Cardinal Pilot Flying Pipeline - Crashed

Zeldman said:
As a kid I remember a tower down the road from us. I do not know how tall it is, but I remember watching men take most of the morning to climb to the top. Years later I found out what the empty gallon jugs were for.......
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Bombs awayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!
 
Zeldman said:
As a kid I remember a tower down the road from us. I do not know how tall it is, but I remember watching men take most of the morning to climb to the top. Years later I found out what the empty gallon jugs were for.......
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Don't you just find the downwind side of the tower and...
 
@SoonerAviator On my way to Oshkosh last year, Tulsa App/Dep had me heading straight for those towers east of Broken Arrow "at or below 3,000". I called em' up and said I'm staring at some mighty tall towers, can I go another direction. They said oh yeah, your discretion, sorry about that.
 
3393RP said:
The guy wires on 1,500' + towers are 2"-3" cable. They are connected with pulleys to tensioning blocks set below ground level that weigh more than ten tons.
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And I said earlier that I thought they were 1" - 1.5". That's BIG.
 
JohnAJohnson said:
An EA-6B Prowler at 450kts can cut a cable and survive. I don't know how large the Italian gondola cable was but with the car having a 7000 pound capacity, I would think it would have been substantial.
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I used to work at the Sandia Peak tramway in Albuquerque. It has, or had, the longest clear span between towers of any tramway in the world. The haul cable was 25mm diameter, and the two track cables were 50mm diameter. It had a capacity of 40 people in each car, or 8,000lbs.

Tramway track cables are quite different than the wire rope most people are accustomed to seeing. It has a conventional axial wound interior using round wire, and the axial wound exterior wire is made of rectangular section material. This results in a smooth circumferential exterior, and the gondola truck sheaves ride on top of it. The haul cable is of conventional construction, the ends are swaged to clevis eyes and attached to the gondola truck.

I think that the EA-6B surviving the collision had everything to do with where the cable hit the aircraft. According to documents I viewed, the track cable was 50mm diameter and the haul cable was 25mm diameter. The tramway had a single track cable and a much smaller clear span. The jet cut the track cable and the haul cable, and the wing damage was from the leading edge to the spar.

If the cables had struck the fuselage or empennage it's a safe bet the aircraft would have been brought down. The crew was lucky to survive their showboating.
 
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Joshuajayg said:
And I said earlier that I thought they were 1" - 1.5". That's BIG.
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When I started working at the KDFW transmitter site (I installed UPS and generator systems) I assumed the cables were 1" or 1 1/2" diameter. When I walked out to one of the tensioning blocks I was amazed at how big the cable and concrete tensioning block was.
 
GRG55 said:
There's nothing close to that where I am in the west.
First time I realised there were towers that tall was many years ago on my first flight to OSH. We were VFR in a Cherokee somewhere over Minnesota flying along at roughly 2000 AGL when I noticed the strobes on a pair of towers a couple of miles off my wing seemed about the same height we were. Checking the chart was quite a revelation for us. I've never flown over the flatlands of the mid-west that low ever again.
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There is a television tower in Walnut Grove, California (a little south of Sacramento) that is 2,051 feet high MSL (2049 AGL). There is another just a little north of that tower that is 2,030 high.
 
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I used to know a guy who buzzed his office building in Denver City, TX back in the 1970s, soon after he'd gotten his ticket. He struck a guy wire and sheared off some of his wing, yet managed to land to the DC airport. The man was damn lucky, to say the least!
 
OkieFlyer said:
@SoonerAviator On my way to Oshkosh last year, Tulsa App/Dep had me heading straight for those towers east of Broken Arrow "at or below 3,000". I called em' up and said I'm staring at some mighty tall towers, can I go another direction. They said oh yeah, your discretion, sorry about that.
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Well, you'd clear them as long as you were at 2600' or so, and your altimeter was set correctly. They're definitely imposing to see up close, but having grown up around them, I'm pretty keenly aware of where they are. The radio tower field in OKC always makes me anxious, since there's about 10-15 of them in close succession at different heights. Luckily I'm never too close when running to KOUN since I approach from the Tinker AFB-side of I-35.


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Same survey company who lost the kid in the Skyhawk a year or two ago, or different company? Just curious if anyone knows.
 
Let'sgoflying! said:
Its funny how the brain will map obstacles you are familiar with; we have a 15,000' obstacle near me and it feels like a permanent, and automatic no-fly zone in my head.
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denverpilot said:
Same survey company who lost the kid in the Skyhawk a year or two ago, or different company? Just curious if anyone knows.
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You must be along the Gulf coast, although one is around Cocoa Beach. and one near Key West. Look down radar to catch plane and boat smugglers.
 
mscard88 said:
You must be along the Gulf coast, although one is around Cocoa Beach. and one near Key West. Look down radar to catch plane and boat smugglers.
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no, but near the border. No water for hundreds of miles! Ours is apparently looking for a/c, vehicles, people (reportedly can see people 60mi away)
 
mscard88 said:
You must be along the Gulf coast, although one is around Cocoa Beach. and one near Key West. Look down radar to catch plane and boat smugglers.
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I don't think you meant to quote me on that answer?
 
So, for those of you who have done pipeline patrol, what types of precautions and flight planning is generally done in order to combat these types of incidents? Sectionals can only give vague representations of tower locations, and probably aren't much use for a large portion of low-altitude obstructions.


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SoonerAviator said:
So, for those of you who have done pipeline patrol, what types of precautions and flight planning is generally done in order to combat these types of incidents?
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I don't know but have wondered the same thing. One thought is, the pipeline routes are probably not constantly changing. New towers will pop up from time to time. I suspect the pilots know the routes. New pilots hopefully get mentored on the routes.

I wonder if the bigger issue is not 'where are the towers?' but 'we know where the towers are but we spend large portions of our scan looking at the ground'.
 
Let'sgoflying! said:
I don't know but have wondered the same thing. One thought is, the pipeline routes are probably not constantly changing. New towers will pop up from time to time. I suspect the pilots know the routes. New pilots hopefully get mentored on the routes.

I wonder if the bigger issue is not 'where are the towers?' but 'we know where the towers are but we spend large portions of our scan looking at the ground'.
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I've heard some bad things about certain operators in that biz, and I'm going to leave it at that, other than to say, I'm amazed some low time pilots survive it. Those that do all have stories of the stuff they barely missed one day.

Haven't met a pipeline person yet who doesn't have a scud running story that ends with "I pulled up and missed X just in time. Scared the hell out of me."
 
JohnAJohnson said:
An EA-6B Prowler at 450kts can cut a cable and survive. I don't know how large the Italian gondola cable was but with the car having a 7000 pound capacity, I would think it would have been substantial.
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An f-16 hit a wire when leaving the Flint hills range. It recovered successfully. The maintenance guys reportedly said it was easy to put a new vertical stab on.
 
denverpilot said:
I've heard some bad things about certain operators in that biz, and I'm going to leave it at that, other than to say, I'm amazed some low time pilots survive it. Those that do all have stories of the stuff they barely missed one day.

Haven't met a pipeline person yet who doesn't have a scud running story that ends with "I pulled up and missed X just in time. Scared the hell out of me."
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Where I am the industry is moving very quickly to drones with multiple sensors for this work.
 
GRG55 said:
Where I am the industry is moving very quickly to drones with multiple sensors for this work.
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Doesn't surprise me. Sad for low timers who need hours who don't want to teach, but it's the way of the future.
 
Let'sgoflying! said:
ok what physically can happen when you hit a cable?
-cable can break, you continue on (less likely)
-cable 'wins'; cuts vital structure off a/c ie tail parts/wing, down you go
-cable flexes as you strike it, slowing you enough to stall a wing +/- inducing significant yaw, down you go maybe in a spin
-cable directly incapacitates pilot regardless of a/c damage
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Physically it'll go through your aircraft like a hot knife through butter.

Years ago, I sat through a safety brief on a Black Hawk that hit guy wires in TX. Literally split the aircraft right down the middle.
 
Let'sgoflying! said:
I don't know but have wondered the same thing. One thought is, the pipeline routes are probably not constantly changing. New towers will pop up from time to time. I suspect the pilots know the routes. New pilots hopefully get mentored on the routes.

I wonder if the bigger issue is not 'where are the towers?' but 'we know where the towers are but we spend large portions of our scan looking at the ground'.
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Agreed. I figured that once you "know the route", spotting the towers is much easier. I just thought there would be some other tools we don't normally use for flight planning that pipeline guys look at for such information. It's difficult to spot obstacles when you're focusing on a pipeline below you.
 
I suspect they are constantly switching from left side to right side of the pipeline, based upon upcoming towers. Might be hard to recall "ok are we on the correct side for this leg?" Just guessing.
 
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