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Tests begin on cause of Stratoliner crash (fuel exhaustion?)
Posted by bdk on Wed Apr 03, 2002 11:25:06 AM
In reply top Options Explored for Stratoliner Restoration posted by bdk on Wed Apr 03, 2002 11:12:12 AM
Tests begin on cause of Stratoliner crash in Elliott Bay
Seattle Times 04/03/02
author: Kyung M. Song
Divers are expected to return today to the spot where pilots ditched a Boeing Stratoliner in Elliott Bay on Thursday, scavenging for missing parts that could make the one-of-a-kind vintage plane nearly whole.
Investigators also today will begin tests to determine, among other things, whether the four-engine aircraft went down because the fuel tank had run empty.
Boeing is still mulling whether it would be feasible to restore the plane to flight-worthy condition.
Yesterday, the company gave Associated Press (AP) and KING-TV journalists, selected as pool reporters, a close-up look at the Stratoliner 307, which has been hauled to a hanger behind Boeing's former corporate headquarters building on East Marginal Way.
The Clipper Flying Cloud, first delivered to Pan Am in 1940, is structurally intact. But the accident ? and the subsequent daylong immersion in salt water ? left it looking hardly like a pampered airplane whose band of 30 volunteer restorers had formerly required onboard visitors to slip paper booties over their shoes.
The damage tally included torn skin behind one wing, dented cowlings, swollen wooden flooring and doors, a corroded aluminum skin and stained wall fabric.
The AP reported that the sea has left its mark in gray streaks and the threat of internal corrosion. The crews are doing their best to counter that with fresh water, a soap solution and Fels Naptha soap, a World War II-vintage remedy.
Inside, the carpeted wooden floors are spongy underfoot.
The cockpit is bare with a few dangling wires, its instruments and radio among the first essentials to be removed, dried and cleaned. The instrument panel had to be recovered quickly; it's irreplaceable.
All the blue-and-white-upholstered bench cushions on the starboard side have been removed, though the roomy blue leather single seats on the port side were still in place yesterday ? along with the rich leathery smell, despite the damp.
The embossed beige wall fabric ? rewoven for this plane in Pan Am's signature global-map pattern and hand-sewn into place ? was stained by the mix of salt water and hydraulic fluid that poured through the interior as the plane was lifted out. The hope is to remove the fabric for cleaning before the damage becomes permanent.
Boeing said it received dozens of e-mails from people offering to help make the Stratoliner fly again. Boeing built just 10 Stratoliners before World War II interrupted the airliner market, and the Clipper Flying Cloud is the sole surviving version.
Boeing used its own employees, volunteer labor and donated materials during the seven-year restoration. Douglass Interior Products of Bellevue donated blue Scottish leather for the single seats as well as carpet.
John Hroncich, Douglass's vice president of sales and marketing, said the company "most definitely" again would provide the material for free.
Meanwhile, the National Transportation Safety Board continues its probe into why the Stratoliner's third engine surged unexpectedly before all four engines failed.
Kurt Anderson, a senior air-safety investigator with the Seattle office of the safety board, said investigators will test the plane's fuel gauge as well as the fuel-tank senders, which measures fuel levels and relays the signals to the fuel gauge, for possible malfunction.
Anderson said one possible cause of the accident under examination is that the aircraft simply ran out of fuel, but he said investigators are also looking at other possibilities.