One of the most AMAZING aviation stories ever told | TACA flight 110

This video is presented along with a flow of curiosity about your special offer. Use the link in the description below and the promo code. Mentor pilot. A Boeing 737-300 is on the final descent towards New Orleans International Airport in the United States, at around 16,000 feet. The crew inadvertently enters a Category 4 storm. The turbulence is so immense that the crew can hardly They can read the instruments in front of them and suddenly they encounter about 30 seconds of intense, heavy hail. The hail storm is so intense that it sets fire to both engine numbers one and number two and leaves the plane without any power source.

The crew is working f

ever

ishly to start at least one of the engines, but initially to no avail. What is about to happen is one of the

most

extraordinary

stories

in

aviation

history. is the story of taka airlines

flight

110, be sure to stay tuned for this one. The incredible story of Taka Airlines Flight 110 took place on May 24, 1988. The

flight

originated in San Salvador in El Salvador and then the crew had flown over. towards Belize City in Belize and the incident occurred on the second leg of the flight the leg between Belize and New Orleans in the United States the plane they flew was a new Boeing 737 300 that had been delivered to attack the airlines just a few weeks Before the incident on the flight there were 38 passengers on board and seven crew members in the cockpit of the flight.

Captain Carlos Dardano is 29 years old but had managed to accumulate the impressive figure of thirteen thousand four hundred and ten hours on the day of the accident along with him was the first officer Dionysio López. He also had a lot of experience with over 12,000 hours and there was also a third crew member, a line training captain named Arturo Solei, and the reason he was there was to not do a Carlos and Junicio online check , but he was there only to check the functioning of this new aircraft because when a new variant of aircraft is introduced into an existing fleet it is very important to check how it is working and how the standard operating procedures etc. are applied. is working fine, so this makes a lot of sense now that this was not the first day this flight crew had flown this particular aircraft; in fact, they had been assigned to fly the exact same route the day before, but the day before they had encountered a problem with the planes when they landed after having flown from San Salvador to Belize, when they tried to start the engines again for their second flight. towards New Orleans, they just couldn't start the engines, they tried to start finishing number two, but no matter what.

They did, the engines just wouldn't start, so they shot the plane down. They had to cancel the flight for all the passengers and they called engineering, and engineering checked it and what they found was that this plane, even though it was a brand name. new it had been in the desert waiting for delivery for a while and when it did it had died and the battery didn't like it very much so it wasn't in good condition so what engineering did was just take the battery out old and replaced it with a new battery and this will become a really important point in what is about to happen.

The crew was very excited to fly this new plane because it had some really cool new features. It had an external accelerator. which they weren't used to using, it had good lateral navigation, vertical navigation and all these interesting autopilot modes that they weren't used to having on the 77 200 that they normally flew anyway on the date of the incident that the crew had prepared for They flew just as usual and were aware that they were flying to an area where they could encounter possible storms, but they took off normally from the Belize City airport, climbed to their cruising altitude of 35,000 feet, and while crews were augmented, the first officer asked the captain.

Carlos whether or not it would be possible for him to invite passengers into the cabin just to show off this eighth wonder of the world, which was the 737 300. Of course, this was in 1988, so it was perfectly fine, they opened the door. They let the passengers in, they took photos, they looked at the cabin and it shows how proud they were and it also shows the kind of zeitgeist that I love now, before I continue, I just want to give you a little bit. There are some details about one of the main characters in this story, which is Captain Carlos Dardano, so if you want to look for a real seat of the pants and pretty suitable South American pilots, Carlos would be him, okay, he had grown up flying, came.

From a family of pilots, so he was flying since he was a little boy, he got his licenses as soon as possible. He started flying commercially at a very young age, so he was able to accumulate 13,000 hours at the tender age of 29, but he came back. In 1979, nine years before this incident, he had been in a very serious incident involving a small bagpiper archer flying near San Salvador. After landing, he was caught in crossfire between the gorilla and the regular El Salvador army. and a sniper had shot him, the bullet entered the back of his cheek and exited through his left eye, leaving him completely blind in his left eye.

Now you might be wondering how is it possible that you are allowed to fly commercially with only one eye and it wasn't easy right, you had to go out and do what we call functional test flights because you were already flying commercially, they didn't want to take away your livelihood so you had the opportunity to leave and they showed that he could still fly perfectly with one eye and after a period of about three months they had allowed him to keep his medical class one not only in El Salvador, where he was originally from, but also in the United States because it was based. in New Orleans at the time, so I needed the FAA to approve it as well and they got it right, so anyway I was flying on a special type of medical leave at the time of the incident, as the crew was now taking approaching its peak.

As the passengers were taken out of the cabin, they began to breathe as they approached New Orleans and they also began to see these storms appear on the weather radar. Well, now the weather radar on the 737 300 was state of the art, really good, because of the radar and the The way your weather radar generally works is that it has a radar antenna that is located in the nose cone, like in the front of the plane, and that radar antenna will send out radar pulses correctly and the way it works is that the radar pulses then bounce off things like precipitation, so rain, hail and snow, and the Weather radar measures how many radar pulses come back and how long it took them to come back and based on that a picture can be formed of how much precipitation is ahead of you and also how far away it is and it shows that on our navigation screens, well, on the navigation screen you will see an image that is very similar to what you see or when you watch the weather on the news on television, so very light rain will be shown. like green, it gets a little more rain or precipitation, it turns amber and then very heavy precipitation is red, the areas that are free of any type of precipitation are usually black, so the plane started descending to the left 35 At about 30,000 feet they entered a cloud layer that covered them just before entering the clouds, they did what we always do: they turned the engine start switches to continuous, this means that, instead of which we normally do during the cruise, they started to turn it off, which is when the type of flame inside the combustion chambers and the jet engines are feeding well, so out of extreme caution, we changed it to continuous, which means that the igniter inside the jet engine keeps turning on continuously, that's to make sure or you know, safeguard against fire as we get into potential icing conditions, so that's what they did, they put the starch switches on They continued and they turned on the engine and their eyes for the same reason, but now that they are descending towards New Orleans they see that there are at least two big storms ahead of them, they see these two red cells, so they contact traffic control Houston air route and they ask them to detour east to avoid these storms that Houston traffic control gives them. the cares to do it basically say you can detour based on your own kind of recognition and just tell us when you're coming back to New Orleans, so that's what they did, they're looking at these thunderstorms and they see that between the thunderstorms.

It seems there is a black area that they could safely navigate and return to New Orleans. Another thing you need to understand about weather radars is that they are not perfect, and just like with any type of obstacle if you have a very strong storm in front of you, then a lot of these radar pulses that are being broadcast will come back to the radar, that is what gives you the kind of red radar return, but another function of that is that you won't be able to see what's behind this red cell, that's what we call a radar shadow, and that happens behind mountains, so For example, behind large buildings or, in this case, behind really s

ever

e thunderstorms, which means if you have like in this case they had two large storm cells. and then a black area that is between and behind it, might give you a false sense of security, but the only reason you don't see anything behind these radar echoes is simply because something called attenuation is the weakening of the radar. cue for the crew to now turn between these two cells and as soon as they get between them they realize their mistake, okay it turns out that behind these two initial cells there is a much larger red blood cell and now they are completely surrounded , they have cells. both left and right and fly into this storm as they do so, they al

most

immediately encounter moderate to severe turbulence.

The turbulence is so strong that they reported that they could not see the instruments in front of them. They had trouble reading the seconds on their instruments. then they get into very heavy hail, well 30 seconds of severe hail and heavy rain, the rain is expected to be equivalent to about 30 inches per hour or about 25 to 30 grams of water per square meter, just to give you an idea how much. It's water, and as they go into this hail storm, both engines shut down. At this point the burning engines go out, why do they go out? Have they not been tested to be able to drink a lot of water?

You would be absolutely right to ask that question, in fact the 56 cfm engines that were installed on the 737 300 have been certified to take in almost four times the amount of water that the engines were expected to be ingesting at the time and are still continuing. consuming. operate, however, it turns out that there has been a crucial mission when it comes to the testing and certification of these engines because the engineers who did this test assumed that water and hail would act the same way, so they never tested how to do it . this jet engine would actually work if there was hail involved and it turns out that while they were basically using fire hoses and you know, they were shot directly into the engine during testing and certification, the water would hit the fan blades and be spun into the bypass duct and away from the engine core, but the hail did not work that way, rather it worked more like a bullet that followed a ballistic path, so as the water was centrifuged, these hailstones entered and especially resulted in the bottom. power settings when the fan is not spinning at such a high speed it could pass between the fan blades and directly into the compressor stage of the engine and then basically saturate that stage into the combustion chamber and shut down the engine so this is what happened on this flight and it happened on both engines simultaneously and when this happened you have to understand that generally the airplane takes all of its electrical power from the two engine driven generators that are connected to the engines, so now They are in severe and strong turbulence.

Both engines shut down, this means the cabin essentially goes black, except for the multitude of warnings. The Master Corsa warnings that they are receiving the main instrumentation in front of the pilot also disappear and this is where I wanted to pay close attention because what is Captain Carlos. to do now is something that all pilots should learn from. He continues to fly the plane even though he is originally very, very disoriented. This strong turbulence will very quickly make you lose sight of what is above and below, especially since you don't have any. visual references look around this cabin to see what you can rely on and on the 737 300, when it loses electrical power from the generator, it goes to its backup source, which is the battery, remember the battery they just changedthe day before the battery was built. to handle some of the most critical systems, okay, that means they have backup instruments, you have a radio, you have some warnings that are still working, you have some emergency lights for the cabin and some other systems, okay, the 737 It does not have ramire turbine because you can still fly the plane which is in the flight controls it is connected by cables to its respective rudder surface so you can use only battery power and the battery installed in the 727 300 will last about 30 minutes like this that captain carlos is looking at sees his small holding horizon and uses that to make sure the plane keeps the wings level and at the correct speed, that's all he's doing at this point and this goes to the crucial avian communication and navigate that we always have to follow when we are flying airplanes well and it isProbably if I had been overcome by turbulence from the loss of both engines at this point I could have ended up in a very bad attitude that I potentially couldn't escape from later on, but it continues flying and that's the important thing.

Now, while he does this, he calls his colleagues and tells them that I have lost confidence in both engines. At first they don't even believe him, right? They think he's joking, but he shows them that, you know, he advances the trust levels twice. without getting any kind of response, so he tells them to try to fix it, try to get one of the engines going, but at this point the industry didn't believe it was possible for two engines to go out at the same time, which meant that Until this point there was no loss of confidence in the checklist for both engines, so the first officer along with the jump training captain now had to attempt to start the engines from his basic knowledge of the aircraft and the checklist. of existing engine failure checks so that He tried to do this, well, Captain Carlos concentrated on flying the plane, his two colleagues are now trying to start the engines and they initially tried to start it with something called a windmill start, which is basically when you are using the speed of the plane. the air that is being pushed by the speed of the plane to spin the engine port, both the fan and the compressors to start the engine, but it turns out that it just doesn't work right, there is just too much water inside the engine.

It is possible that the speed was not high enough. It usually takes over 300 knots to do this, so they realize they need something more. They need the auxiliary power units, the APU, the small engine in the back of the plane. So this is happening at about 16,000 feet and as they descend to about 12,000 feet, they reach and turn on the apu. The apu starts up when they have it running, it means they now get all electrical power restored, so they get their primary instrumentations back, so at this point they also have the ability to call air traffic control , but they can call to tell them that they have lost all control of the air driver is extremely helpful.

Well, they begin to give potential vectors to a landing site that includes several lakes in the area, includes an interstate highway like an airfield that is a little closer than the new orleans international airport, but captain carlos quickly realizes that With the type of turbulence, remember that you are still inside the storm here. They are losing altitude very quickly and will not be able to catch up with any of them. His colleagues are now working to try to use the apu to start the engines and they managed to, in fact, managed to finish off number one and ng.

Number two started like on the egt starting to ramp up but it turns out the engines are too saturated with water so even though they have the engines on they can't get them to run properly as captain Carlos is now asking the engines To trust what happens is that the engines immediately overheat, the exhaust gas temperature becomes too high and it actually melts some parts of the turbines in the engines causing damage to the engines. He gets an overheating warning. I think they caught fire too. warning shortly, so they realized that, well, these engines are not working and they turned them off, so now they know well that they are not going to have any engines, they are going to continue flying this plane and land it wherever they can, Captain Carlos has called now.

The cabin crew were also

told

to prepare for a possible ditch, definitely an emergency landing, so the cabin crew are preparing the passengers for this as the plane is now descending to about 5000 feet, the crew begins to see the ground beneath them and in an interview which by the way I have linked here you have to watch this interview if you are interested in more details about this incident, captain carlos says that he was able to see this channel shaped like a perfect runway which is in the east and outskirts of New Orleans, he realizes that he is at 5000 feet, he is about 15 miles away, which is a perfect glide distance from the 737 and he lines up the plane to hunker down in this channel just down the hill that the first officer runs along. the abandonment checklist okay, the abandonment checklist includes things like, for example, closing the outlet valve, you know, preparing the cabin crew to activate certain circuit breakers and deactivate the gpws, warning things like that to as the plane enters and lines up for the first officer's abandonment.

He is looking towards his side and realized that on the canal side there is something called tax. Well, there's basically a grassy area, not as wide as a canal, but wide enough to land on with just a slight incline. The first officer noted that the captain said captain, we can, we can land, we can land there. Captain Carlos looks and notices, but yeah, okay, that's a good place to land, but he also notices that it's a little high, so while he had prepared for the. abandoning he prepared to enter without many flaps and with the gear up because that is how the abandonment would be done now he immediately asks for them to lower the gear it is okay to remove the flaps he looks for his speed brakes, he removes the speed brake and he also does something which you just don't hear people do on commercial airlines: it does what we call a right sideslip, that is, when you push the rudder and opposite aileron to essentially push the body of the plane into the airstream and make Since the entire body works as an air brake, this is a very efficient way to lose altitude, something you would use on smaller airplanes or gliders to descend, but not on passenger airplanes, because doing so can cause a failure in the motor on one side because of the vortices coming out of the body and into the motor, but of course these guys don't have any motors, so it's not really a risk you're taking, so your slide slides. to its position and sees it at the nearest end of this dam. there's a fence, so he just goes over that fence and makes a perfect soft butter landing on this margin.

Okay, he remembers that they don't have trust crossings, so he has to use brakes. He can't use too many brakes because no. I know how soft the ground is, but he managed to roll and stop the plane completely. The plane is safe, the passengers are safe and there isn't even any damage except the damage that has already been done to the engines. It's an

amazing

story, okay, they sit for a while, look at each other, hug each other, and then they realize we should probably evacuate. There was actually an argument in the cabin about whether or not they should evacuate because the plane is safe, but of course.

You don't really know if, for example, the landing gear is safe or not, so they decide to evacuate the plane, they ask for evacuation, everyone gets off the plane and then the storm they just went through comes and it starts to rain. Outside, now outside, everyone is calling the pilots to come, come, go, jump and Captain Carlos and his flight crew just look at them and say no, no, no, it's raining so they sit down. inside the plane until it rains. It stops raining and then they go out and join the passengers outside. Now you would think this would be the end of the story, but this story actually gets even crazier and if you stick around right after this break, I'll tell you. how they managed to get the plane out of this tax, this episode is brought to you by trivia and trivia it's one of those things that I know you like because, to be fair, you're watching this episode which is like a documentary and documentaries is exactly what it's about deals with Curiositystream.

They have thousands of high-quality documentaries and non-fiction series from some of the best filmmakers in the world and a ton of exclusive material, as well as a series I'm following right now. It's a series called heavy lift and right now I'm watching an episode about antonov 225 that I know you guys would love to see too and if you think this is interesting then go down and click the link in the description of the video which is curiousstream .com mentorpilot and use the promo code mentorpilot all lowercase letters that will give you a full 30 day trial period with curiositystream and if you think this is something for you then it's pretty cheap to sign up it's 2.99 per month or if you want to go annually it is 19.99, so come on down, click the link and enjoy after landing.

Tucker Airlines representatives had a bit of a dilemma about how they were going to get this plane out of this tax. Initially they thought it was the best. The way to do it was probably to just assemble the wings and put the whole plane on a barge to have wings and then take it to a place where it could be reassembled and reused, but then someone pointed out that the tax that had landed was next to the NASA Mashud assembly facility which used to be during World War II an assembly factory to manufacture, among other things, airplanes and when you have an airplane assembly line it is useful if you also have an airport, so it turns out They discovered that the The road that was right in front of this NASA facility used to be an old World War II landing strip that had now become something called Saturn Boulevard, so what they did was wait until the ground dried out a little. . so that it could support the wheels of the plane and then they towed the plane to the beginning of this road, then they got clearance from the FAA.

The FVA came out, made sure I knew the obstacle distance and everything was fine, then they loaded the plane with the minimum amount of fuel needed and then a couple of test pilots who were not the same crew as the flight used this road and They took off fine, they took off from this stretch of road and then flew to land at the New Orleans airport, which is where they were. I was supposed to leave only 13 days late, that's how they resolved this. This plane was in such good condition after this landing that all they had to do was basically change the engines that had been damaged during the hail storm and once they had the plane's engines completely airworthy, so what they were able to accomplish this flight, which is surprising anyway, obviously some upgrades to the cfm56 engines were needed after this incident. cfm came in and they looked very closely at the certification requirements and realized that they needed to, on the one hand, improve the roulette, the roulette before this incident was conical and then what they did was shape it into a mix between a shape conical and one elliptical, so now called elliptical corn shape, that's the type of spinners you see.

Well, on modern 737s, the reason they wanted to do that was because they discovered that if hail hits that shape, it will deflect it outward and thus protect the core of the Andean interior. They also changed the distance and number of fan blades on the engine a bit and incorporated more variable bleed valve gates within the engine core, so that during low revs during low power settings, these bleed gates could open and letting out the water that had been ingested into the core before it reached the combustion chamber, so some major improvements were made to the engine itself, but in addition to that, some operational guidance was also provided to the pilots, so for a while, if the pilots realized that they were going to go through moderate to heavy conditions. precipitation, they couldn't get the air to idle again, they had to stay on a slightly higher power setting to prevent this from happening, so once again guys, as you can see, this is a very serious incident, this time handled masterfully by the crew. they helped each other they were crm they flew the plane, which is really very important and after that the authorities came in and saw what we can improve, how we can make flyingsafer and then it became safer after it was fine so it was a really fun episode to get right as no one was hurt this actually wasn't classified as an accident meaning it wasn't a final report, so I had to go in and watch documentaries and read.

Online descriptions and paper clippings and things about this incident and I love doing that like I said. Watch the interview with Captain Carlos about this incident. It's really good if you like these types of videos where I analyze famous incidents. and accidents and explain them well, then I hope you have subscribed to the channel and highlighted the notification bell. I also hope to see you inside my Discord server, we are now almost 5000 people there and this. On Friday we are going to do a group flight in Greece. You can go and download my mentor pilot livery for free at menopause.com and then enter discord and participate in this group flight.

It's really very fun. We did it. A few weeks ago too and there are some really awesome photos from that group flight anyway. I hope you are absolutely fantastic, have a great day and see you next time, bye.