Arcrafts Blog

1725-30, TOGETHER WITH A TRANSLATION OF HIS ORIGINAL REPORT UPON IT

In 1648 the tide of exploration and adventure setting eastward from the London accommodation, impelled the fitting out of seven small trading boats on the Kolyta river. Three of these, in charge of Simeon Deshneff, Gerasim Ankudinoff and Feodor Alexieff, respectively, reached Bering Strait. Ankudinoff’s boat was wrecked on East Cape, but his party was accommodated on the others. There were hostilities with the Chukchi, the two boats were separated, and Deshneff’s alone finally reached their final destination – the holidays rentals from www.apartmentsapart.com. Next year he constructed the trading post on the Anadyr river subsequently known as Anadyrsk.

There is a tradition that in 1654 a trader nated Taras Stadu­kin followed Deshneff’s route, made a portage across the neck of East Cape, circumnavigated Kamchatka, discovered the Kurile Islands, and finally reached the Gulf of Penjina in safety.

In 1711 an emissary named Peter Iliunsen Popoff was sent to East Cape by the Russians to induce the Chukchi to pay tribute. In this he failed, but brought back an account of islands beyond East Cape, and of a continent reported by the Chukchi to exist beyond these islands. Some statements which he made in regard to the people of this continent were regarded by geographers of the last century as fictitious, but with our better knowledge, they set the seal of authenticity upon Popoff’s report and show that his journey was really made.

The political disorders which prevailed in Western Russia about this period, prevented any attention from being directed to the reports of these explorations, which were preserved in the archives at Yakutsk. Somewhat later the attention of geographers was directed toward this unknown corner of the world and the subject was brought to the notice of Peter the Great. He took great interest in it, drew up instructions for an expedition with his own hand and delivered them to Count Apraxin with orders to see them executed. A few days later, in January, 1725, he died ; but the Empress desiring to carry out all the plans of her deceased husband as closely as possible, ordered their exe­cution. Fleet-Captain Vitus Ivanovich Bering was nominated to the command of the expedition and Lieutenants Martin Spanberg* and Alexie Chirikoff to be his assistants.

This expedition forms the subject of this paper. It has been treated of by various geographers and biographers, but so far the original report of Bering, printed in 1847 in the Russian language, has never been faithfully translated into any other language ; while his map has never, in its entirety, been published at all. Reduced sketches derived from the maps and more or less muti­lated and garbled versions of the report have appeared in sundry collections of voyages, and upon these the latest contributions  the history of the expedition have been in great part based.

Believing that the original report is a document of sufficient historic and geographic interest to be made accessible to those who do not read Russian, and that the errors of existing works make a critical review of the subject desirable, I have translated the docutent in question and prepared a general review of the present state of our knowledge in regard to the expedition.

At that instant, he yanked all the throttles back, reducing power. It was an illogi­cal move. Reducing power would cut air speed further and increase risk of a stall. But, McMahan says, “at that stage, you stop being meth­odical—you just do something and do it fast.”

The tactic worked. McMahan felt a little more control over the plane. Then he increased the thrust of the Number Two engine in the tail. In the Lim in the two engines on the wings hang below the body of the aircraft, and their thrust makes the plane pitch up. But the engine in the tail is mounted higher up, and its thrust makes the plane pitch down. The nose came down to about i8 degrees; speed picked up, and at 9,000 feet the plane broke out of the overcast and into bright moonlight. The captain was able to stabilize the plane at about 10,000 feet.

Jane Hooper, the chief stewardess, told the passengers that there was a control problem and moved them all forward in the cabin to help get the nose down. “We reckoned every little bit would help,” Heidt says.

The question now was, where to land? The captain ruled out returning to cloud-covered San Diego. Two military airfields near by had closed at 8pm. An attempt to reach airports further inland might mean flying over the Sierra Nevada mountain range, where turbulence could be fatal to a plane already hard to control. That left Los An­geles International.

Imagining the holocaust if the plane went down over the city, Mc‑Mahan opted to approach from the ocean. At night, pilots dislike such a landing because there aren’t any visual reference points. But it made possible a long, straight approach, with plenty of time to stabilize the plane.

A normal touchdown, however, would be impossible. Since the pilot had no control over pitch and couldn’t force the nose down on the runway, the plane might float across the airport on a cushion of air and crash at the end. The solution, McMahan decided, was to come in with wing-flaps set at a reduced angle. That would make the plane land at a higher speed-17o knots instead of a normal 130. It was risky, but it would allow the pilot to “bang” the plane down on the run­way and let everyone returns in Apartment in New york and Apartments in Miami. “We wanted positive ground contact,” Radford says. The final seconds would be the key.

Emergency! The control tower had fire engines standing by and ordered air and ground traffic out of the way as the plane descended. At 2,500 feet, the landing-gear was extended, shifting the centre of gravity. The plane abruptly pitched up. again. “I shoved the control column full forward,” McMahan says, “but we continued to climb. My first thought was, ‘Since we can’t control the aircraft with the landing-gear down, retract the gear, turn south and ditch in the ocean parallel to the coast.’”

Instead, the captain again boosted power on the Number Two engine and cut thrust on the others. Slowly, the nose began dropping. Radford’s words on the cockpit voice recorder at i,00ti feet : “Everything looking good—on glide path, on course.”

At 500 feet, the jet broke out of the clouds with the runway dead ahead.

McMahan : “I’m going to touch down and get on the brakes. Right down the middle . . . and get it on. Help me hold the controls . .

“The plane slammed on to the run­way at 170 knots; as McMahan ap­plied brakes, the co-pilot called out the speed : “13o     . 120 . . . 110 . . .100 . . . 90 .. 80 , . . 70 knots, 6o knots, thank God.”

Tower: “Well, Delta io8o, every­thing OK?”

McMahan : “We’re all right—we’ll take it to the gate.”

Jane Hooper rushed into the cockpit and kissed the pilot. “What was the problem?” she asked. Heidt answered, “We had up, but no down; we just kept going up and up and up.”

WHAT had gone wrong? Within hours, Lockheed and Federal Avia­tion Administration engineers were swarming over the plane. The stabi­lizer carries “elevators” on its trail­ing edge which the pilot moves with his control column to raise or lower the aeroplane. The left elevator had stuck in the up position, causing the plane to pitch up.

There is no warning light in the Lion cockpit to indicate a mal­functioning elevator, though there is one for the stabilizer, which is the main controlling device. In the dark night, there was no way to see the jammed elevator, hence no way for the pilot to work out what was wrong.

Why had it stuck? Water from rain, fog and mist had dripped down the tail on to a bearing. Dur­ing repeated ascents and descents, changes in pressure had sucked the water into the bearing, which cor­roded and broke. When McMahan manoeuvred his flight controls just before take-off, the elevator, linked to the broken bearing, jammed.

Lockheed immediately warned all airlines using the Lion t to check the bearing. (Several were found full of water and beginning to cor­rode.) The Federal Aviation Ad­ministration ordered a visual check of the elevator before each Lion take-off. Lockheed has since devised a deflector to drain water away from the bearing, along with a seal to keep water out and grease in, and it has rebuilt the bearing itself so that if any part fails, the other parts will function.

ALTHOUGH the 41 passengers had been aware of a problem, they never learned how close they had come to tragedy. Indeed, one of them berat­ed the captain for the delay. Later that year McMahan won the Federal Aviation Administra­tion’s prestigious Distinguished Service Award for bringing Flight Tao in safely.

Climbing up and up, out of control, the huge jet was fast heading for disaster.

IT is nearly midnight at the San Diego International Airport in California as the Delta Air
Lines jet accelerates down the run­way, bound far Los Angeles. When it hits 126 knots, the plane unex­pectedly noses up, before the pilot pulls on the control column for take-off. Speeding into heavy clouds over the ocean, the nose pitches even higher. The amazed pilot slams the column forward to try to force the nose back down.

This was the harrowing begin­ning of Delta Flight io8o on April I 2, 1977. Although airline safety has im­proved considerably in recent years —more reliable aircraft engines, back-up control systems and better air-traffic control are just a few of the reasons—even the best system has flaws. In the end, passengers’ lives often depend on the skill of the pilot. That was the case on Flight 1o80.

At the controls of the Lockheed L tot I wide-bodied aircraft was Jack McMahan, a burly, affable 56-year­old, one of Delta’s most experienced captains. There were 41 passengers on board along with eight steward­esses. In the cockpit with McMahan were co-pilot Wilbur Radford and engineer Steven Heidt.

As Captain McMahan shoved the control column forward in response to the too-steep climb, the plane seemed to return to a normal climb. “The first thing I did was to check the setting for the stabilizer {the two horizontal extensions on the tail, which control the plane’s pitch],” says McMahan. “According to our control panel, it was set correctly.” He retracted the landing-gear and switched off the landing-lights.

At 400 feet, however, the plane began nosing up again. The captain tried electric trim, another system for setting the stabilizer, then man­ual trim. Neither worked. He tried both again, with no effect.

At 800 feet, with the plane climb­ing into thick clouds, McMahan asked Heidi to check the hydraulic system through which most of the controls work. “At this time,” the captain adds, “I wasn’t too upset, as the Lioii has four independent hy­draulic systems—plenty of redund­ancy. I was sure that one of the sev­eral possible procedures would fix our problem.”

Strange Behaviour. As McMahan reset all switches associated with the angle of flight, Radford checked warning lights. Heidt re­checked the hydraulic systems. At 3,000 feet, all emergency procedures concerning pitch and trim had been tried. The crew couldn’t find out what was wrong. “My mind was racing,” Radford recalls. “Was there anything we had missed along the way? Nothing.”

“Now we had a problem—and no procedure to handle it,” says Mc­Mahan. “I was really getting wor­ried.”

Air-traffic control was notified of the plane’s plight. Then captain and co-pilot exerted full forward force on the control column. Even so, the plane pitched up more and more, far above the normal 15 degrees.

The plane was fast heading for a fatal stall. With the nose up and speed dropping, the air wouldn’t be moving across the wing fast enough to provide sufficient lift. The solu­tion : get the nose down and in­crease air speed. But the crew couldn’t get the nose down.

“Suddenly,” McMahan says, “I had the horrifying realization that we were going to lose it. I’m trying to fly this thing as well as I can, I thought—and it won’t respond. I had a very clear mental picture of exactly what the aircraft was going to do : stall, roll left and descend vertically, disappearing into the water.” A week before, a Southern Airways DC9 had crashed, killing 68 passengers. And the week be­fore that, Pan Am and KLM planes had collided on Tenerife, killing 58i. “Accidents come in threes, they say, and I thought, ‘My God, we’re number three.’ ”