Looks like one of the restored B-17's coming in for an airshow crashed on landing this morning.

https://www.click2houston.com/news/national/wwiiera-b17-bomber-crashes-at-connecticut-airport

Collins Foundation "909" . Lost an engine on take off and was trying to land. Had 10 paying passengers on board plus 3 crew.

With four engines, losing one engine can't be all there is to this, particularly since they also apparently couldn't control it enough to reach the runway.

they had just taken off, never a good time to lose power when your in that transition zone...

74OA said:

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With four engines, losing one engine can't be all there is to this, particularly since they also apparently couldn't control it enough to reach the runway.

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Sounds to me like they didn't have enough power to control, turn, and land. even in a 3 engine scenario, you are relying on your momentum to gain control of the aircraft. If you have an up angle attitude, your momentum is dependent upon full thrust, and the time it takes to level and control the plane is significant.

you NEVER want to lose thrust right after takeoff, especially when flying a multi engine led-sled. In an urban environment, there is no where to safely land except the runway you came from, and you most likely won't have the thrust required to recover, turn, and land. Thats why you see way more crashes on takeoff than you do landing (where a loss of thrust is the cause).

I stumbled across this update on youtube.

Very sobering report. My son and I flew on the 909 when it made the annual Collins Foundation trip to College Station.

Another update

My wife's uncle just bought the B-17 housed in Galveston (I think). He is looking to take possession in early Jan.

He is a very experienced pilot and his comment - if I understood him right - was that they sacrificed air speed on the go around and stalled at landing. They could have pushed the engines more and they let the gear down too early. His thought was there was a lot more thrust to give before causing a roll and they should have maintained a higher cruising speed and made a longer go-round.

In coming in for a landing, they were not able to generate enough speed on descent and it led to a stall at the runway. When they stalled, they thrusted and caused the lean which caused a loss of control.

Had they pushed the remaining 2 engines a little on the go round to generate some air speed before descent they would have likely survived.

In other words, a two engine loss should not have been catastrophic regardless of how high they were.

I just thought it was an interesting conversation. I didnt get to watch the whole video, and he may have said that in the video, but just wanted to add that convo.

Very interesting video, thanks for posting.

Another take on the report



Absolutely mind-blowing to see the degree of both arrogance and negligence on display here. You used to see this kind of thing back in the horse and buggy days of the warbird movement, but in in this day and age it's beyond belief. The condition of the magnetos was shocking - No wonder there was no run-up prior to takeoff, as if they had performed one, the engines would have cutoff when they cycled through the bad mags. Then on top of that, once the plane was airborne and everything started to go south, the Pilot proceeded to make every wrong decision possible. Yet another case of the proverbial snowball rolling downhill. Feel extremely bad for the families of the passengers who died having to hear all this.

Hope Collings has deep pockets, as the insurance company will now be completely off the hook for this one (the passenger waivers are null and void as well).