So depressing... (goodbye to a special airplane)

[Baradium]

IDENTIFICATION
  Regis#: 898AT        Make/Model: DC4       Description: DC-4 (C-54, EC-54, HC-54, TC-54, VC-54,
  Date: 05/30/2007     Time: 2000

  Event Type: Accident   Highest Injury: None     Mid Air: N    Missing: N
  Damage: Substantial

LOCATION
  City: MCGRATH   State: AK   Country: US

DESCRIPTION
  AIRCRAFT ON LANDING CRASHED UNDER UNKNOWN CIRCUMSTANCES, NIXON FORK MINE,
  MCGRATH, AK

One of the 3 remaining Carvairs that was flying in the world... well, guess it's two now.   They didn't fly it all winter and this was the first revenue flight since then.  I saw it doing the tests flights on Tuesday.  Rumor is they caught one of the main gear on something as they were landing at that mine.   So much for trying to get to see the inside of the thing.   I can hope that maybe the damage is repairable... but either way... it's either never coming back or it's going to be a very long time.


The remaining DC-4 that Mom is familiar with... last week the tail stand failed/fell out or something to that effect and the plane fell on the tail and is busted now as well... although in light of what happened to the other two aircraft they'd been flying regularly in the past year.... I guess it came out as the lucky one. 

      

[Baradium]

Roger just got her flying on Tuesday and Wednesday was her last flight. The pilots were fine, I picked them up and took them to Fairbanks.

It happened at Nixon Fork Mine near McGrath, Alaska. The strip is notorious. There is a hill at the south end of the runway which forces everyone to land to the south. The winds are treacherous and unpredictable. As they were approaching to land, they had a tail wind and were trying to come in as slow as possible. They caught a down draft and clipped the end of the runway with the right main and the rest is self explanatory. You won't believe this but this is the second Carvair to crash up there. Along with a DC-6, DC-4 and a Casa.

http://www.oldwings.nl/content/n898at/n898at.htm
Photos at the above link.

Sounds like they had no buisiness going to that airport on that day.  It's a 1500' strip.

[Frank N. O.]

How long a strip does it need normally?

Frank

[tundra_flier]

I'm never sure whether to thank Brooks for allowing us to see these old aircraft in the air...or kick him for busting them up.
RIP 898AT 

Phil

[airtac]

Yes it's sad to see the ending of magnificent old workhorses like the Carvair but at least our generation got see see them in the air, doing what they were designed to do.  How much more sad would it be to see the last of the type moldering away in some aircraft graveyard, forlorn and forgotten?
Someday even the memories will be relegated to history as the world moves about fueled by smooth quiet, and clean energy sources--gone forever will be the fart of backfire, the cloud of blue smoke, and the overprimed flame of exhaust.   AHHH yes, we are lucky to have seen and heard them, let's raise a glass on high tonite in loving memory of the passing of an era and how we were lucky enough to at least be witnesses to that passing.

As for myself, I've poured a tumbler of Glenfiddich over ice and will consume this lustily with thoughts of glorious days gone by for this old bird and her kin!   HEAR-HEAR !!!

[undatc]

As for myself, I've poured a tumbler of Glenfiddich over ice and will consume this lustily with thoughts of glorious days gone by for this old bird and her kin!   HEAR-HEAR !!!

Some 12 year old Scotch and a nice cigar should do nicely for me.

Sad to see one go.  Never seen a DC4, only the 3's.  Its probably safe to assume that some hisorical society will buy it and put her back together.

[Baradium]

Sad to see one go.  Never seen a DC4, only the 3's.  Its probably safe to assume that some hisorical society will buy it and put her back together.

This bird is in shambles and far from the nearest road.  Unfortunately I think it's far more likely that she will be delegated to being pushed into a pile away from the runway or into a pit somewhere in the area.


The DC-4 that they killed... they cut the wings off of her and drug her to the airport she was trying to make it too. 

[Baradium]

This was on the front page of today's (Saturday's) newspaper.

http://newsminer.com/2007/06/02/7292


For being a newspaper they did pretty good...

Historic plane crashes
By Eric Lidji
Staff Writer
Published June 2, 2007


The president of a Fairbanks aviation company and his co-pilot were aboard a historic plane when it crashed near a mine site outside McGrath on Wednesday, but escaped without injury.

Roger Brooks, the president of Brooks Fuel Inc., and co-pilot Jonathan Hathaway were landing a modified Douglas DC-4 between noon and 1:15 p.m. at a private airstrip at the Nixon Fork Mine 30 miles northeast of McGrath when they hit “sinking air” and came in low on the landing, according to a preliminary report filed with the National Transportation Safety Board.

The plane hit a rocky embankment at the start of the airstrip, destroying part of the plane’s main landing gear and dropping the nose of the plane and one wing onto the gravel runway. The impact tore the right wing off the fuselage and sent the plane sliding into brush on the side of the runway.

The separated right wing caught fire and burned for more than an hour, but the fuel oil on board the plane did not ignite.

The accident is the fourth at the Nixon Fork Mine airstrip reported since 1995, although only one of the other three crashed on landing.

The accident grounded a unique modern airplane.

The plane was originally built in 1946 for the Norwegian Airline Co. and served in Japanese, Korean and Australian fleets throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Ansett Australia converted the plane in 1965, along with 20 other Douglas DC-4s, into a Carvair ATL-98 air ferry, according to a report by the late aviation historian Gil White.

The Carvair is immediately recognizable by its bulbous cargo hold located under the cockpit. The hold is accessed through a door on the nose of the plane.

The plane traveled with fleets around the world before Brooks Fuel purchased it around 2003 and began a massive restoration project. Before the crash, the plane was one of only a few Carvairs still capable of flying.

Wednesday’s accident is the second for Brooks Fuel this year, following a January incident where a plane headed to the same mine site caught fire in flight, forcing the pilot to bring the plane down in the snow near Nenana without landing gear.

Scott Erickson, an air safety investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board in Anchorage, said investigations will determine whether the two incidents are related. According to standard protocol, the Federal Aviation administration is conducting a concurrent investigation.

Erickson said a final report is usually released six months after an accident.

Brooks Fuel has been transporting fuel around Alaska since 1986.

Roger Brooks could not be reached for comment.

Contact staff writer Eric Lidji at 459-7504 or elidji@newsminer.com.

[Baradium]

http://newsminer.com/2007/06/03/7311

"According to Roger Brooks, founder of Brooks Fuel Inc., a master rod on the DC-4’s No. 2, left-side engine broke and knocked one of the cylinders off the engine, starting the fire."

Final journey
By Mary Beth Smetzer
Staff Writer
Published June 3, 2007


A piece of aviation history made its final touchdown in Alaska’s wilderness last January.

After 60-plus years of service, the DC-4 lay broken beyond repair in the midst of a thick spruce forest 4 miles west of Nenana.

The shorn tree tops, angling downward to stubs, mark the plane’s last approach. Its final runway was hewn by its own impressive bulk.

An engine fire forced the emergency landing on Jan. 17.

Remarkably the Brooks Fuel pilots emerged from the burning plane unscathed. A cell phone call to the plane’s owner and a position reference by a Wright’s Air Service pilot flying nearby who heard the DC-4’s mayday were responsible for the pilots’ quick retrieval.

Within 30 minutes, the two men were picked up by an Alaska Air Guard helicopter and delivered to Fairbanks Memorial Hospital where they refused treatment.

The engine was still burning when the pilots were airlifted out, but the fire didn’t spread beyond the wing.

According to Roger Brooks, founder of Brooks Fuel Inc., a master rod on the DC-4’s No. 2, left-side engine broke and knocked one of the cylinders off the engine, starting the fire.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Pilot Matt Johnson remembers the winter afternoon well.

“It was a beautiful day for flying,” he recalled.

Johnson and co-pilot Trevor Wills were approximately 15 minutes into their second trip of the day, a routine fuel run from Brooks Fuel Inc. to Nixon Fork Mine near McGrath before they noticed anything amiss.

“It started with a rough running engine,” Johnson said.

Johnson shut the No. 2 engine down, the propeller stopped, the fire started, and the pilots went into emergency mode.

First, they discharged the aircraft’s fire extinguishing system, while making an 180-degree turn, heading for the Nenana airport.

The fire warning went out but the fire didn’t.

“I saw a little flicker of flames inside the accessory section of the engine (the little gaps between the cowl plate),” Johnson said. “It required direct attention. We figured we could probably make it back.”

But the plan was quickly cast aside when Johnson saw flames flaring out through the cowling and burning back over the engine and part of the wing.

“At that point, I figured we had an out-of-control fire and we no longer would be able to make it to Nenana.

“That’s when we elected to make an emergency landing,” Johnson said. Quickly scanning the landscape below for a thin spot in the forest, Johnson spotted an area where the trees appeared smaller and started heading in.

“It looked like an old oxbow,” Johnson said, describing what was to becomean impromptu, lifesaving airstrip, located on state Mental Health Trust Lands.

Keeping the plane’s wheels up, and putting the flaps down to slow the plane for landing, Johnson guided the plane in.

At the same time, co-pilot Wills made several mayday calls.

Johnson recalled the landing as very noisy but fairly quick.

With the wing still burning on the pilot’s side, the two men bailed out of the co-pilot’s window and ran well away from the fire.

“While we were standing in the clearing Trevor’s (cell) phone rang,” Johnson recalled. “Then I called Roger (Brooks).”


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The forced landing, about four miles west of Nenana off the Parks Highway, was a big hit for Brooks Fuel since the plane was only covered by liability insurance and the company was obliged to cover the costs of the recovery effort.

Rockwell Engineering and Construction Service Inc., which specializes in solving problems unique to Alaska, undertook the challenge to recover the plane.

Work started almost immediately following the crash landing during the short days of winter, which lengthened into an extremely cold spring with daily subzero temperatures.

Accessing the crash site, located just off the Nenana/Kantishna sled trail, involved the use of snowmachines and four-wheelers. Thick brush and stands of spruce had to be cut out for easy access and so crews could later skid out the long fuselage of the DC-4.

Within a couple of days after the crash, a crew unloaded the heavy bladders of fuel oil, 3,000 gallons destined for the Nixon Fork gold mine, and emptied them into tankers at the Nenana River boat launch site near the Parks Highway.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mike “Soup” Campbell led the on-site recovery effort for Rockwell.

While engines were dismantled and wings removed, brush and spruce trees wedged around, against and beneath the large carrier had to be cleared away.

The work was slow and weather extremely cold many days, (minus 30 degrees) but it was better than trying to do the job in the summer with thick clouds of mosquitoes and slippery tussocks to contend with.

Among the first undertakings were draining the motor oil and hydraulic fluids.

Laboring in heavy clothes, the men moved slowly but efficiently to every task, sometimes joking about the ghostly wailing heard from inside the empty fuselage, which turned out to be the sound of the plane’s rudder flapping in the breeze.

The interior of the plane was relatively unchanged from the impact of the landing, except for some loose wiring and the bulkhead that had smashed inward, pushing the co-pilot’s seat forward.

However, there was some evidence that vandals had been on the scene shortly after the crash, kicking out some windows and interior hatches and signs that a fire had been attempted under a wing. No serious damage resulted.

Once the propellers and engines were removed and the wings dismantled in two sections each, the fuselage with the rudder still intact (the elevators and the stabilizers on either side removed) was skidded out to the Nenana River boat launch site and trucked over to the Nenana Municipal Airport on a sunny day in early March.

Campbell oversaw the massive aviation workhorse’s final journey as it was pulled out tail first — a Nodwell pulling the tail in front and the front-end loader pushing the nose forward from the rear.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As final cleanup of the crash landing area neared completion in early May, Mark Rockwell, Rockwell Engineering CEO, said his company’s quick recovery response was due in part because of the company’s existing, hardy, work force, which included men from Nenana and Minto.

The DC-4 recovery is the first aviation recovery effort by the entrepreneurial engineering firm, which was formed 12 years ago and has worked extensively on environmental projects.

The latter experience enabled the company to deal quickly and efficiently with the paperwork required by governmental agencies since the crash landing was on state trust lands.

Rockwell said he is always amazed how simple engineering techniques can accomplish large jobs.

“The recovery was all done with pulleys and levers and ropes-some basic tools and simple Yankee ingenuity,” he said.

Brooks Fuel, the only DC-4 operator in the state, has another DC-4 on order to replace the downed N82FA craft, which now will provide replacement parts.

“We are going to take all the good stuff off,” Brooks said. “The electrical stuff, hydraulic units and things like that.

“Some of the components and valves not damaged in the accident will be used for spare parts,” he said.

The DC-4 (dubbed Skymaster C-54) was dellivered to the United States Army Air Forces in June 1945, but its military history is unknown to Brooks. He does know that it once was used as a cargo plane out of Falcon Field in Texas before it was purchased from its last owner in Arizona in February 2006.

A search of the Internet shows the four-engine airplane working the Camino forest fire in California in August 2002.

Today, the red and white fuselage rests temporarily beside the Nenana airstrip, a reminder of a bygone aviation era. Eventually, all of the remains will be recycled for other projects, Brooks said.

No pictures in the link, there were pictures with the newspaper article.   both this and the carvair article were front page articles... on subsequent days.  So Brooks got his problems in the newspaper two days in a row.


I do have to admit... a master rod breaking is hard to simply pin down as a maintenance failure.

[Baradium]

Note:  the website posted initially has more pictures of the carvair crash.

[BrianGMFS]

Dang.... Another old bird bites the dust. It's funny though.... Last month I flew (on my computer) that same Carvair into the same strip....


Brian

[BrianGMFS]

I just flew a quick leg from McGrath to Nixon Fork Mine in the Brooks Carvair I have for Flightsim... My tribute to the old girl.... 









Brian

[Fabo]

I just flew a quick leg from McGrath to Nixon Fork Mine in the Brooks Carvair I have for Flightsim... My tribute to the old girl.... 
Brian

Can you give me a link? Always wanted to try the piston jumbo

[BrianGMFS]

http://www.simviation.com/fs2004props125.htm thats the Brooks repaint.... the plane itself is a link next to the download. the panel shot I cheated on.... It's a much nicer DC-4 I have.

Brian

[tundra_flier]

Cool, what flightsim is that?  The tree details are really nice.  But you forgot the cockpit placard "Flare High"

Phil