re: 40 years ago today, July 9, 1982, Pan Am flight 759 crashed

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Not long after that, another plane flew into a hotel at the end of the other runway. Local lore said the liner was empty of passengers. Apparently the trainer pulled back the throttle to fake a power loss and trainee could not recover

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That was in 1967

LINK

My favorite microburst gif:

Plus they were full tanks, so maximum fuel to spread a huge fire.

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Grandpa was on that flight I wasn’t born yet, dad was about 18 at the time

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Pretty sure i knew your dad.

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As a result of this crash and others, a lot of research went into wind shear/downburst weather science and pilots are better equipped to avoid it which is why it is a much rarer occurrence now. Here’s a good write-up from 2014 about it.

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We get a lot of training in wind shear avoidance and recovery and the aircraft can detect it and give flight guidance.

One of my first simulator sessions in the aircraft I’m currently flying, I was taking off at night from JFK and after rotation I was climbing out and at about 200 ft, the wind shear warning and guidance popped up on my primary flight display and the aural warning, “Wind shear! Wind shear! Wind shear!” I pushed the throttles to max power and kept the pitch in the “yellow box” that gives you pitch guidance and kept the wings level as best I could, but the plane would not climb and started descending slowly despite full power and pitch at 10-15 degrees up. The slow descent continued until we crashed into the ground. It’s very realistic in a full motion simulator.

My sim partner says, “I ain’t gonna lie, I was legit scared.”

So after we crashed, the sim instructor is laughing and says that he wanted to try out the “severe wind shear” setting on the sim since he had never done it before. They normally use the “moderate wind shear” setting, so we were his guinea pigs. He said that I did everything right but at that low altitude and severe wind shear, the odds are against you.

Moral of this story is, don’t take off or land into a thunderstorm or severe rain shower.

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I was in position on runway 10 next to go, I can be heard/read on the cvr/atc recording/transcript

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Damn.

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Same thing happened in Dallas.

Delta Air Lines Flight 191 - August 2, 1985

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My wife, my mother-in-law and I were going to Ft. Worth to the museums on that day. We were in my 69 Chrysler 300 convertible (a land barge). We crossed north of DFW Airport and the weather was incredibly bad - windy with very heavy rain. Later, we heard about the crash on the radio. Based on timing, 191 was about one minute behind our crossing the north end of the airport.

My uncle was a captain for Delta on his way to work that day and said his pickup downshifted to keep speed on the spillway due to the wind.

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My understanding is it was the first fly-by-wire aircraft, too.

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I think the Viper may have been the first, A-320 claims to have been the first airliner, POS compared to its Boeing counterparts, imho

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150 feet is a lot. Only sounds low compared to cruising altitude.

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That's a lot of energy hitting the ground. Nothing good can happen.