I can't imagine going out like that..

Well beyond the recurring dreams.

I'd have just opened the door and parachuted to safety/CP

Not shitting you here. My dad used to work for a major small aircraft company and one of the test pilots that worked there had to put a plane down in a farmers corn field once and had to bail out. The farmer described seeing the parachute pop up from below the rows of corn. He survived and flew my family to California once on vacation.

Not recommending it, however.

Believe this is SOP there, to avoid possible surface-to-air fire

What do you have against vacationing in California?

FWIW, Bugs Bunny first appeared in a cartoon 75 years ago today.

dang. I did not know that.

Napoleon gives his condolences

http://www.lolriot.com/wp-content/up...ying-hands.gif

LMAO

A guy that was a close friend of my quasi-flight instructor tried to do that and learned the first lesson in setting a plane down in a cornfield the very very hard way:

Always aim for the middle.

He tried to land at the front of the field and one of the wheels hit the fence (I believe it was the fence; could've been a power line). It flipped the plane right as it was about to touch down and killed the guy.

Fence or phone line, the concept is the same - aim for the center where you don't have to worry about that crap. The glide ratio's on small aircraft are truly amazing. Those things will damn near hover so long as the prop doesn't go into that funky retro-spin thing (it has a different name that I don't recall; it essentially cavitates and drops your nose). If you can get to a field, you can get to the center of it.

Not really. It's almost definitely a stall; the question is why.

I think the load shift caused it. Once that nose went up, there just wasn't enough power to maintain lift.

And when that happens, it's essentially akin to a kite-string going slack. There's no control until you can build your airspeed back up up to create enough lift for your flight surfaces to function again; essentially getting the string taught.

Like I said, the guy almost had it. You could see he had just started to get some stability back when he got it rounded out and you could hear the motors wailing. Give him another 100 feet of altitude and he either gets it back in the air or at least brings it to the ground with enough control to not end up in a fireball.

EDIT: Eh....he'd have needed more than that; he hadn't really started forward yet. Damn that thing went down fast. The guy probably didn't have enough time to comprehend the gravity of the situation before the lights went out.

Ick.

Steep departure, which is normal at Bagram. Looks like a load shift and stall. He (I presume) almost had it right at the end, too...

Altitude is life.

almost looks like they were trying to put the gear back down

Oh well.

Could be a CG issue, could also be a power management issue. I think if you asked the army, that is a prevalent problem in afghanistan. Bagram is only ~5000 feet though, but depending on temperature, I could see it.