In April 2013, a civilian-operated Boeing 747-400 crashed after taking off from Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan. The NTSB concluded that the cargo, five armored vehicles weighing over 80 tons total, shifted during take-off to the rear causing a massive imbalance to the aircraft's center of gravity. The aircraft, unable to gain altitude, stalled and impacted the ground in a fiery explosion.
To confirm the NTSB’s findings, RTI was asked to analyze video of the crash captured from a security vehicle’s dashboard camera. With the connection to the black-box disabled mid-flight, the 20 seconds of low-resolution footage became crucial in determining the flight characteristics of the 747.
Using camera matching techniques and satellite images of the crash site, engineers in our Imaging Studio were able to track the aircraft frame by frame, correcting for the speed of the camera on the moving vehicle, and determine the approximate roll, pitch, yaw, airspeed, and altitude of the 747 prior to impact.
The reconstructed flight path was imported to our proprietary interactive software, which animated a representative 3d model of the aircraft with our findings of the flight characteristics. The 3d model could be viewed from any angle in real-time, allowing additional viewing angles of the crash that were not possible using only the dashboard camera footage.
