Talk:Stockport air disaster

BBC News Report and the pilot "looking for a good place to crash"
The BBC article states that the pilot was looking for a good place to put the aircraft down; he missed some park and instead put the aircraft down in an uninhabited area near Stockport city centre. The evidence does not justify this supposition whatsoever. For one thing, the AIB report states that the aircraft was likely uncontrollable after the engines cut out, and might not have been controllable even before then. The first officer died and the captain suffered retrograde amnesia, so we don't know what went on in the cockpit. There isn't the tiniest shred of evidence that the pilot "put the aircraft down" someplace safe. It was likely just coincidence - there are a lot of empty or disused areas around airports and under approach paths (and *that* is often deliberate).

This is such a common urban legend/media foofah. Every time a plane doesn't actually fall out of the sky, some media type comes up and says the pilot was "looking for a place to crash that wouldn't cause injuries on the ground". I don't blame the Wikipedian who put this in at all, because he/she likely didn't have any sources other than the BBC article. I am blaming the BBC for making a supposition not supported by the facts.

I suppose people want to think that in an emergency the first thing the pilot will do is look for a safe place to crash. It makes them feel less worried about an aircraft crashing into their home, school, or place of business. It ain't necessarily so, though; in fact it almost is never so. Aircraft about to crash are more often than not uncontrollable - that's why they crash. -- Charlene 19:40, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Edited to add: The cause of the accident wasn't "pump failure" (boo, BBC, again). It was a design error in the fuel line. -- Charlene 20:02, 30 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Apologies. That would have been my factual faux pas. Thank you for correcting my blathering and making this article respectable. :) Legion 13:56, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

A second's more flight and the plane would catastrophically have taken the tower off Stockport's fine Town Hall and crashed into the facade of the (then) infirmary opposite the Town Hall, blocking the main road between that runs from Manchester through Stockport to the south - AG, Stockport.


 * "From the evidence of two eyewitnesses who saw the aircraft just before the crash it was clear the pilot-in-command deliberately cut the power very shortly before impact and deliberately put the aircraft down on what was the only pocket handkerchief of relatively open space immediately before tall blocks of flats, the town hall, the police station, and Stockport Infirmary" - ICAO circular 107-AN/81 (AIB report, 1968)  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.149.53.255 (talk) 19:33, 31 October 2020 (UTC)

Additional cause of this crash
I remember seeing a BBC program about this crash. It reported on the findings of the inquiry. It said that there was an additional reason for the crash.

Apparently, the engine speeds were shown in the cockpit on two dials, one for each wing. Each dial had two hands, one for each engine and each labelled with the engine number.

This had been serviced, and a mistake had been made so that engine 3 was connected to the hand marked "4", and engine 4 to hand "3".

I think it was engine 4 that was starved of fuel. The pilot saw from the dial that engine 3 had stopped, so he switched off / feathered engine 3. Now both engines on the right wing were out. (This would explain why engine 4 was windmilling.)

As part of the investigation, they tried flying a similar aircraft with engines 3 and 4 both out, and discovered that the aircraft could not be flown properly.

Now, I mention all this because it is an interesting story. Also, because I want to apply the moral to setting up a computer cluster. I want to avoid the possibility of one computer failing and a different one being taken out for service by mistake, thereby bringing down the cluster.

Does anyone know more about this? Mm67 11:44, 4 March 2007 (UTC)


 * You are correct, the internal gearing within one of the dual rev-counters had been inadvertently mis-assembled so that each engine rev-counter output read out on the wrong indicator needle however the fault had been corrected some time earlier by swapping the connectors so that the 'wrong' engine fed the 'right' needle hence cancelling-out the effect.


 * Excellent 1968 BBC North documentary on the accident here:


 * BTW, the pilot performing the test flight of a BM Argonaut in the linked video (starting from 22:30) is D.P. "Dai" Davies, author of Handling The Big Jets. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.144.50.152 (talk) 09:15, 25 October 2020 (UTC)

External links modified
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I have just added archive links to 1 one external link on Stockport air disaster. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive http://web.archive.org/web/20090628134445/http://www.stockportexpress.co.uk:80/news/special_reports/305003 to http://www.stockportexpress.co.uk/news/special_reports/305003

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