The 727 you refer to was flown by none other than, well, come to think of it, I won't say his name here, but for those of us who have been in the aviation business and working for the airlines in particular, he was well known. It was definitely not an intentional roll, but was the result of an unintentional deployment of certain leading edge devices, which was in turn a result of the action of a crewmember who was not in the cockpit while the captain manually deployed flaps in a non-approved configuration in order to create a little more lift with minimum drag, back in the days when the first OPEC scare was going on and fuel prices were at a then all time high. The crewmember came in and saw an abnormal indication on a circuit breaker panel and without thinking, simply reached over and pushed in the C.B.'s resulting in asymmetric deployment of the deactivated leading edge devices. At the high sub-sonic cruise speed, that resulted in the infamous roll (actually, I seem to remember that it was several rolls). It was all the captain could do to regain control of the aircraft because the departure from controlled flight resulted in a Mach overspeed situation and he got back control only after deploying speed brakes and then the landing gear (which at those speeds was way beyond normal operating parameters and of course just ripped the gear doors off). He also lost something like 30,000 feet or so of altitude in the recovery! Subsequent inspection of the airframe after landing revealed the fuselage was severely cracked just forward of the tail! Boeing has always built strong airplanes! This was borne out several years ago when the China Airlines crew (I think that was the airline) inadvertently rolled their 747 three times after stalling it at altitude, hitting Mach 1 on the way down and tearing the tips of the horizontal stab (it was also bent up quite a bit)! I saw the airplane at the airport the day it arrived. What a sight! Keith RCSE-List facilities provided by Model Airplane News. Send "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
