B-2 "stealth" bomber crash video

[Normy]

This happend on Guam a few months ago:

http://www.avweb.com/avwebflash/exclusivevids/ExclusiveVideo_B2Spirit_StealthBomber_CrashReport_ 198060-1.html

$1.4 billion down the drain. All because of a little water!

-How this works: Basically, when the pilot of this fly-by-wire aircraft puts a motion to a control yoke or pedal or stick, an electrical impulse is sent to several computers. These computers use information from sensors along the fuselage that determine temperature, speed through the air, and the angle of the body of the plane relative to the air going past it along with information from gyroscopes to determine what position the control surfaces should be moved to. In this case, a sensor was apparently full of water, and just after the plane left the ground, the computer received an angle of attack signal that told it that the plane was nosing into the ground. Since this flight computer, like the flight computers on any fly-by-wire airplane, are designed to prevent the pilots from doing something stupid, the plane tried to take control of itself and raise the nose. The problem is that the airplane wasn't going fast enough for the nose of the plane to be this high, and it basically stalled and dropped a wing.

This airplane has this flight control system for a reason; it is "dynamically unstable", meaning that it wants to "porpoise" up and down, and each "porpoise" motion gets larger than the one before it. That basically means that it wants to go out of control, and the box actually flies it because it can only be kept under control by the fast reflexes of a computer. The human just tells the computer what he wants by moving the stick and rudder pedals. Similar though less sophisticated systems are on all modern Airbus aircraft, and on the Boeing 777.

It's always the little details that get you. Ask anyone who races his car!

N!