Posted by admin in Ironical, isn’t it? But wait, we’re not talking about how incompetent NASA was when it happened — because it was a planned crash!
NASA, back in 1984 started a program called Control Impact Demonstration, in which they tried to determine ways to enhance the survivability of an airplane’s occupants in a crash. As part of the experiment, they mixed the airplane fuel with a chemical called antimisting kerosene (AMK), which would allegedly dampen the intensity of the fire after the crash.
Well, that was where they turned out to be wrong. The RC Boeing 720, which was one of the biggest RC planes ever built, crashed and burned — literally. Here’s how it happened:
The left wing touches the ground first:
This causes the aircraft to veer to the right and the fuel leak caused the fire to erupt
The entire plane gradually was engulfed in the fire
The planed kept on burning for over an hour, and the AMK wasn’t successful in controlling the fire. However, in the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) investigators’ estimation, about 23-25% of the aircraft’s passengers could have survived the plane crash.
However, as much a disaster as this experiment was, it did help NASA come up with some important fire safety guidelines for air crafts, including the call for a better landing system compared to the existing one.
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