Dan’s DC-3 Crash! Plus Cockpit Tour - How to Fast Start The Highly Maneuverable DC-3

hey come on in my name is brenda clemens this is probable cause i am in the office which is my editing room for probable cause and i'm here today to tell you about a couple of things that i have here in my office and the reason that i have them is because we were at the hangar and looking at some items that prompted us to do a video which you'll see later the video is about dan's dc3 crash uh he had a gear failure on on the landing and crashed so in um that accident i actually got a propeller from that accident we got it yesterday at the hanger and we'll show you that but we brought it here to the house added some paint so it's in my office i'm thrilled about it i also have another little prize that we got from the hanger yesterday that i'll show you since you're in my office and this is an antenna for dc3 i'm not sure which one this is from but it's the antenna that sits horizontally on top of the cabin right above the cockpit where the pilot sit so continue to watch this video and we're going to show you the um footage or photo photographs from the crash and we're going to start the dc3 today so we're going to take you in the cockpit we're going to do a dc3 start and you'll be surprised how long it takes to start that dc3 it's not like the 172 you get in bam bam you're done let's go it takes quite a while to start the dc3 so we're excited to show you that follow along saturday morning march 20. dan and i are down at the hangar and uh just doing some normal hanger things messing with the dc3 and i'm spreading cat litter on the floor you know why i'm doing that but i'm over by these blades about 20 paddle blades in the corner and i noticed these uh bent props and i've been looking for something for my office for decor wanted something different and i saw this one and thought that was pretty cool so i've been down here cleaning this up and getting ready to add just a little bit of paint on it and make it shiny for my office but there's a story behind this april 1st 2005 i can't remember where dan told me he was landing but he had a gear failure and the picture is pretty dramatic and i believe there's video as well so he can tell you about that but for now i've got a new piece of artwork i think it's gorgeous and it's going in my office yeah so brandon's talking about december 1 no i'm sorry april 1 2005 we were flying this and landing it at thompson georgia i had julie boatman she was julie boatman at the time and charlie atterbury students julie was doing a little aopa thing and if you want to read that entire pdf it's still online i'll include it in the description i'll include a link to that so you can see the actual slow motion shot of this airplane crashing with all three of us on board photographed by mike collins who was standing alongside the runway and photographed it as it happened as you know mike just passed away our deepest condolences to mike's family and friends i will say that mike was probably one of the most stellar individuals personal friend excellent photographer and i'm deeply saddened to hear of his sudden passing here just recently um just a few weeks ago mike collins photographed this accident for us at the time and i've still got all the originals that he gave me on a disc of that but what happened was uh the dc3 when it lands it puts a little bit of weight on the wheel the wheel is trying to go backwards because the airplane's trying to go forward so we have this thing right here called a drag strut which prevents it from going backwards so this is the gizmo that goes up in the wing that receives the drag strut via this hole right here and this thing due to excessive wear vibration and moisture over the years it failed there's no way to inspect this no way to know so this thing failed in half what it did was it shot this drag strut right backwards it curled this landing gear around the spar the forward spars right here didn't hurt the spar cap but that's how strong the forward spar is on a dc3 it curled this landing gear bent it around the lower spark cap didn't put a scratch on it and it's totally fine the uh the interesting thing on this story is that i forgot the airplane secure and pulled all this stuff out and i ordered two of these one for once this side that was still in place and one for this side um i got a knock on my door down here at the hangar and sure enough three feds wanted to know how come i had not reported this accident in which case i said i did report it i reported it to the ntsb under part 830 i got the receipt the name the stamp i reported it in a timely manner as i was supposed to was not nobody got hurt uh and it was just an ntn speed incident but i did report it so they simmered down a little bit the next thing they wanted to know was how come this airplane did not have its aeds complied with and i said well why why do you think it doesn't have 80s and they said well it's supposed to have a new drag strut fitting in there to prevent this from happening and i happen to have these two pieces laying on a table 10 feet from where we were standing and they had a copy of the a d in hand listing the required part number so i said we'll step over here and read the part number and they stepped over to where this piece which i had just removed out of the airplane is laying and sure enough it is stamped with part number 4341810 so i threw water on that uh as well this is the correct part it just failed this is the updated part that's supposed to be in there and they said uh our error have a nice day so that was that if you want to read that pdf it's fascinating and i'll get out of the wind here um and go on to this but a lot of you asked about starting the dc3 we're going to go inside if anybody wants to see this thing start and also i've got video we're fixing to change the engine on this thing here in the very near future lost an engine on this airplane on takeoff at this airport not a big deal we lose engines on takeoff all the time so i'm kind of ready for it i kind of know how to do that lost an engine happened to catch that on video as well my son drew caught that on video so i'll include a little clip of that and you can see you can hear it when this engine right here let's go [Applause] that engine turn left if you lose the left engine think about a right turn climb to something safe come back over top of the airport now let's hop in the airplane i know you think this thing starts with a key and you turn it and starts but it takes a long time to to get this thing started it's amazing how long this thing has to spin over before you can introduce fuel and spark and all that and then it doesn't start fast it takes forever to start and then it takes about 10 minutes to warm up before you can even put any power on it long long process to get one of these started let's hop up in the cockpit and later on i'm going to have some in-flight test flight footage of this during the test flight on this channel we got gopros we're going to put in the cockpit so you can ride along when we do all the test flying in this and let's hop up to the cockpit right now yeah more selfie video with the iphone in the dc3 fix to go up here in the cockpit and start this thing and uh show you how to do that a couple quick numbers on the airplane this thing's built in 38 it's got about 56 000 flight hours on the airframe and i went to swiss air first and then ozark had it for a long time basic empty weight on this particular airplane is very light 17 345 pounds bew when they flew these for like freight and stuff like that they had a max gross takeoff weight of 26 900 pounds we operate them today part 91 with 25 to 25 200 pounds max gross takeoff so if you do the math between 25 2 and 17 3 that's what you get to play with for fuel people baggage and banjos now my banjos are fairly heavy and i have several of them so i have to include that that's the bew banjo empty weight yeah just kidding that's uh the banjos we put in there extra and we throw those on there when we do our weight and balance all right but we do a weight and balance now i always know what the gross weight is on this thing so we're gonna go up front and start it step you through kind of the process it's a long process to start one of these they don't start fast and it's a long process it gurgles and grinds and makes all kinds of starter noise and pumps noise before you ever even turn a blade so that's uh how the whole thing works let's go up front and give that a try so up in the cockpit now in the right seat where i've spent a career flight instructing and moving airplanes i always give the left seat to the guest whoever wanted to fly it the accidents we were talking about had both julie and charlie on board ironically charlie atterbury uh was left seat and just made a nice landing in thomaston georgia when that accident happened uh funny story with that he makes a nice landing he's rolling out the airplane's slowing down when this thing failed out there in the right wing and the whole thing with both engines running it just fell down on the right wing and chaos just pure chaos charlie lets go of everything and he goes your airplane so uh we always kidded him about that and uh but he did he let go of the controls of your aircraft and then after the fact several days later he said well if you remember i did tell you i was going to make a full stop landing and he sure did that was a full stop landing captured by mike collins on camera flown by charlie had julian the jump seat and of course mike collins has since blown west very recently so uh uh deep respect to both of those guys uh good lifelong friends and both great guys that were here in this airplane on that project so i digress let's go ahead and start this thing i'll talk you through it everything is already done on the outside our before start checklist which i always do all the switches are appropriate everything's been checked fluids everything that you need to do i've pulled the props through to check for hydraulic lock all that's done so i'm going to start in here and now we start it via memory uh because after you go through this a few times you just remember what to do but this is the ignition master and now i've turned it on that controls the ability of the magnetos to be able to come on now next i'm going to bring on ship's power that's just like a master switch in the cessna 172 so ship's power's on and that noise right there that's our pre-oiler that's a pump a pre-oil pump that's running pressurizing the lower engine case making oil pressure so that once the engine starts to have rotation we're pre-oiling this engine uh the pre-order is a good thing so if you're outside this is a pretty loud pump out there you can definitely hear it's on next i'm bringing on a fuel pump and that's making fuel pressure also pretty loud outside and it takes this long to start this thing now i'm going to go ahead and spin it it's up it's clear outside and here we go one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve blades i let go of the pre-oiler mixture on ah she almost lit here let's do one more here fuel pumps on i'm gonna go ahead and spin it mixture mags come on baby all right let's do one more thing here it did not light i'm gonna go ahead and spin it get my feet up here near the brakes in case i need it still spinning no thrust out there just blades going around so it's not making any wind right now and now she's running i'm just waiting for oil pressure to come up real slow it's idling about 800 rpm right now nice and easy i got my feet on the brakes everything's good boost pumps back off oil pressure's looking good it's coming up oil is very slow but it's coming up and you can hear how rough it sounds up there that's because it's not hitting on all cylinders yet but it will be here in a second takes about 10 minutes to get this thing warmed up or you can even put any power on it now we would have to go through the same process for the other engine in order to move the airplane takes about 10 minutes to start it get it warmed up and get everything going here before you could never even think about moving the airplane for my tiny little itty bitty fledgling youtube channel my name is dan ryder and you've been watching a dc-3 start on probable cause you

Channel: Probable Cause: Dan Gryder

Views: 151,017

Rating: 4.8132029 out of 5

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Id: H6RtEJTX8bI

Length: 15min 53sec (953 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 21 2021