Stunt aircraft loses wing mid-flight

[CannonFodder]

http://www.snopes.com/photos/airplane/onewing.asp


Real or fake? Lots of youtube commenters saying fake. Can better snopesters than myself help me out with this one?

If real, it's certainly an amazing piece of airmanship.

[jimmy101_again]

It's got to be fake.

Can't find any reputable news sites with the story. The accident most certainly would have been photographed by multiple photographers and the photos/video would have been on many local news casts, in the papers etc.

The video looks OK up until the wing comes off. After that the sky around the plane looks slightly off color from the surrounding sky. Also, though it is hard to tell without a frame of reference for the ground, it appears that the plane is still performing stunts... rather hard to do if you are falling out of the sky I would think.

[Hans Off]

I've seen extra's hang on their props before, they are quite phenomenal aircraft...

I think it is semi-plausible, but...I don't like the way the wheels fail to interact with the ground surface at the end of the clip when it moves off the grass and onto the concrete...

what I think it is is a recording from an MS flight sim like package comped onto a video recording of a real airfield, there is something about the way the prop stops that smells of FS (and in the first few frames, the uniformity of the smoke trail is fishy)..

Also when it bounces it slows to a near stop while it is in the air that just looks wrong....


Nice attempt, but a small edit would have made it much more convincing.

[UEL]

I think the plane is a version of CGI after it loses its wing.

Especially during the hokey landing.

I also think the word "thrill" on the side is different between the plane near the beginning, and as it lands. Mostly size of the letters and placement.



compared to



Then compare wing placement in the photos. In the air, there is a prominent amount of orange paint coming from the nose before it hits the wing. On the ground, the wing mounting is pretty well on the nose.

I'll submit that it is fake.

[Hans Off]

It seems to be a viral ad for "Killathrill"


See here

[Richard W]

It looks like CGI most of the way through, to me. Especially the landing and the way the light reflects off the plane and it just bounces and stops. It looks almost like a game - I could believe it was made using a flight simulator.

[Salamander]

Actually, there are some similarities with this video: http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=SsNIhB...eature=related

But that is a model plane, not a real one. As for the OP video, it was all in the realm of possibility (highly improbable but not impossible) until the final flip prior to landing and the landing itself.

[Photo Bob]

When I first watched the video my thought was that it was a RC plane, especially the way the wing floated away. The landing appeared to be of a model as well.

Then again I don't know enough about airplanes to make any determination and yet I still feel the need to comment.

[BoKu]

Fake. Avweb Insider concurs.

Video of the Twombly T-6 and Zelazny Zlin crashes show what a one-winged airplane of about that size acts like, and it's nothing like that.

I've seen wreckage from a couple of crashes where a wing was torn off, and it's never as neat a separation as that.

Also, the details of the wing joining surface on the fuselage look like those of an RC model, and very unlike any aerobatic aircraft. Airplanes like the Extras and Sukhoi and such have huge meaty wing spars situated so as to take maximum advantage of the full depth of the wing, and there's nothing of that to the fake airplane depicted in the video.

[Troberg]

I believe it's a fake, or we would have heard more about it. It also seems strange that the wing is lost at a moment where it's under relatively little stress, and not a few moments before when it was under much higher stress.

However, I also believe that such a landing could have been made by a skilled pilot. Those aircraft have an excellent power to weight ratio, and the pilot is doing exactly the right thing. He is turning it into a hover, then transitioning into a knife edge, neither of them requiring the lost wing, then, at the final moment, turning the aircraft around and before the missing lift is noticed, dropping it to the ground.

I've seen what Jurgis Kairys can do in his Sukhois, and I have no doubt that this could be done, but it wasn't done in this video.

[jimmy101_again]

Originally Posted by Photo Bob

When I first watched the video my thought was that it was a RC plane, especially the way the wing floated away.

I once small a pair of small airplanes collide. One plane lost a wing and the wing fluttered to the ground similar to a leaf falling off a tree. It took several seconds for the wing to fall perhaps 500 feet to the ground. The aircraft that lost the wing went into an immediate flat spin. There was absolutely no way that plane could have been controlled.

( The planes were in a landing approach and flying under visual flight rules. I've always thought that visual flight rules are amazingly dangerous. Most planes have HUGE blindspots in all kinds of directions. Two planes can fly in each others blindspots for great distances without realizing the other is there. )

[Gavida]

I just watched a german TV-Show with the name "Galileo", some kind of educational show (some might beg to differ ^^)

They showed how they made the clip with a model airplane and CGI and how they then posted on the internet to see how fast "video rumours" spread.
They even created the website for the non-existant pilot with faked pictures.
After the first week the video had 3 million hits already.


Link to german webpage from Pro7, the TV-Station that hosts Galileo (german only, sorry)

http://www.prosieben.de/wissen/galil...artikel/59449/

Gavida

[Gavida]

Here now a link to the show from yesterday (it is in german, but if you watch it you will see the segment where they show how they made the video)

http://www.prosieben.de/wissen/multi...oplayer/50001/

(the link normally is active for about a week or so and it might be neccessary to go to the page where you can select the episodes ("ganze Folgen" = "whole episodes")

Gavida