UPS A300 Crash - Birmingham

[a2capt]

Witness Peter Torres, a Civil Air Patrol member who said he is a former airline mechanic, said he thought he heard what sounded like a backfire from the jet's engines as the plane passed overhead. He rushed to his window."I saw the flash," of an apparent explosion, he said, followed by a "boom" that shook his home.

With that, and the other comments in the article, it sounds like it was too low and unable to maintain an approach to the endzone. Though nothing with ATC indicates a problem.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/14/us/alabama-cargo-plane-crash/index.html

The NTSB will figure it out.

[Brad]

Found the flight for the amateur analysts out there:

http://flightaware.com/live/flight/UPS1354

[stillamarine]

As a Birmingham Police officer I'll just comment on the location. It was about a mile maybe from the airport in a field that the airport owns. Luckily no houses hit. I did not go to the scene. It is not the first accident we have has in this area. Weather was severely overcast. I'd be very interested in seeing the NTSB report when it comes out.

[stillamarine]

What amuses me is that flight aware shows the flight as arrived.....about a little short.

[Brad]

Flightaware assumes a lot of their data I've found.

[a2capt]

It's typical for some flight data to drop off within that proximity of the runway, so the computer closes the record as completed.

[PHall]

As a Birmingham Police officer I'll just comment on the location. It was about a mile maybe from the airport in a field that the airport owns. Luckily no houses hit. I did not go to the scene. It is not the first accident we have has in this area. Weather was severely overcast. I'd be very interested in seeing the NTSB report when it comes out.

And now you know why there are "clear zones" at the ends of the runways at most airports. At least until the local city council grants a waiver to build in it.

Should be interesting to see what the black boxes have to say about this one.

[Critical AOA]

Or the orange ones.

[PHall]

Or the orange ones.

No, they were pretty much black and charred when they pulled them out of that still smoking tail section.

[MacGruff]

Or the orange ones.

They are called "black boxes" but have been some sort of very bright orange for a long time now. The theory being that it would be easier to identify them this way. Of course, as the next poster pointed out, in this case, they were pretty charred.

[Critical AOA]

Actually they are called the Cockpit Voice Recorder and the Flight Data Recorder or Digital Flight Data Recorder. 

There are dozens of black boxes on board commercial jets such as navigation & communication radios, air data computers, flight control computers, FADEC computers, auto pilot, GPS units, inertial nav units, and numerous others including black boxes for your Wi-Fi and other IFE.  They are indeed black in color. However, the two boxes that the NTSB is keen on finding and analyzing are none of these.  They are the two previously mentioned recorders which are actually orange.  The color they might end up being due to fire or heat damage is irrelevant to what they are.

The only people who call the two recorders black boxes are the media and the uneducated.

[PHall]

Actually they are called the Cockpit Voice Recorder and the Flight Data Recorder or Digital Flight Data Recorder. 

There are dozens of black boxes on board commercial jets such as navigation & communication radios, air data computers, flight control computers, FADEC computers, auto pilot, GPS units, inertial nav units, and numerous others including black boxes for your Wi-Fi and other IFE.  They are indeed black in color. However, the two boxes that the NTSB is keen on finding and analyzing are none of these.  They are the two previously mentioned recorders which are actually orange.  The color they might end up being due to fire or heat damage is irrelevant to what they are.

The only people who call the two recorders black boxes are the media and the uneducated.

And the guys who fly on the airplanes that have them, like me.

And you're semi-right, if we needed to refer to one box or the other then we would refer to the box we're talking about, i.e. DFR, CVR.
But if we were talking about both of them them the term "Black Boxes" was usually used.

At least that's how we did it at the 452d AMW on the C-141C's.

YMMV