Vibration encountered -

The High and the Mighty was my all time favorite airplane disaster movie. I was around five years old when it was released in 1954 but when I was older I had watched this movie nearly every time it was broadcast on local TV throughout the sixties. I have it now on DVD since it was finally released.

Now that many years have passed and I too have been an airplane pilot and mechanic since the sixties I understand now what had happened to that number one engine. In the beginning, when Robert Stack complains that the engines didn't seem to be in sync and the three times the airplane shuddered, tells me that the prop governor on the number one engine was about to fail. The prop governor is a piston inside the prop hub that controls the pitch of the prop by hydraulic pressure. So, when it began to fail it was apparently trying to increase the pitch of the prop resulting the subtle then a heavy vibration. Anyone who has flown a multi-engine airplane and feathers one of those props knows the airplane vibrates heavily until the prop is parallel with the airflow. The catastrophe occurs when the prop governor finally fails throwing the the prop into a extremely low pitch or into the feathered position with the engine still producing 1450hp of power caused the prop shaft to fail thereby separate the prop from the airplane punching holes in the wing as it rotated aft along the top of the wing.

This movie represents a time when people actually dressed up to fly. When aircraft were entirely mechanical and flew IN the weather, not over it. Most airplanes of this category sped along at three miles per minute not the blinding eight to nine miles per minute of today's fly by wire jets that overfly the weather or twenty-two miles per minute of the former Concorde at Mach 2.