Inanimate Objects with Personalities…


Peter put up a post HERE about robots, and another HERE in response to Raven Prometheus, who put up a post on robots HERE.  Now if I haven’t confused you enough…


Stepping back 38 years we had a P-3 Orion C/S YD-10 that was an alright bird, flew well, no real quirks; until…


In 1973 it had a mid-air with a C-130 off Guam during a search and rescue flight (Both acft made it back to Guam successfully).  It was determined that there was ‘minimal’ damage (only 8 feet of the left wing missing), so a trim, lap patch, draining tank 4 and bringing in a test crew would allow the aircraft to be ferried back to Alameda for repairs…


I know the pilot who flew the ferry flights (Guam to Hawaii, Hawaii to Alameda) fairly well, and many years later he admitted he STILL has nightmares about those two flights (more on that later)…


So in late 1974 we get the airplane back, new wing tip, and a four foot wide, ten foot long bandaid painted on the underside of the wing.  Now this airplane hasn’t flown an operational flight in almost two years, and equipment needs to be upgraded, and there are acceptance flights, etc. (e.g. a LOT of work to get the bird back up to ASW capable).  So the squadron check pilot gathers a min crew to go fly the acceptance, and off they go; only to return with smoke/fumes in the tube in the middle of takeoff roll after a ‘shudder’ in the airframe…


Nothing found, out they go again, get in the air and everything works fine, so the in check is good…


Our crew draws YD-10 as an ASW trainer/ASW acceptance flight a few days later,  and off we go, no problems on take-off, climb out, transit, descent to onsta.  Down at altitude we power up all the equipment and the airplane literally shudders like a dog shaking off water…


Declare an emergency, climb out, run for base with everybody in parachutes just in case. Smoke and fumes in the tube, activated the fire bill, land safely, nothing found…


Turn back around, go back out, and lose the pitot static system on takeoff (e.g. no airspeed, VSI, important instruments)…  Come back around and land, nothing found again…


Jump forward a month, another crew takes the airplane and again it shudders like a dog, the crew comes off station and 15 minutes out of base, the aileron power pack in the service center explodes…  


Crew makes it back and lands safely, again no proximate cause found to a one in a million failure…


We take the airplane on deployment to SE Asia in 1975, fly the hell out of it (at one point the acft is never shut down for four days), and no problems.  Another crew takes YD-10 for a MAP track off Vietnam, three hours out the airplane shudders and the crew tries to turn around and finds the rudder is locked up…  They used differential power to turn the airplane around and fly back to Cubi, only to find the rudder is fine on the descent and landing…


Nothing found…


Lastly, we took off for a similar MAP track, descended onstation (200 feet off the water, 200kts). As we burned off fuel, we would shut down engines to conserve fuel, started to do that, and the airplane shuddered again… Pilots kicked off the autopilot and were hand flying the airplane as #1 was shut down, and we got a prop failed to feather, prop overspeed…


NOT a good situation, as the prop continues to rotate albiet much slower than the other props, and is now disconnected from the engine, and is putting one hellva lot of drag on the airframe.  Not to mention the massive amounts of vibration caused by said prop…


Which popped circuit breakers throughout the airplane, cutting comms with homeplate…


We never got high enough to bail out (1000 feet), and never got more than 5kts above stall speed, but the pilots managed to hand fly the bird all the way back to Cubi and land it successfully…


(Note: another crew in another squadron had a similar situation, which ended up with them crashing and loss of 5 personnel)


So yes, inanimate objects CAN have a personality… I’m firmly convinced YD-10 ‘knew’ when things were going to happen, and warned the crew with that shudder…


And the pilot who flew it back to Alameda? He told me in 1998 he STILL has nightmares about looking out the side window and not seeing a wingtip, knowing he was going to crash and all of them would die.  He also told me the airplane did shudder occasionally on both flights, for no apparent reason, and the airplane actually flew ‘normally’ with that much wing missing and no aileron on that side…


And no we didn’t name her…

Comments

Inanimate Objects with Personalities… — 19 Comments

  1. I’m not a pilot, but I’d have suggested that they get a different crew after the 3rd time. Don’t care that you “couldn’t find what was wrong”.

  2. Was the SAR for a Buff that did not quite make it back to Anderson and the crew having to be picked up by a sub?

  3. How many replacement pilots seats had to be installed after the originals were removed from somebody’s crack?

  4. Flew in lots of different carrier based jet A/C, and all of them had a distinct personality. We had one Prowler that hated night flights. took us over 15 attempts in a row to launch her in to the dark. Popped CB’s, generator failures, hydraulic failures, etc. etc. Each one different, but downed the A/C. Finally flew her on a couple of day flights and after that she reluctantly accepted flying at night.

  5. BP- We just shrugged and went on… sigh…

    SS- It was a job 🙂

    Jon- I believe you are correct, I wasn’t on that det.

    DB- None, but a couple of folks quit flying… 🙂

    Rev- Nope, never found the cause, as it was ‘intermittent’, and lots of sign offs said ‘turbulence encounter’- My dyin ass…

    Mikey- Oh yeah… 🙂 Another squadron had a bird called Fire Four, it hated to fly at night too, and would catch fire every flight, but ONLY on night flights…

  6. Inanimate objects are the creation of man and often they don’t seem to be as inanimate as logic would tell us they should be.

    I’ve had ambulances with personalities too. Or maybe they were just haunted by the souls of the people who died in them. One ambulance had a particular affection for me. The day after I turned it in to get a new truck it literally fell apart in the garage. It never ran again.

    Computers are the worst. I think we’ve unknowingly created artificial intelligence and a malevolent one at that.

  7. Yep, I’ve worked on systems we built that would act up for the customer, only to run fine when I arrived.
    One customer said they were going to get a full-color, life-sized cardboard cut-out of me, and bring it out whenever that particular system acted up.

  8. May not have had a name for her, but I’ll suspect you had a few trenchant phrases to describe her… as did the maintenance techs.

    I love my plane, and she’s been pretty forgiving for all I’ve put her through while learning to be a better pilot and bringing her down. She does have a few quirks, though – her wash-in/wash-out is so drastic that you can see the difference in the set of the wings when walking up to her, rudder tab as adjusted as safe to get… and yet she still won’t fly straight. Four thousand miles with the yoke cranked over slightly, right where it’s a nice hand rest, and I’m just broken in while she’s flying as she pleases.

  9. TOTW- Yep, dead on, on both counts 🙂

    drjim- Don’t get me started on systems…LOL

    Wing- I remember your saying that, but she still flys, and so do you! I flew on a Connie in 71-72 that flew 3 degrees left wing down, six degrees nose to the right to fly straight and level, and no about of re-rigging could ever get that out…

  10. The system I ran at work had a habit of developing a critical fault an hour before quitting time. On Fridays.

    I liked the OT, but not the cancelling of plans and loss of sleep involved in fixing the damn thing.

  11. Taking off one fine day, we had a cargo fire master caution. There was NOTHING in the back cargo bay. (which wasn’t acessable from up front) The bottles were shot off, still the light remained on. it was repo flight with just a few guys bumming a ride back to home base. So I didn’t really think we had a fire. So I didn’t declare an emergency but did ask to come back for the approach.

    Controller comes back “Aircraft on fire, you’re number 8 for the approach, expect extensive delays”.

    I declared an emergency

    That fine day I was happy to land with all the parts I took off with.

  12. TOTW- yep… funny about those…

    Brigid- I remember your telling that story 🙂 We did that one day at NAS Memphis, except the tower could SEE the fire as we did a 90/270 back to the runway with three turning and one burning…

    Andy- We just drank a lot 🙂

  13. What? Didn’t you have chaplains on base?
    I’ve often said a prayer or three (in Latin, just to make sure) as I’ve worked on computers. Just to make sure they’ll operate.
    Am sure a priest would have been happy to have blessed the craft.