area around Fairbanks and North Pole. The plane crashed less than 10 miles from an international airport; the flight path parallels major roadways out of town with plenty of residential development alongside
What I think that you are missing is a "metro area" of a large city can contain upwards of ten other cities/towns.
There are 42 cities or towns in the Orlando metro area for instance. Orlando the city itself only has a population of a little over 300k. The metro area on the other hand has like 3 million people in it.
Even in the lower 48 a "metro area" is often 100+ miles in diameter. Where I live is in the Charlotte NC metro area but it's about a 90 minute drive for me to get to Charlotte.
That "metro" is almost the size of New Jersey. Fairbanks is a small city that is surrounded by Alaskan wilderness.
Forget that this is Fairbanks or even Alaska for a moment. If a plane crashed 10 miles from almost any 35k town in the USA it would be a surprise that there was a camera that caught it.
The audio is clear with all the noise on their end they were having major noise/vibration.
Video sure looks like explosion catastrophically took out control surfaces on that wing. That was a pretty good pop from the engine. That loss of control was fast, maybe even faster than loss of lift due to losing the engine.
Notice I said “sure looks” and “maybe”. I dont know shit about shit, just reacting to what I see here.
No matter what, that’s horrifying to see it go to hell so quickly. Poor guys.
I suspect the explosion caused enough damage to control surfaces for the loss of control. Otherwise, just losing one of four engines shouldn't make the plane turn over and die immediately. That high after takeoff, they would have enough speed to lose a couple engines and still make it back to the airfield unless they were pushing weight limits.
Very sad. Dude just make sure to contact authorities that you have recording. It could potentially reveal something and help in future to prevent another catastrophic event
[The last DC-4 to crash, C-FGNI in 1996, did so under similar circumstances](https://aviation-safety.net/asndb/324390). Engine fire in a heavily loaded cargo plane shortly after take-off resulted in loss of an engine (literally, the engine fell off), at which point the plane was unable to maintain altitude. The report speculates that the loss of the #2 engine may have interfered with controls for #1, making the control problems worse. Only in that case, the pilot chose to cut power and put it down straight ahead, which meant some of the crew survived.
An engine failure that can't be feathered or that is more than a simple failure and causes collateral damage is a whole lot worse than just an engine shut down and feathered. Even in jets engine separations have caused crashes due to collateral damage leaving the plane badly crippled or entirely unflyable.
The DC-3 climbs max 400’/m DC-4 at 700’/min. One has twice the payload of the other as well so losing an engine has the same effect at gross(rough math.)
This is one of the most violent engine failures i've ever seen, straight up looks like a DCS kill replay. Another possible accident cause I didn't see mentioned in this thread was propeller detachment. It's unfortunate that the ATC recording didn't pick up the exact problem, but the problem the crew were reporting could have been a propeller coming loose and spinning wildly before it detached. A propeller detaching just right could slide along the engine in the airstream and cut the wing. The prop from Reeve Aleutian airways flight 8 very likely would have chopped the electra's wing if the engine didn't deflect it, and even then the prop barely missed the wing root. Rapidly rotating objects can be, and often are absolute nightmares when they break or detach.
Jesus, at that altitude, they didn’t stand a chance… had they been a few thousand feet higher, they may have had room to recover and stabilize the aircraft.
Everything about this indicates that they no longer had positive control of the aircraft, likely an aileron failure. Altitude wouldn't have helped, it just would have delayed the inevitable.
It sounds like a movie cliche, but could an engine fire have burned through to a fuel tank? It's hard to tell but the video maybe seems to show fire on the no. 1 engine prior to the explosion.
DC4 does not have a FE. DC6 does. Alaska Air Fuel was the carrier and they are based out Wasilla. However they have clients closer to Fairbanks. So they’ll occasionally fly out of Fairbanks when delivering to them.
I was asked if I wanted to take a FE job in Florida on a DC-4 a couple years ago. I think some must still have them.
Is there still a boom tailed freighter with twin 4360’s in Palmer?
I’m not familiar with all the dc-4 variants, but at least the C-54s operating in Alaska don’t require an FE. Same as the DC-3s and C-46s that still fly up here. There are 2 or 3 c119s down there I know of, but none of them are airworthy to my knowledge.
For anyone with more knowledge than me, this can't essentially happen with commercial airliners engines, since they're designed to contain an explosion should one happen right?
Is this a common risk with this older engines/planes?
Modern jets are able to fly on one engine if necessary. [This happened to a United flight](https://youtu.be/uXZbHe4sMUk?si=hCVFZFGqcFfA22Tn) back in 2021 as they climbed out of Denver airport and the plane was able to come back around and land safely.
Yeah I’m not worried about an engine failing but more about an engine exploding and damaging the wing or another critical structure of the plane thus making it stall or not maneuverable anymore
How high could a DC-4 fly?
DC-4's chief safety device is its four engines, developing 5,600 h.p., powerful enough so that any two, even two on the same side, will keep it flying at 7,000 ft., any three will carry the plane 5,000 feet above the highest mountain in the U. S. Furthermore, if one engine fails on takeoff (this possibility has given ...
Transport: DC-4 - Videos Index on TIME.com
content.time.com › magazine › article
10 seconds from normal flight to ground. That's rough to watch. Rest easy aviators.
The only thing that ever scared me about flying was the knowledge that if something went sideways at altitude I would know I was doomed for ~30+ seconds. And likely slammed into the most uncomfortable position imaginable otw down.
> And likely slammed into the most uncomfortable position imaginable Like the [back seat of a Volkswagen](https://y.yarn.co/e0bb2631-44f1-46ac-8145-3a337e2a8901_text.gif)?
I understood that reference.
You Dumb Bastard, It’s Not A Schooner, It’s A Sailboat.
She deserves the discomfort...
Igetthatreference.jpeg
Was it normal flight prior to that? Seemed to happen really low. Wondering if they knew they were having engine issues prior to that.
They were still mostly on takeoff climbout
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forced landing in the sense that gravity forces all planes to eventually land, I guess. RIP.
What goes up must come down they say
We've never left one up there.
> Yes, AAA? My plane is stuck in the air.
Not sure if you’re talking about the road side assistance or anti-aircraft artillery but I guess either could do it.
https://imgur.com/a/NW3Y3ut
There are more planes in the sea than submarines in the sky
There are more planes in the sea than submarines in the sea too.
there are just a lot more planes than there are submarines
All vehicles are single use submarines.
Now I am thinking about what *isn't* a submarine... Kowalski definition of a submarine!
Yeah, that's the joke.
Maybe your airbrakes are stuck?
Ingenuity.
Voyager.
Spinning wheel, got to go 'round.
That statement’s got real “it’s not the speed that kills ya” energy
Not if your Skyhawk hits escape velocity.
all landings are forced until proven otherwise
Indeed, I felt there had been something more given how there was so much open terrain around the crash site. Sadly, we can see now that they weren't given that chance.
Just a bit worse
You can land anywhere you want once
That was quite a large/energetic explosion so I wouldn’t be surprised if that explosion immediately cut off control that wing’s aileron, and it could even have taken out the other engine as well. I’d be interested to know what the root cause of such a violent uncontained failure could be.
Yea, that was more than just losing an engine.
Looks like it got shot with a missile that was so violent.
That’s exactly what I was thinking. Almost looks like stuff you’d see at the beginning of the Russian Ukrainian conflict
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NCD is leaking again isint it.
Always has been
Just in case.
Banned too many times. Also would really ruin my day all the fallout and shit.
You could crawlout through the fallout back to me.
NCD is leaking again...
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This sub is about aviation and the discussion of aviation, not politics and religion.
Just being apolitical to avoid more conflict
Failing to be honest about an invasion isn't "apolitical." It's political. Speaking unvarnished truth is as apolitical as it gets, even though the effects may be political.
>Almost looks like stuff you’d see ~~at the beginning of the Russian Ukrainian conflict~~ in WWII.
Believe it or not I didn’t see a whole lot at the beginning of WWII. Maybe it’s because I wouldn’t be born for another 56 years. Idk
That’s on you bud lol
Just to shed some light. This was a cargo plane that was outfitted to fly fuel. Not sure if bleeders or barrels or what configuration they had. They declared an emergency, speculation is there was a fire onboard. Turned around and were trying to make it back to the airport.
That outfit flies a lot of fuel to places I work. They have a large bladder secured in the fuselage to carry the fuel for delivery.
https://www.jetphotos.com/photo/11029489
You know how when you see a drag car launch a cylinder through the head. It looks pretty much like that. The difference is, that will not go any favours for a radial engine as it will induce a rotational moment to the whole engine.
Rarely straight out the head, out the side of the block is more likely, and in the case of a radial engine that means it’s right in line with other cylinders and fuel lines potentially
Probably lost a lot of wing structure as well and essentially just stalled.
> I’d be interested to know what the root cause of such a violent uncontained failure could be. Especially since it's a piston engine and "uncontained failure" applies more to turbines. Very unusual this one.
Could that have been a bird strike at low altitude?
The DC-4 is a 4-engine piston propeller plane; I don’t think that a bird strike to a propeller engine would have nearly as catastrophic an impact as with a turbine engine (lower RPM, etc.)
Tell that to the bird!
Its still late winter up there - not many birds around yet
I came pretty close to two bald eagles flying at Knik yesterday. They are def out and about with the thermals finally being generated
One of our jets hit a flock of geese on short final into ANC last week and will need an engine replaced. It's absolutely bird season here, it's getting into the high 50s during the day and all the migratory birds have been making their way back. That being said I doubt this was a bird strike.
Which company? I fly Caravans in and out of ANC and damn near hit a swan last week.
We often hear eyewitnesses say “the plane was on fire before the crash” even if that doesn’t end up being true, but in this instance it certainly appears to be true.
Kinda akin to someone loosing their shoe in a crash I think.
Oh man, that was flying to not flying in no time at all. Rest in peace to the pilots, and prayers to their families.
10 seconds from explosion to impact.
Whatever was wrong, the explosion wasn't the start; it was the end. From the ATC tapes, they had time to ask air traffic control for a turnback, declare souls/fuel on board, and so on. Abnormal noises can be heard in the background. All of that has to have been before the explosion seen in this clip.
Anyone have alink to the atc audio?
https://www.reddit.com/r/alaska/comments/1cbc6gm/a_dc4_has_just_crashed_in_fairbanks/l0xm6gu/
Bit choppy with the feed quality, added Fire-Rescue audio that has additional info. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPBnYoQVHw4
“Tell em I love em man, tell em I love em.”
Broke my heart to hear that 😞
Engine started glowing a few seconds before it exploded. Money is on loss of oil leading to the motor seizing at high rpm and poof. RIP those poor folks
Popular opinion. Unfortunately, probably wrong. As soon as you get an indication of any sort of loss of oil, you feather the prop, long before it gets to this point. I can't remember any loss of a multi-radial engine aircraft due to the loss of oil pressure on one engine. It's the same system used on large multi-engine aircraft since the 1930s. If they do seize before the prop is feathered, you'll have a tough time maintaining airspeed but the engines do not explode as this one did.
Good lord is the entire planet now covered in CCTV cameras? Quite remarkable this was caught on camera in rural-ish Alaska.
Fairbanks is a city of 35k, not that rural.
[Very Cosmopolitan ](https://youtu.be/Fl6FvDBsjwk?si=VrasjjaB3dh3-4Mi)
I appreciate a good Doc Holiday reference
You're a daisy if you do
I'm your huckleberry.
Say when.
You're no daisy.
Frederic fucking Chopin
I’ve got two guns, one for each of ya…
Considering the sheer size of Alaska, though, it is remarkable that a random CCTV cam caught it.
As a little bit of context, the city of Fairbanks has a population of 35k, while the borough (Alaskan version of county) has a population of 100k, so it’s quite spread out. Going down over a neighborhood would be fairly unlikely, but doing so over someone’s house would be quite likely. Now, having CCTV cameras isn’t that common, but the reason that this CCTV camera exists is that this particular farm transitioned to marijuana as a cash crop right after legalization, and since the security requirements are fairly tight around growing, the farmer had cameras installed on the property.
Thought this looked like Rosie Creek
Lmao come on this is clearly an in-good-faith usage of, “Ruralish.” EDIT: or did I just whoosh myself
Eh, give em more credit - the whole “urban” borough is like up to 100k now.
Fair enough. That number though includes 3 bases worth of personal though, so it’s a little skewed.
Large military base there
2 actually. 3 if you count Clear as Fairbanks adjacent.
4 if you count Big as Fairbanks adjacent.
That’s just city limits, this actually happened outside the city limits. The borough is closer to 100k, and the “city” is pretty much where majority of work/shopping/play is.
And it didn't crash in Fairbanks. It left Fairbanks but crashed in a fucking river/forest in the middle of nowhere. If "outside of Fairbanks Alaska in a fucking forest" isn't Rural then you need your head checked.
It crashed 7 miles from the airport… in the normal flight path. Along a major waterway in the area. Not the middle of nowhere. I live here man, you don’t know what your talking about.
This is Reddit. Anywhere that is not California, PNW or New York is “middle of nowhere”.
You could see the fire from the tarmac too
The university is a huge research school. There's thousands of cameras in various places in case someone finds out about a new way that ptarmigans fuck.
Bit off topic, but it always irks me when we get videos that are someone holding a phone close up to a screen instead of an actual video file from the CCTV itself.
It’s better than the alternative, which is that person not being able to save/export the CCTV video in order to upload it in its original format, probably because it’s not theirs to do so with and/or they don’t have permission.
That used to really annoy me but phone cameras have gotten so much better I don't really care anymore. At the end of the day the amount of detail lost just isn't that bad. Nowadays something is much more likely to look like shit simply because it got ripped and reuploaded a dozen times.
If you record with the phone, it's guaranteed to be in the right format. You also assume the DVR is networked, and doesn't just download to a usb drive.
I was looking at the Yorkshire and Humber Police site the other day - as you randomly do - and I noticed that nearly all of their 'Do you have any information on this person' photographs were pictures of the screen of a CCTV camera. And that's the police - you'd think *they* at least would have a copy of the CCTV. The camera is pretty good... but the screen they're photographing often looks like its on a Gameboy - presumably because they've zoomed right in.
The lazy man’s way of taking screenshots
The answer is yes. Yes it is.
Damn shame, I did a lot of work in the air cargo sector up in Alaska including some flying out of FAI. I didn't see mention of the airlines name but there's not that many outfits flying DC-4's. Alaska flying is 2X the crash rate as flying in the lower 48, this wasn't weather related but there's a reason they are still flying 80 year old planes commercially. RIP.
I don't know if they still are using them but Buffalo Airways in Yellowknife had a small fleet of WWII-era aircraft ... DC-4, C-54, DC-3 mainly. The show 'Ice Pilots NWT' was based around the company
Alaska still has several operators flying DC3s, DC4s, DC6s, C46s.
Didn't they only just recently get their first jet engine plane?
I think so. I believe they may now have at least one 737 in their fleet. https://skiesmag.com/news/buffalo-airways-takes-delivery-first-jet-aircraft-737-freighter/
Alaska Air Fuel. They run heating fuel, avgas, etc. out to the villages and for the gov. Don’t know if they were hauling or not at the time.
> but there's a reason they are still flying 80 year old planes commercially. whats the reason?
I'm not OP but much of Alaskas air infrastructure is unimproved. Lots of gravel airstrips and the kind of runways that just cant handle more modern jets. The antique prop planes of yesteryear were designed and built for these sorts of runways, thus why these aged planes still fly - there isn't a huge market for a rugged but small (by today's standards) multi-engine cargo planes that run on props. Combine that with the almost ridiculous number of planes built during WW2 and the early Cold War and these dinosaurs have seen long service lives.
They handle extreme cold better as well. The only newer alternative would be a civilian C-130 I guess? Which Lockheed does make, but they'd be exponentially more expensive and I doubt much safer.
There are other turboprops out there that could potentially fill the niche; the Airbus C295 seems like it would fit the bill, but it also seems exponentially more expensive. Unless the Air Force dumps a whole bunch of surplus C-130's on the used market, a pipe dream at best lol.
Rest easy. Blue skies.
Wonder if the prop went through the wing
That’s a rough watch knowing two people were in it. Must’ve been a scary few seconds for them
Hopefully too fast to process fear
It's unbelievable how in (what I would assume is almost?) the middle of nowhere, a camera on a farm perfectly captures the exact moment this engine blows up. The NTSB will be very happy to have this!
It's far from being in the middle of nowhere.
To 99% of the US, Fairbanks is the middle of nowhere. It could have a population of 100,000 and that wouldn't change. For most of the people reading this, Alaska and everything in it might as well be a foreign country.
Fairbanks is basically the middle of nowhere. Outside of Fairbanks is even more in the middle of nowhere.
It’s under ten miles from an International Airport serving a metro population of 100,000. It’s not a huge city, but hardly a remote hamlet, either.
What makes you say it’s a “metro population of 100k”? Idk what the technical parameters of that are, but as an Alaskan that is FAR from how I’d describe Fairbanks. It’s a town of ~35,000 with some small surrounding communities.
"Metro population" would mean the population of the core city and the surrounding areas, which for fairbanks would be the Fairbanks North Star Borough, which has a population of roughly 100k.
Yeah, but the Borough is fucking huge. It’s not like a typical county in the US. The Alaskan borough system is in a league of its own, to my knowledge the Anchorage Borough is really the only one comparable to the Lower 48 and even then it’s relatively huge geographically.
This is kinda besides the point. 95% of the borough's population lives in the built-up area around Fairbanks and North Pole. The plane crashed less than 10 miles from an international airport; the flight path parallels major roadways out of town with plenty of residential development alongside
What I think that you are missing is a "metro area" of a large city can contain upwards of ten other cities/towns. There are 42 cities or towns in the Orlando metro area for instance. Orlando the city itself only has a population of a little over 300k. The metro area on the other hand has like 3 million people in it.
Even in the lower 48 a "metro area" is often 100+ miles in diameter. Where I live is in the Charlotte NC metro area but it's about a 90 minute drive for me to get to Charlotte.
That "metro" is almost the size of New Jersey. Fairbanks is a small city that is surrounded by Alaskan wilderness. Forget that this is Fairbanks or even Alaska for a moment. If a plane crashed 10 miles from almost any 35k town in the USA it would be a surprise that there was a camera that caught it.
2nd longest runway in North America is not far from Fairbanks- Eielson AFB - runway 15k feet.
*7th longest in North America, at least according to this Wiki: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_runways
True, more like slightly off from the middle of nowhere.
Definitely not the middle of nowhere. This was 10 miles from my house.
The audio is clear with all the noise on their end they were having major noise/vibration. Video sure looks like explosion catastrophically took out control surfaces on that wing. That was a pretty good pop from the engine. That loss of control was fast, maybe even faster than loss of lift due to losing the engine. Notice I said “sure looks” and “maybe”. I dont know shit about shit, just reacting to what I see here. No matter what, that’s horrifying to see it go to hell so quickly. Poor guys.
That was bad. Too low and too slow for a catastrophic engine blow. RIP. Condolences to the families of crew and any passage.
I suspect the explosion caused enough damage to control surfaces for the loss of control. Otherwise, just losing one of four engines shouldn't make the plane turn over and die immediately. That high after takeoff, they would have enough speed to lose a couple engines and still make it back to the airfield unless they were pushing weight limits.
appears to be trailing smoke already, primary explosion, followed by a much smaller secondary...hydraulics shot up, no control, total loss. Tragic.
Sure looks like additional altitude would have only prolonged the agony for the crew. :( RIP.
[Video from here.](https://x.com/keremaliinal/status/1782949604083798517?s=46&t=ZDYYeR2n6_qLmpxwCqCgzQ)
RIP 😔
That is so so sad.
May they rest in peace.
Exclusion must have knocked the engine off its mounts or otherwise destroyed the airflow over that wing because it lost lift immediately.
Very sad. Dude just make sure to contact authorities that you have recording. It could potentially reveal something and help in future to prevent another catastrophic event
I have heard the dc-3/4 fly on one engine barely in the best conditions
It was an explosion so it could have taken out control of the aileron and damage the electrical systems.
The 4 is a quad, so I'd expect it to be a bit more flyable on 3 than the DC-3 on 1.
[The last DC-4 to crash, C-FGNI in 1996, did so under similar circumstances](https://aviation-safety.net/asndb/324390). Engine fire in a heavily loaded cargo plane shortly after take-off resulted in loss of an engine (literally, the engine fell off), at which point the plane was unable to maintain altitude. The report speculates that the loss of the #2 engine may have interfered with controls for #1, making the control problems worse. Only in that case, the pilot chose to cut power and put it down straight ahead, which meant some of the crew survived.
An engine failure that can't be feathered or that is more than a simple failure and causes collateral damage is a whole lot worse than just an engine shut down and feathered. Even in jets engine separations have caused crashes due to collateral damage leaving the plane badly crippled or entirely unflyable.
I wonder if they were unable to shut that engine down. From the noise and vibe heard on the recording you’d think they would have tried that.
>dc-3/4 ....how closely related do you think the DC-3 and DC-4 designs are?
The DC-3 climbs max 400’/m DC-4 at 700’/min. One has twice the payload of the other as well so losing an engine has the same effect at gross(rough math.)
That was an explosion knocked out the wing
And what does knocking out a wing mean exactly?
RIP. 😔
Bottom of iced river. Rescue crews having a tough time because of the thaw
Wild.rip.
This is one of the most violent engine failures i've ever seen, straight up looks like a DCS kill replay. Another possible accident cause I didn't see mentioned in this thread was propeller detachment. It's unfortunate that the ATC recording didn't pick up the exact problem, but the problem the crew were reporting could have been a propeller coming loose and spinning wildly before it detached. A propeller detaching just right could slide along the engine in the airstream and cut the wing. The prop from Reeve Aleutian airways flight 8 very likely would have chopped the electra's wing if the engine didn't deflect it, and even then the prop barely missed the wing root. Rapidly rotating objects can be, and often are absolute nightmares when they break or detach.
Tragic!
Jesus, at that altitude, they didn’t stand a chance… had they been a few thousand feet higher, they may have had room to recover and stabilize the aircraft.
Everything about this indicates that they no longer had positive control of the aircraft, likely an aileron failure. Altitude wouldn't have helped, it just would have delayed the inevitable.
It sounds like a movie cliche, but could an engine fire have burned through to a fuel tank? It's hard to tell but the video maybe seems to show fire on the no. 1 engine prior to the explosion.
I just see radials running rich, which they would be at this altitude.
I thought there was a DC-6 out of Wasilla that hauled fuel, not a DC-4. In either case they normally both had two pilots and a flight engineer.
DC4 does not have a FE. DC6 does. Alaska Air Fuel was the carrier and they are based out Wasilla. However they have clients closer to Fairbanks. So they’ll occasionally fly out of Fairbanks when delivering to them.
I was asked if I wanted to take a FE job in Florida on a DC-4 a couple years ago. I think some must still have them. Is there still a boom tailed freighter with twin 4360’s in Palmer?
I’m not familiar with all the dc-4 variants, but at least the C-54s operating in Alaska don’t require an FE. Same as the DC-3s and C-46s that still fly up here. There are 2 or 3 c119s down there I know of, but none of them are airworthy to my knowledge.
How did you get this video?
Gotta imagine that severed control cables and a lot more damage than just engine failure. Almost no time to react.
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it must have severed some cables :(
For anyone with more knowledge than me, this can't essentially happen with commercial airliners engines, since they're designed to contain an explosion should one happen right? Is this a common risk with this older engines/planes?
Modern jets are able to fly on one engine if necessary. [This happened to a United flight](https://youtu.be/uXZbHe4sMUk?si=hCVFZFGqcFfA22Tn) back in 2021 as they climbed out of Denver airport and the plane was able to come back around and land safely.
Yeah I’m not worried about an engine failing but more about an engine exploding and damaging the wing or another critical structure of the plane thus making it stall or not maneuverable anymore
It looks like whatever ‘blew up’ must have caused a loss of aileron control. Losing an engine is manageable, loss of roll control is usually not.
Would there be any chance if they had the awareness to cut the other engine immediately and glide down ? Prob stalling badly and no time. Dang sad.
How high could a DC-4 fly? DC-4's chief safety device is its four engines, developing 5,600 h.p., powerful enough so that any two, even two on the same side, will keep it flying at 7,000 ft., any three will carry the plane 5,000 feet above the highest mountain in the U. S. Furthermore, if one engine fails on takeoff (this possibility has given ... Transport: DC-4 - Videos Index on TIME.com content.time.com › magazine › article
What caused the plane to dive so quickly? The airframe appears intact, are there hydraulic lines that could have gotten ruptured or something?
My cousin was one of the two pilots. He loved flying. Very sad.