Talk:Samoan Clipper
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Bill Sage
I've moved the Bill Sage document here pending a cleanup I have on my to-do list.
According to Don Metzger, whose father Sam Metzger was a personal friend of Ed Musick, the Samoa Clipper developed some sort of engine problem shortly after taking off from Pago Pago Harbor in American Samoa's island of Tutuila. The S-42 was fully loaded with fuel, and was over the gross weight maximum required for a safe landing. Becasue of this, Captain Musick elected to dump fuel prior to setting her down.
Metzger told me that because of the weight and loss of power, the S-42 was circling the harbor with flaps extended to maintain the necessary lift while fuel dumping was in progress. Apparently, Sikorsky had never tested fuel dumping while flaps were fully extended, and the position of the fuel dump vents on the wing coupled with the shape of the airflow caused by the flaps extended created a sort of back eddy of vaporizing fuel which lingered and grew around the trailing edge of the wing.
Apparently, the vaporized fuel air mixture grew to a critical mass large enough and in close enough proximity to the engine exhaust manifold incandescent gases to create optimal conditions to detonate catastrophically. In other words, the dumped fuel and the hot engine exhausts created a fuel-air bomb large enough to blow the Samoa Clipper to bits, killing all on board.
I heard this explanation from Don Metzger when he was General Manager of KGU Radio in Honolulu back around 1985. He had a picture of his Dad Sam Mezger on the wall of his office showing him in a Glenn Curtiss Pusher. Don told me that Sam held U.S. Pilot's License #15, and when Ed Musick landed in Honolulu back in the mid 1930's, Don as a little boy had been given a tour of the S-42 by Captain Musick. Unfortunately, Don Passed away about a decade ago, but this is what he told me about the fate of the Samoa Clipper, to the best of my recollection.
Bill Sage, Honolulu sagecorp@lava.net
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samoan_Clipper"
WikiProject class rating
This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as stub, and the rating on other projects was brought up to Stub class. BetacommandBot 01:22, 9 November 2007 (UTC)
Removed unsourced hearsay "explanation" from article which was not consistent with the official report.
I've just removed the old explanation for this accident, which was largely unsourced speculation. Most of its claims were not made in the official Bureau of Air Commerce report on this accident, which I grabbed from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University's accident report archive and have uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. The report's conclusions were far less definite, since there simply wasn't enough evidence available to arrive at a specific cause.
The explanation which was previously in the article came from an IP editor's uncited personal account back in 2005; it is repeated above in the section "Bill Sage". This account was then cleaned up by another editor. Since then the contents had remained mostly unchanged, apart from infobox additions and various detail edits.
Bill Sage's secondhand explanation, even though it is given as if the definitive cause had been determined, actually seems to be more of a speculative "just-so story". In fact the official report makes no mention of the flaps at all. Very little wreckage was recovered from the crash, and there was nothing to indicate the state of the flight controls. It's not at all clear that the flaps were even deployed or that there would have been any need for them. From what I've seen on figures for the performance of the original S-42, the S-42-B had plenty of reserve power and was perfectly capable of level flight on three engines without flaps, even at high gross weight, let alone while dumping fuel to lighten weight. (In Igor Sikorsky's 1934 speech to the Royal Aeronautical Society on the original S-42, he gives its three-engine service ceiling as 7,500 feet. Although the S-42-B was somewhat heavier, it also had more powerful engines and constant-speed propellers, so I'd expect it to perform similarly.) In fact, the accident report claimed that the Samoan Clipper should have already been below its maximum landing weight when dumping started. The real reason it was dumping fuel, again according to the report's reasoning, was because the topography of Pago Pago harbor, where the aircraft intended to land, required a steep landing approach, which made a lower landing weight highly desirable.
The report said nothing about how dumped fuel might interact with airflow around the wing. The supposition that airflow around the wing caused a cloud of fuel vapor to build up and blow up the airplane like a fuel-air bomb seems to be an invention without evidence. The report did consider it likely that the engine exhausts might have somehow ignited dumping fuel, but it also mentioned that other sources of ignition were possible. In the end it could not determine how the fire was started. Furthermore the sole eyewitness account and the wreckage that was found actually indicated that the plane did not immediately blow up at altitude, but rather landed or tried to land and exploded on or near the water's surface.