ORIGINAL: icepilot

Raf,
I was flying my Simjet 300 powered SpiderJets F-16 during an extremely cold jet meeting here in Norway this winter. I was setting up for a landing because I was freezing my nails off, at the same time a friend of mine landed his Merlin powered Eurofighter and taxied by me. With the noise from his turbine, I was unaware of the fact that I had a flameout on finals, and proceeded like I had a running turbine with 25-30% power.

The plane just came to a complete stop in the air approx. 50 feet up, and fell straight to the ground with the wheels out. The "landing" caused the wheels, legs, retracts and formers to brake off, and the flex in this moment caused the plane to bounce maybe 15 feet up again. The amazing thing was that there was very little structural damage to the plane, and all internal components were completely unharmed.

I had almost 1 litre of fuel left, and the weight during the crash would have been about 13 kg. We are talking about a serious impact here, but the fact that it pancaked on the runway and the wheels, legs and retract formers broke away propably saved it!

Afterwards, I was thinking about my failsafe settings and wondering whether to set it to turbine idle, wheels out and full up elevator to try and reduce speed and hope for a loop or two and a pancake crash instead of the rather optimistic slight elevator, slight turn hoping that the plane would land itself if control is lost. After all, if you loose control and the plane goes up in a tight loop. it would be much easier to regain control than if you snaproll it.

Here are a couple of pictures - a flyby and falling out of the sky! Notice the elevators going down!! Heard of the bent stick??!!