A small plane is a whole ‘nother ball game. That Killathrill hoax brought out so many hoots from the experts. The definite small plane wing loss case is the Neil William Zlin incident, where the wing didn’t actually come off. It flew itself knife edge with the loose wing actually remaining relatively level, then he inverted the plane. It’s caught on film, as are other cases where the wing did come off. There’s a uniform behavior of the remainer of the plane after the wing comes off, including that even if the plane does agree to keep flying, it flies inverted. Not that it succeeds in landing. This story didn’t fit it.

During World War II the Corsair F4U was content to fly level and right side up at speed, but when the engine was throttled back, as with a landing, it wanted to roll. The P Factor, engine torque, countered the natural tendency of the design to want to fly inverted; but when the P Factor was gone, the plane wanted to roll over. Also the right wing had a tendency to stall. A spoiler was built into the wing to be raised during landings to fight the roll.

F-15 land on one wing:
http://duoquartuncia.blogspot......-wing.html

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The Golden Age of Flight was the most dangerous, there was so much they didn’t understand about flying. Running out of lift over a box canyon, microbursts, all manner of inexplicable problems. Why indeed would a plane descend to a runway, then refuse to actually let the wheels set down? And this ‘Porpoise Effect,’ hitting the runway and bouncing into the air again and again, each time harder than the last until the plane comes apart. How can this be?

Ah, the biplane. If 2 wings are good, are 3 even better? Or is the middle wing mostly ineffective, counterproductive, even?

I’m not sure I believe the story of a plane missing one wing being balanced and flown. Even the B17 never succeeded at that. When the wing came off, noone in the plane could make it out, it rolled over too suddenly, even as the pilot tried to use the remaining aileron to slow it. Hard enough to keep a plane level if a wingtip came off. There were several fake videos making the rounds in the last few years of people landing radio control planes when a wing falls off. There is such a thing as ‘Flying 3D’ in RC, meaning the prop is up like a helicopter and they can settle to the ground in a way that would be a terrible crash for a real plane.

Meanwhile, a German television show created a fake video of what was supposed to be a real stunt plane (Looks like an Extra 300 to me) that loses a wing and lands. This included an interview with the stunt pilot telling what it took to land the plane. I haven’t been able to find an English transcript of the episode where they revealed the hoax, so I only know they released it online and reported the reaction. I do know it had been roundly debunked before they went public.

When you make a steep banked turn, you have to roll the yoke back and fight the plane from going further into the bank, basically if the plane were level it would want to bank the opposite way, if the ailerons were merely straightened out as in level flight it would steepen the bank. I was told in flight training that if one of the flaps stuck and the other went down, that could be enough to flip the plane.

And then there’s the moment of my first solo landing, as I got onto the runway but had the right side suddenly rise as whatever wind got under the wing, and even as I gently increased my counter turn to the right, it just wouldn’t come down. (Well, after several LONG seconds it did.) So I have to question such tall tale as the pilot bouncing in out out of his seat to balance the plane with a wing gone. With whatever 60mph windforce hitting him, he’d have never been able to hold on anyway.

If you want some REAL adventures in flying disasters and near disasters, there’s Ernest Gann’s ‘Fate is the Hunter.’ A classic from probably the greatest aviation writer ever.

Oh, but that airliner landing on the 405 freeway using the Jeep Grand Cherokee for front landing gear just HAS to be real.

http://www.spike.com/video/405/204155