Convair CV-990
| Convair CV-990 Coronado | |
|---|---|
 NASA's Convair CV-990 |
|
| Type: | Four - engined narrow-body aircraft |
| Design country: | |
| Manufacturer: | |
| First flight: |
January 24, 1961 |
| Production time: |
1961 to 1963 |
| Number of pieces: |
37 |
.jpg)
The Convair CV-990 , also known as Convair 990 or Coronado , is a four-engine jet airliner produced by the Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corporation , called Convair. It is essentially an enlarged version of the Convair CV-880 .
technology
In the construction of the Convair 990 , a prototype was not used , as the base model Convair 880 Golden Arrow , which had been introduced shortly before, was built on and therefore no “new” aircraft, but an improved version was to be produced. The CV-990 is a good three meters longer than the CV-880. The CV-990 should be a little faster than the CV-880 with a cruising speed of approx. Mach 0.90. Therefore it got a new wing with flow bodies (also called Küchemann carrots ) to prevent the air flow on the upper side of the wing from exceeding the speed of sound, at the same time they served as tanks. The Convair CV-990 had four General Electric CJ805-23B turbofan engines with an aft fan design. With aft-fan engines, the fan stage is not at the front, but at the rear of the engine. A disadvantage of these engines was their large amount of smoke.
history
The first Convair 990 left the factory in San Diego in November 1960 and took off on January 24, 1961 on its maiden flight. Control problems caused by turbulence on the internal engine pylons emerged early on during the flight tests . This turbulence affected the effectiveness of the control flaps. In addition, the outer engines vibrated heavily under certain operating conditions. At the end of March 1961, the flight tests were suspended for a few weeks in order to make changes that should fix the problems. At the end of April 1961, testing was resumed. With the aerodynamic improvements, the type was now called CV-990A. Convair found that the control problems and engine vibrations had been resolved, but that the aircraft was no longer able to maintain the guaranteed cruising speed without using a disproportionate amount of fuel. As a result, the CV-990 no longer kept the guarantees regarding payload and range that Convair had given its customers. Convair then started a program to reduce drag during cruise. At the same time, the FAA approval was postponed from June 1961 to December of the same year.
Because of the performance problems and the delayed approval of the type, Convair had to go back to the negotiating table with the two first customers American Airlines and Swissair as well as with the follow-up customers SAS and Varig in the summer of 1961 . Convair was forced to offer high discounts to American Airlines for the 20 CV-990s it had ordered, while SAS even canceled its order - but later leased two brand-new CV-990s from Swissair - and Varig reduced the order to just three copies.
The first copy of the type took up scheduled service with American Airlines on January 7, 1962. Swissair received the first machine almost at the same time and gave Convair another name, Coronado . This designation was later generally used for the CV-990.
With the CV-990, Convair hoped to be able to offer a more competitive further development of the CV-880 and thus solve the problem of the low capacity of the CV-880 and achieve greater sales success. Due to the problems that put a strain on the project at an early stage, the CV-990A did not sell nearly as well as the aircraft of its competitors Boeing and Douglas . The program should not recover from its early setbacks. After just under three years, production of the CV-990 was stopped again in 1963. Up to this point only 37 CV-990 / 990A had been delivered. The total production of the CV-880/990 family - the production of the Convair 880 also ended in 1963 - amounted to only 102 units. Because of the financial losses caused by the failure, Convair stopped developing and producing civil aircraft. Instead, the focus was again on military aviation and the role of a supplier to the aerospace industry.
The worst accident involving a CV-990 occurred on December 3, 1972, when a Spantax machine ( aircraft registration EC-BZR ) got out of control shortly after taking off from Los Rodeos Airport on Tenerife in bad weather and poor visibility and from a height of 90 meters crashed. None of the 155 people on board, including 144 German passengers, survived the accident.
Spantax was also one of the last commercial operators of the CV-990. Two copies of the type were used regularly until 1987, shortly before the company's final bankruptcy in March 1988. Most of the former Spantax CV-990s, including the last two, were parked at Palma de Mallorca Airport . The planes were gradually scrapped, so that there is currently only one last Convair 990 - former registration number EC-BZO - there. Since the end of the 1990s there have been efforts to restore the aircraft, but this failed for a long time due to a lack of financial resources. The first restoration work began in 2017. There were plans to scrap the plane, which fans prevented. (Location: 39 ° 33 ′ 29.7 ″ N , 2 ° 44 ′ 52 ″ E )
Operator (historical)
Operator of brand new machines
- Aerolineas of Peru (APSA)
- Alaska Airlines
- American Airlines
- Balair (leased from Swissair)
- Garuda Indonesia
- SAS (leased from Swissair )
- Swissair
- Varig
Operators of used machines
- Air Ceylon (leased from Swissair in 1974)
- Air France (Modern Air Transport used a machine in wet lease for Air France in their colors from April to August 1967. )
- AREA Ecuador
- Ciskei International Airways
- Continental International Airways
- Denver Ports of Call
- Federal Aviation Administration (acquired, inter alia, the first built CV-990)
- Galaxy Airlines
- Iberia (leased from Spantax )
- Internord
- Lebanese International Airways
- Middle East Airlines
- Modern Air Transport
- NASA (last operator of the type)
- Nomads Travel Club
- Nordair
- Northeast Airlines (leased from American Airlines )
- Paradise 1000 Travel Club
- Spantax
- Thai Airways (leased from SAS)
Incidents
From the first flight in 1961 to the end of operations in 1988, the Convair CV-990 suffered 11 total losses. In 5 of them, 258 people were killed. Examples:
- On May 28, 1968, a Garuda Indonesia machine ( aircraft registration number PK-GJA ) fell almost vertically to the ground about four and a half minutes after taking off from Bombay Airport . All 29 occupants, 14 crew members and 15 passengers, as well as one person on the ground were killed. It turned out that all four engines had failed because the machine in Bombay was accidentally misfueled with gasoline instead of kerosene (see also Garuda Indonesia flight 892 )
- On the night of December 28-29, 1968, Israeli commandos landed at Beirut airport and blew up 14 planes from various, mostly Lebanese, airlines in retaliation for a Palestinian attack on an Israeli plane on December 26, 1968 in Athens. These included two Convair CV-990s (OD-AEW and OD-AEX) operated by Lebanese International Airways , which also lost most of its fleet with two Douglas DC-7s and had to cease operations the following January.
- On January 5, 1970, when the Spantax started a charter flight from Stockholm to Palma de Mallorca, an engine failure was noticed. The start was aborted and the machine with the registration number EC-BNM rolled back to the terminal. Afterwards, the plane was to be flown to Zurich for repairs with only three functioning engines without passengers . During takeoff, the machine got out of control in bad weather and strong winds, grazed some treetops and eventually crashed. Five of the ten crew members died (see also the Spantax flight accident near Stockholm ) .
- On February 21, 1970, after a bomb explosion, the HB-ICD of Swissair crashed near Würenlingen (Switzerland). All 47 people on board died (see also Swissair flight 330 ) .
- On December 3, 1972, the worst accident occurred to a CV-990. On the flight from Los Rodeos Airport (today: Tenerife North) to Munich-Riem , the Spantax EC-BZR machine got out of control during take-off with almost zero visibility at an altitude of about 90 m, overturned and finally crashed on the ground. All 148 passengers (mostly German vacationers) and 7 crew members died (see Spantax flight 275 ) .
Technical specifications
| Parameter | Data |
|---|---|
| crew | 5 |
| Passengers | 90-149 |
| length | 42.49 m |
| span | 36.58 m |
| height | 12.04 m |
| Wing area | 209 m² |
| Wing extension | 6.4 |
| payload | |
| Empty mass | 54,893 kg |
| Max. Takeoff mass | 115,750 kg |
| Cruising speed | 917 km / h |
| Top speed | 1030 km / h |
| Service ceiling | 12,495 m |
| Range at max. payload | 6116 km |
| Max. Range | 8900 km |
| Runway length | 2775 m |
| Runway length | 1690 m |
| Engines | 4 × General Electric CJ-805-23B turbofans with 71.4 kN thrust each |
Preserved copies
A few of the only 37 CV-990s produced have survived to this day in better condition than the former Spantax machine mentioned. A Swissair Coronado is in the Swiss Museum of Transport in Lucerne , and another copy is at Mojave Airport in California as a distinguishing feature .
See also
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Helmut Kreuzer: Jetliner. From Comet to Airbus A 321. Air Gallery Verlag, Ratingen 1991, ISBN 3-9802101-4-6 .
- ↑ Coronado at Swissair ( Memento from June 22, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Aircraft accident data and report in the Aviation Safety Network (English)
- ↑ Mallorca newspaper: Convair 990 Coronado: sandblasting for the ghost jet . ( mallorcazeitung.es [accessed on May 31, 2017]).
- ^ Accident statistics Convair CV-990 , Aviation Safety Network (English), accessed on January 16, 2018.
- ^ Accident report CV-990 PK-GJA, Aviation Safety Network (English), accessed on January 20, 2016.
- ↑ Aviation Safety Network - Report list 1968/3: see 28-DEC-1968 (English), accessed on October 17, 2019.
- ↑ Ulrich Klee, Frank Bucher et al .: jp airline-fleets international 1967 to 1969 . Zurich Airport 1967–1969.
- ^ Accident report EC-BNM, Aviation Safety Network (English), accessed on January 20, 2016.
- ^ Accident report HB-ICD, Aviation Safety Network (English), accessed on January 20, 2016.
- ^ Accident report EC-BZR, Aviation Safety Network (English), accessed on January 20, 2016.
- ↑ Helmut Kreuzer: Jetliner. From Comet to Airbus A 321 , Air Gallery Verlag, Ratingen (1991) ISBN 3-9802101-4-6
- ↑ a b Karlheinz Kens: Aircraft types - type book of international aviation , 1963, p. 280