Sea Fury crash landing!

[Comrade Jenkens]

Wondering if anyone else head about the Hawker Sea Fury crash landing at the air show yesterday? Luckily the pilot is fine.

Is the aircraft able to be repaired does anyone know? They aren't exactly common anymore.

The Sea Fury is one of my favourite British aircraft.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-28594569

edit: RN not RAF

Edited August 1, 2014 by Comrade Jenkens

[andrew123]

Wondering if anyone else head about the Hawker Sea Fury crash landing at the air show yesterday? Luckily the pilot is fine.

Is the aircraft able to be repaired does anyone know? They aren't exactly common anymore.

The Sea Fury is one of my favourite RAF aircraft.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-28594569

A darn shame, but I'm pretty sure they'll fix 'er up soon. Can't have too many vintages in the air nowadays.

[jwenting]

damage looks from those photos to not be too severe, but it's impossible to tell any structural damage of course.

I'd be surprised if they make her air worthy again, she'll probably be restored to non-flying museum condition and put up for display somewhere.

[MightyDarkStar]

Looks a bit like a scrape to the underside and a wrecked prop but it should be fine!

[Comrade Jenkens]

I'd be surprised if they make her air worthy again, she'll probably be restored to non-flying museum condition and put up for display somewhere.

I really hope that they restore her to flying condition. To lose an aircraft that's been flying since almost WWII would be sad.

[Seret]

Wondering if anyone else head about the Hawker Sea Fury crash landing at the air show yesterday?

It was on the news, so yes.

The Sea Fury is one of my favourite RAF aircraft.

Someone from the Fleet Air Arm is going to get cross with you in a minute.

It was a wheels-up landing at fairly low speed, so it should be repairable. Might be a lot of work if they have to rip the guts of it out, depends how much damage has been done to the underside. Repairing one of these old warbirds generally means making a lot of the parts from scratch, so it'll probably be neither cheap nor quick.

[mike9606]

I sure hope they get thise aircraft repaired and flying again. It would be a shame to see it no longer fly. At least the pilot is fine.

[Comrade Jenkens]

Someone from the Fleet Air Arm is going to get cross with you in a minute.

sorry Royal Navy

[jwenting]

Looks a bit like a scrape to the underside and a wrecked prop but it should be fine!

yes, but there's no way from those photos to judge the internal structural damage, overstressed main struts and structural members.

Once had a car crash, car looked fine, just a dented rear panel. When I got to the shop to have it fixed a few days later (weekend...) the verdict was rather different.

Bent rear axle, broken rear wheel, fuel tank seriously damaged including its mounting brackets, exhaust system bent out of line, in all the car was beyond repair given its age and value.

Yet from the outside, looking at it, looked like a few bangs with a hammer and maybe some paint would be enough...

[rdfox]

Looks like a routine belly landing. Most likely, if you just jack her up, lower the landing gear, and replace the prop and engine (which will need a full teardown and inspection if not a full rebuild due to the torque loads imposed on it), she'll be airworthy for at least a "hospital" ferry flight immediately.

Propeller-driven warplanes, with those big piston engines, were *tough* birds (so were propliners), because of the vibration environment that they lived in. (On the prototype 707, there were a large number of gauges that didn't work on the early flights without the pilot tapping them any time he wanted to read them, because they were designed for propliners and had lots of resistance in them so that they'd read steady in all that vibration... and on the 707, there was no vibration, so they just tended to stick in place!)

Put it to you this way--I've personally ridden on a B-17 that suffered damage that, by all rights, should have written it off TWICE. The first time was in 1953, when it was used as a target in military effects (i.e., damage) studies at three nuclear tests in Nevada. After being repaired in 1965 (cannibalizing parts from another essentially-destroyed B-17 that was used in the same tests), it was restored to service for use as a water bomber for fighting forest fires... pretty much just in time for the US Forest Service to ban the type from water bomber service; it was then converted back to regular bomber configuration and became an airshow warbird, until, in 1986, a botched landing saw it go through the fence at the end of the runway, tear off its landing gear on a drainage ditch, and lose an engine and the outboard part of the right wing to hitting a telephone pole. While this would have been considered fatal damage and resulted in a trip to the scrapper just ten years before, the owner decided to repair her, and by 1990, the bird was flying again and remains on annual tours around the US to this day.

So yeah, most likely, that Sea Fury will be flying again pretty soon.

[Tommygun]

Well they dug up a P-38 that had been been buried and partly squashed under a glacier for 50 years and got it flying again, so I'm sure they could fix that plane.

It's just how much time and money you want to put into it.

[Seret]

On the prototype 707, there were a large number of gauges that didn't work on the early flights without the pilot tapping them any time he wanted to read them, because they were designed for propliners and had lots of resistance in them so that they'd read steady in all that vibration... and on the 707, there was no vibration, so they just tended to stick in place!

And that's why you get that buzzing sound in modern types as soon as you power on; there are vibrators in the instrument panels.

[Camacha]

Looks a bit like a scrape to the underside and a wrecked prop but it should be fine!

It is going to be pulled apart completely for sure. A while ago, a Husky popped its nose in a ditch. Not much damage, just a bent prop. But because you need to re-establish the air worthiness of all parts, it needed to be totally ripped apart, balanced and put together. It it flying again and still flying, so that is good news, but it takes a lot of work.

This looks a little more serious, so I am sure it needs to do the whole dance too.

Edited August 2, 2014 by Camacha