Something dented the nose of a Northwest Airlines Boeing 757 in mid-flight Sunday, July 6, 2008. The FAA is exploring several explanations, including structural fatigue and lightning.Others have posited that any jet that struck a bird at such speeds would incur similar damage, but flight data indicates the incident occurred at elevations higher than those at which birds fly. The crew was descending into Tampa International Airport, at 18,000 feet, when the collision took place. No signs of organic residue from any such bird were discovered once the nose was examined later.
After minor repairs, the jet was cleared for use and placed back into service.
Okay, okay... Let's get it out of our systems, shall we? One wonders if this 757 didn't in fact strike a cloaked extraterrestrial drone sent on a recon mission of Florida's themeparks.
4 comments:
Dang! That means the parking isn't any better over the area than in it!
Cullan:
This is an intriguing incident, is it not?
What did that plane hit? A drone, as you suggest, or something else, new to the atmosphere, and tangible, but not too much so?
This should be looked into, semi-seriously.
Rich
I would love to see someone run tests on the structural intergrity of these nose cones. If they are, as I suspect, not designed to handle impacts of any significance, then the slightest tap - especially at 700 mph - might crush it inward like this. Who knows, maybe that "tap" comes from the wind itself, if the material was not sufficiently strong enought to resist the force of the wind. I know, from what has been reported thus, that this cone is made of different materials than the skin of the plane. It may be softer.
I know this was originally written quite awhile back,but...
The B757-200 however has a VMO below 10,000 ft of just 250 knots because the windshield isn't certified to withstand birdstrike above 313 knots.
Above 10,000 ft the 757 is VMO is still limited to 350 knots.
At altitude,
they still go no faster than 610mph.
Those nosecones have plenty of engineering experience behind them to survive normal usage&events-
they are obviously critical to the operational aerodynamic integrity of the design.
The original C-130's in the early '50' looked like B-29's at first-
A symetrically rounded fuselage with no nosecone at all.
The distinctive nosecone was added to accommodate radar,
Thus the famous nose job.
Also,the C-130 radar is capable of permanently blinding people on the ground if turned on while not flying.
If you find these things interesting,
you can look up transonic airflow and
you'll begin to understand how portions of an aircraft's surfaces are already achieving supersonic velocities before the entire aircraft actually does.
Believe it or not,
parts of a Top Fuel Dragster's surfaces are going transonic during a race because of massive aerodynamic inefficiency even though the vehicle is going less than half of the Speed of Sound at its fastest operational moments....
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