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featherwinglove-blog · 12 years

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The Autumn Rain

Post date: 2012 April 6

Today, I looked up Air France 447, the Airbus A330's first fatality accident. On 2009 June 1, this aircraft mysteriously crashed into the sea... I already knew the details of Colgan 3407, a Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 twin prop that crashed into Buffalo, NY on 2009 February 12. The details of Air France 447 have come to light only recently, since it was very difficult to find the recorders ("black boxes") in the three mile deep sea. Two very different aircraft, two very different places of the Earth, two very different flight conditions, two very different investigations, yet full of astonishing similarity.

1. Both aircraft were initially thought to be claimed by icing.

2. It actually turned out that both aircraft crashed because their crews were maintaining (much more successfully in Air France 447's case) wings-level stalls from their intended altitudes to the surface.

3. Both plane crashes have attached themselves by coincidence with the Eternal Tears of Sorrow song, Tears of Autumn Rain and my own fictional story of a plane crash that got the name Autumn Rain from a different song.

Before these events began, I did have a sufficient understanding of aerodynamics and flying that if I were a passenger of either of these flights and had either visual or instrumental information about the situation, I would have died very confused and upset about the crew's behaviour and flying. This knowledge is also applicable to airborne featherwings and birds.

On 2009 February 1, the strange mantle of Featherwing Love descended on my shoulders as I had the first vision of the featherwings flying while listening to the Cascada song Everytime We Touch. The pair had just been married and were messing around in the air, dancing and playing. I began to understand how these wings worked. (Note: It is an Ayashi no Ceres AMV because this exact video was what I was listening to when I got the vision.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gS9eMpRJG5c

On 2009 February 10, I came up with a story concept that a featherwing being would be on an airliner as it crashed into a mountainside. The aircraft was actually brought down by icing in a storm on the leading edge of an dreadfully cold high pressure system. All those who survived the plane's impact soon succumbed to the -45degC weather that night, according to history. Actually, one human survived the impact nearly unscathed, the plane's aerodynamicist happened to be on a business trip. He saw the problem that downed the aircraft and had already come up with a simple modification to prevent a similar tragedy, so he was motivated to survive. The featherwing, a lady, survived the impact, but with major injuries; they wouldn't be life threatening under more normal circumstances. The man is quite astonished to encounter this injured pseudo-angel with her wings out, lamenting how the aircraft died, as featherwings are natural aerodynamicists. With the man, wet from the freezing rain that downed the aircraft tucked under her wings for warmth, they briefly co-miserate the demise of the aircraft I later named Autumn Rain. The featherwing woman can't build a shelter because of her injuries. The man can't because they have no clothes adequate to protecting him from the cold long enough for him to do so. Fortunately, the featherwing is a virgin and has the option of sharing her wings with him, transforming him into an uninjured featherwing who can easily build them a shelter...

On 2009 Febuary 12, Colgan 3407, an aircraft very similar to the one I had thought of two days earlier, with the same number of people on board (55), crashes in Buffalo, New York, initially thought to be brought down by wing icing, the same cause as I had thought of. Despite this coincidence, I thought nothing of it; my eyes were closed to the idea that this coincidence had any significance to me.

On 2009 February 18, Eternal Tears of Sorrow released the single, Tears of Autumn Rain. I did not know this at the time. (The original click was uploaded on 2009 February 4, and I can no longer find it.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtMUp3FLcxY

Sometime in March, before I had adopted the discipline of dating everything that I write, I noticed the resemblance between the relationship of the story's characters and the Cascada song Dream on Dreamer and thus named the aircraft after the opening line, "The Autumn Rain is falling down / through the clouds, hits the ground..." By this point, I had purchased both Cascada albums that were available at the time (they shortly afterwards released a third, Evacuate The Dance Floor, the title song of which described a different story I had written before I encountered it.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFtEIfQ6HBQ

I lost the original encounter record, but I'm pretty sure it was on 2009 May 26 that I first searched for "Autumn Rain" on Youtube, and thus found Tears of Autumn Rain. This was the third coincident encounter, and so I was just starting to take notice of the coincident encounters (which now number about forty, perhaps I should make a concerted effort to dredge my notes and come up with an exact number.) Thus, I encountered Tears of Autumn Rain, which describes the plane crash story astonishingly well, with exception to the line, "Words of blood on shore" because my story was about an inland plane crash.

On 2009 June 1, Air France 447, an Airbus A330 with 228 people on board crashes into the South Atlantic. I'm still getting over it.

In the case of Colgan 3407, the aircraft's recorders were recovered almost immediately. The pilots turned out to be rather dim bulbs in the box, as they didn't note how the lowering of the landing gear introduced a drag they needed to compensate for by either lowering the nose or increasing power. The airspeed went down until the stall alarms went off, at which point they unwisely pulled back on the stick, putting the plane into a proper stall, which they maintained despite the stick pushers and shakers. They maintained this stall until shortly before impact 25 seconds later.

The Air France 447 investigation, on the other hand, had little to go on for the next two years, but it was suspected that the pitot tubes had iced up and caused the autopilot and autothrust programs to switch off. A skilled crew could easily save the aircraft using standard procedures (flying with throttle and pitch, which I've done in Orbiter), but it was soon apparent that if the pitot tubes iced up and caused messages, the average crew might take too long to respond. I learned this from the BBC show Lost today. A skilled US Air Force Colonel was only barely able to recover from the incipient spin that could have resulted, losing 19000ft of altitude. If the crew hadn't taken control of the plane immediately, and the aircraft went into a banking stall, it is unlikely to recover. (Note: both types are designed so that they cannot develop spins from banking stalls or incipient spins, so if it happens while the pilot is AFK, the aircraft will recover into a dive. This happened to the Dash 8 Q400 when the pilots gave up and let go of the controls.)

Unfortunately, after the recorders from Air France 447 were recovered, it turned out that her crew was just as dim as that of Colgan 3407, which scares me. A stall warning sounds due to a sudden downdraft. This kicked off the automatic systems and the pilot took the controls. The captain was on break at the time, but rushed back to the cockpit. The autothrust program had left the throttles just a little bit on the low side for maintaining airspeed, and thus the same thing happened as to 3407, the airspeed dropped until the aircraft stalled. After she stalled, the autopilot program began to reject the pitot tube data, leading to the telemetered messages that led investigators to believe they had iced. It was doing this because at high angles of attack, the wind coming at the pitot is no longer direct enough to produce a reliable airspeed indication. The crew then maintained the stall and wings level until they crashed three and a half minutes later. What is odd is that the stall warnings were intermittent, so it appears that the crew may not have believed they were in a stall, or may have believed that they had recovered from it. Why I still call them just as dim as the Colgan 3407 pilots is because the altimeter was spinning backwards at some 10,000ft/min, and I'd be rather suspicious if that were happening while my nose was 16deg above the horizon, even if no warnings were sounding at all.

This is not how the aircraft in my story crashed. The Autumn Rain crashed due to a real icing problem jamming her ailerons. Its controls were directly linked, so the stick quit moving left and right. Her crew dies pounding on the stick trying to break it loose. I later read of a Dash 8 aircraft having a similar (not identical) problem in 1996. By this point, I had already decided that the Autumn Rain crash was a historical event in Featherwing Love's main plot, setting it in this time period, which works out wonderfully.

I felt a need to put this post up to honor the 283 real casualties, and the message that cries out to me from their blood.

#storyvoice #story #aircraft #accident #music #Autumn Rain #featherwing #love #crash #investigation #Air France #Colgan #icing #stall #spin #aileron #autopilot

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