Any pilots or aircraft experts in the room?

He could have sabotaged one of the two drop tanks attacked under the wings so that it wobbles upon jettison. The fix, is to tell the pilot NOT to jettison the drop tanks. Then again, landing with the drop tanks still attached might not be safe at the intended landing field (ex: too short). Or that the F-86 is to engage in combat at which point you definitely don't want drop tanks attached.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlvLphy1fxA

-cb

Ok I'll take a stab at this. I'm a pilot, but not of the F-86 era.

The information source: http://http://www.3squadron.org.au/subpages/Weymouth.htm

Early Avon F-86 Sabres were prone to flame-outs attributed to a faulty fuel pump. This problem was especially evident when flying inverted. One pilot reported he experienced a series of three flame-outs in succession and the cockpit filed with misty fumes. Resulting in very low visibility from the cockpit. The defective fuel pump was replaced.

However, if a saboteur replaced the new pump with an old design pump, a pilot could experience flame-outs and a resulting visibility problem that could require a bailout.

Also, the Avon F-86 was prone to control oscillations that were very difficult for inexperienced pilots. F-86's of that period were not equipped with auto pilots to assist the pilot in control surface management. The control oscillations were especially difficult when flying with auxiliary fuel tanks.

Good luck!

How much detail do you need?

Loosening an oil or hydraulic fitting is a time-worn cliche maneuver. While knowledgeable pilots may groan, the general audience may be fine with that simplified example.

That would be irreversible in-flight, though.

Does the saboteur know about the workings of this plane or is he just a commoner when it comes to plane mechanics? If the latter is true, then you would want something pretty simple and it would fit well with him trying to temporarily disable the plane and overdoing it. Just food for thought, I don't know enough about planes to come up with a damage scenario.

It's hard to sabotage a jet without some special access since the preflight check catches all the routine things. This also depends on what maneuvers are being flown at the air show. There are plenty of ways to screw with acrobatics, a simple altimeter setting could be dangerous if not caught. Landing gear can be an issue, but most pilots would choose a belly landing over bailing out.

Jeff

You can't fix a hydraulic problem while the plane is in the air. But most planes have redundant systems, though I am unsure about the F-86.

There is also the fact that hydraulic fluid is very flammable, so if the jet catches fire, the pilot is not going to try a belly landing, he is going to eject.

profen4 said:

Just curious, what how would this problem manifest to the pilot? Would he have to eject? What would happen in the air?

Click to expand...

Hydraulic fluid is flammable. How much so I don't know.

Hydraulics have many uses in a plane. So, again, it depends on how much detail you want and/or need. At the most simple level, hydraulics are used in the flight controls. The control stick would possibly either freeze or wiggle in place without any effect on flight.

Like I said, this is a rather simplistic plot point. Sort of like the facial recognition in today's police shows going through national databases in seconds. Someone who knows is going to bust a gut. But for the general public, it should be good enough.

robjvargas said:

Hydraulic fluid is flammable. How much so I don't know.

Hydraulics have many uses in a plane. So, again, it depends on how much detail you want and/or need. At the most simple level, hydraulics are used in the flight controls. The control stick would possibly either freeze or wiggle in place without any effect on flight.

Like I said, this is a rather simplistic plot point. Sort of like the facial recognition in today's police shows going through national databases in seconds. Someone who knows is going to bust a gut. But for the general public, it should be good enough.

Click to expand...

Skydrol isn't flammable. See technical standards orders for aviation fluids, FAA website.

profen4 said:

Thanks a lot guys, you've given me some great ideas.

To answer the questions:

The guy doesn't have any specific knowledge, but could get help if need be.

He will have special access to the aircraft before take off. But not alone time, so it has to be before, or something you could do to the plane without someone noticing, or something you could do in the evening that would be missed.

It doesn't have to be too specific.

Click to expand...

I can't think of anything that an unqualified character could do that wouldn't be discovered either during the daily inspection or during the pre-takeoff checks.

The only thing I can think of that I'd accept as a plot device would be to put a self-adhesive bomb in one of the speed brake recesses with a trip mechanism so it's armed by the brakes closing on engine startup and fired by the brakes opening again.

1) The character would need specific instruction to place the thing correctly.

2) The bomb maker would need access to a derelict fuselage that still had the speed brakes fitted. There are a few of these about.

3) the crew would have to be distracted AND the bomb would have to match the aircraft structure, AND it would have to be about the size of an I phone, AND it would have to be placed so the crew wouldn't spot it without a torch AND it would have to be on the sunny side of the aeroplane.

Anyone good enough to fly airshow in fast jets won't be hurried through a pre-flight. Have a look at the special features for 'Top Gun' and the death of Art Scholl. It is a challenge to create characters who are both professional and still plausible with regard to uncertainty, self-doubt etc. and the pilot and crew won't be subject to uncertainty or self-doubt, they'll have the right stuff.

If you character calls the pilot (assuming he knows flight radio procedures- see FAR Pt 91 etc.) after the pilot commences a manouvre which requires the speed brakes to avoid hitting the ground you have your 'irreversible situation' but it will be tight.

Good luck with it. I suspect the realistic outcome won't be 'saving the day' but ending up in hospital with an ejection seat handle fitted into the cavity of your choise!

Maybe you could sabotage/drug the pilot. He's losing motor skill and ejects with his last bit of strength.

LeFevre said:

Maybe you could sabotage/drug the pilot. He's losing motor skill and ejects with his last bit of strength.

Click to expand...

I was just thinking that same thing. Or perhaps sabotage his communications somehow.

> Or perhaps sabotage his communications somehow.

There are ways around that built into the air traffic system. Transponder codes, secondary radio sources, light gun signals, etc, are part of the fail-back scenarios of modern air travel. Should an airliner loses communications today, that plane gets to its destination regardless. Passengers would not even notice it.

Perhaps another way would be to sabotage the oxygen supply. Put some other gas mix in.

-cb

I would go with contaminated fuel using water as a contaminate. Though jet engines can eat water for breakfast... it could cause a temporary flame-out. On restart, you could get a compressor stall caused by excessive fuel. Using a small stretch of the imagination to misted a canopy as described in my previous post.

Early jet engines such as employed in an F-86 were prone to compressor stalls.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressor_stall

You could always have the character drop something in the cockpit and hope. There's all sorts of tales of loose things in the cockpit creating havoc, from pencils getting stuck under foot pedals to people getting smacked in the face and bruised by their own chocolate bars. It's rather luck-of-the-draw, but a handful of loose change or an open box of pencils would not be an aerobatic pilot's friend.

profen4 said:

I have a character in one of my books who wants to sabotage an aircraft at an airshow ( a jet ). An F-86 Avon Sabre

The character wants to save the day. He sabotages the plane, but at the last second he wants to pretend he's figured it out and radio the pilot to warn him, and save the day. But I want the character to have done something that is actually irreversible (as in, I want him to have made a mistake). Or at least, something the pilot can't fix from where he is.

I want the sabotage to be catastrophic, and for the only solution to be for the pilot to punch out/eject.

Can you think of some kind of sabotage that might work for this situation? The jet is an F-86 Avon Sabre.

Click to expand...

I'm not a licensed pilot, but I'm an aviation buff, and write about warbirds such as the F-86.

Frankly, I find the scenario too farfetched for several reasons.

Why does the character have access to the jet? He's obviously not an aircraft mechanic. Aircraft access before flight at airshows is pretty restricted and the pilots do do a walk around check before takeoff.

Now, if he works for the airport or the airshow itself he might have access. Especially if he's the one towing planes from the "static line" to the area where they will be started up to fly. He could also be part of the airshow security.

How will he be able to sabotage the plane without anyone seeing though? Typically aircraft at an airshow aren't in a hanger. They are usually on display at a static line where people can walk up and view them. When they need to be prepped for a flight they are towed into a different part of the ramp where no one else is allowed for the engine start and then to taxi onto the taxiway and runway. Anything he does in any of those areas is going to be too public to hide.

How does he radio the pilot? Unless he's in the tower he's not going to typically have access to a radio that can transmit on the pilot's frequencies. A receiver, yes, but a transmitter, no. Now there are handheld transmitters, but why would he have one? It has to make some sense.

And he's not going to be able to run into the tower to "try to warn" the pilot. Security is tighter than that.

The total combination of plot elements is why I don't think this works.

If you just want the character to sabotage the plane, and not get caught, that's doable. Especially if he has some knowledge of aircraft systems and access. The more trusted he is, the better. If he doesn't have knowledge of aircraft systems though anything he does is either most likely going to be ineffective or so obvious that it will be caught during pre-flight.

Then there's the problem again of radioing the pilot to "save the day." Again, how does he have access to the radio?

I understand what you are trying to do with the whole "he causes the problem because he wants to save the day" idea. It's like a firefighter who starts a fire so he can rescue someone and be a hero. It does happen. However, in this specific situation, I can't see any realistic way for it to work.

For it to work you have to not only figure out a realistic sabotage that he could do, in public, without getting caught, but also have a realistic reason for the same character to have access to the tower to radio the pilot. That's a stretch.

EDIT: One thing I forgot: What's the character's excuse for knowing about the "problem" but only finding out about it after the plane takes off? Seems like he's setting himself up to be a suspect here if he creates a problem that only he knows about and then calls the pilot to warn him about the problem, but only after the aircraft is in flight.

I'm a pilot:

Whatever you do, don't mention avionics.
They didn't have those back in those days.

Good luck!

A question for those who know these things. What would happen if you left a can of soda (or maybe a can of spray paint?) wedged under the seat or somewhere out of sight? Would the pressure change cause it to blow up at altitude? If so, I've got to assume that suddenly filling the cockpit with black paint could cause the pilot some problems.

And if the culprit who left it there could have some logical reason for having such near the aircraft (stenciling something?) then he could "suddenly realize" the can was missing and it must be in the plane.

The air inside the can would expand as you would expect, but not to the degree that would make it explode violently.
For that to happen, the pressure inside the airplane would have to drop dramatically.

As in a decompression for instance.

So, if the pressurisation system was working normally. It wouldn't be a problem.

It just depends how high the aircraft climbed (and therefore) how low the air pressure inside the plane got.

If the f86 wasn't going to be flying too high in this chapter, then the can thing wouldn't be believable.

Standard procedure at modern airshows in my part of the world is not to fly a course that could carry you into the crowd. I'm not quite sure when that came in, but it won't take too much Googling to find out when that really nasty airshow accident happened.

Meanwhile, bird strikes can be catastrophic, it all depends on what sort of bird you hit, where they hit you, and what you're doing at the time.

A bird strike that puts a plane onto course with the crowd? Possible, but I'd probably add it to the 'heavy-handed author' column. A bird strike deliberately caused by another person, when the plane in question is going at a couple of hundred knots plus? Er - no. That's not a bird strike, that's truly impressive ground-to-air shooting, even if the missile happens to be a frozen chicken.

Does it have to be an air show? A plane ended up in the crowd at an air race just a couple years ago. And does it need to be that particular type of plane?

Also - does the plane need to go into the audience? Planes at air shows have gone into surrounding neighborhoods and hit houses in the past, too.