Talk:Samoan Clipper

message: 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)
thread_title:  WikiProject class rating

message: 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.
--Colin Douglas Howell (talk) 06:16, 18 December 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removed unsourced hearsay "explanation" from article which was not consistent with the official report.