On 8/21/15 1:35 PM, notbob wrote:
On 2015-08-21, J Burns wrote:

cause afterfire if shut off when idled down.

WTF is "afterlife"? Is that a new term for "dieseling"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieseling

nb

Harriet Hilliard's (what a dish!) son Eric had a DC-3 because he didn't
like dieseling around the country on a bus. He and his band took a
horrifying trip to the afterlife just before America rang in 1986.

Somebody with influence had newspapers across the country publish a
specious front-page story saying federal investigators blamed
Eric. Investigators immediately responded that this was a lie. Editors
across the country hid the rebuttal inside, with no headline. The
public ignored it.

The summary of the NTSB report implied that the fire was caused by a
gasoline heater installed by a piano player known as The Killer. The
report itself contradicts this. The heater was functioning perfectly.
The gasoline fire erupted after the crash. The passengers were already
dead. The fire that had killed them did not involve gasoline. It
started at floor level at the rear of the passenger cabin. It did not
say how it started. The baggage was in another compartment.

The pilot had gone back there when smoke was reported, pulled an
extinguisher from the bulkhead, pulled the pin on the extinguisher, put
it back on the bulkhead without using it, and returned to the cockpit.
The plane dropped molten aluminum for half a mile leading to the crash
site. It's very unusual for a plane to burn that hot.

If the pilot realized an extinguisher would be useless, and the fire was
intense enough to melt aluminum, what explanation could there be except
that the aluminum of the airplane was itself on fire? It takes thermite
to ignite aluminum. Investigators analyzed samples of the aluminum near
the burn. That could have told them what kind of thermite was used.
Presumably, the NTSB was ordered not to state the cause of the fire for
the sake of the FBI investigation. Was Ed Meese really going to
prosecute the mass murderers? Hah!

Statements Eric's brother David made, indicate that the FBI had told him
of evidence against two women. When one of them barged in on the funeral
drunk, he walked up to her and said, "Murderess!" She then knocked
Eric's daughter to the ground with several blows before the
grief-stricken could pull her off.

Eric was the mysterious dark-haired man in "Delta Dawn," written by her
brother, a close friend of Eric's since the three were children. More
than ten years after the murder, she revealed that when she was 14 and
he 16, a 27-year-old had expressed such intense jealousy that at first
she thought he was joking. When she realized he was obsessed, she was
afraid to be near him, but she kept quiet because she loved his wife and
daughters, and she was afraid people would think she'd invited his
advances. Others had spoken of the obsession he confided over the years.
His intensity scared them, too.

At the time of the murder, he was probably a suspect in an attempt to
murder Eric and his band 3 months earlier. It blew right past the
public because education in this country is such a mess that one can get
a diploma without knowing the difference between backfiring and afterfiring.

Eric had offered Marty Stuart a fight from Memphis to the Mellencamp
camp. The plane sat idling, but Stuart didn't show up. On the takeoff
roll, both engines backfired and quit.

How could two completely independent engines quit at the same time? If
they hadn't waited for Stuart, the engines could have quit after the
point of no return. That would have been fatal.

A DC-3 can't after-fire because the exhaust is wide open. Insufficient
fuel is the only thing that can cause it to backfire. It's second nature
for a pilot to shove the mixture controls to full rich for takeoff. If
somehow they'd forgotten, it would have been obvious as soon as they
shoved the throttles forward, not halfway down the runway.

It couldn't have been pump failure because on takeoff, each engine was
fed by an electric pump in parallel with a mechanical pump. They must
have run out of gas, as if the airport hadn't filled the tanks and the
gauges were faulty. That couldn't be it. Each engine drew from its own
tank. They couldn't have run dry at the same time unless a saboteur
with a fuel truck had sucked all the fuel out, put in a measured amount,
and tampered with the gauges.

Who even knew he was in Memphis? He'd been invited on short notice.
He'd been deceived. He'd brought his band to record, but all they did
was stand around the studio for two days. Of those in a position to
invite him, the only one who even knew him was the man obsessed with
Delta Dawn.

That incident made me conscious of the distinction between backfiring
and after-firing. Accusing the culprit would be as outrageous as saying
O J Simpson cut two people's throats, but F Degraff has posted three
videos on youtube. His father was David's classmate at Hollywood High.