A tornado strikes US airports at night, destroying 11 planes and killing 25 people

From late night on March 2nd to early morning on March 3rd local time, Tennessee, USA, was hit by a severe tornado that swept through the surrounding areas of Nashville. The John C. Tune airport in Nashville was swept by the tornado, and it was reported that the accident caused serious damage to at least 11 aircraft. The tornado caused at least 25 deaths and hundreds of injuries.

Two planes stacked together

In China, the probability of tornadoes occurring is relatively low, but in the United States, hundreds of recorded tornadoes occur every year, with more undetected and confirmed cases in sparsely populated areas. This large tornado formed at night and attacked the Nashville area. Due to the fact that the local area is mostly small towns, many residential buildings and airport equipment are still made of wooden structures or lightweight materials from many years ago, making them susceptible to tornadoes.

Destroyed hangars and aircraft

Compared to typhoons/hurricanes that can be accurately predicted in advance, tornadoes form more quickly and are mostly localized, difficult to detect, and have a shorter warning time, leaving less time for nearby personnel evacuation and equipment reinforcement. This large-scale tornado occurred at night, and many local residents were killed and injured by buildings blown down by the tornado without receiving an alarm in their sleep. The hangar and aircraft were not warned in advance to reinforce the wind, which also exacerbated disaster losses.

Airplanes blown together

The John Toon Airport, which was the most severely affected by the disaster, as a local navigable airport (ICAO: KJWN, runway direction 2/20, length 5500 feet), mainly operates various types of business aircraft. Compared to ordinary civil aircraft, it is smaller in size, lighter in weight, and more prone to displacement in wind disasters. However, this damage was mainly due to the collapse of the airport's simple parking shed, which injured the aircraft, and several Beeches were even pressed under the ruins. A slightly larger falcon next to it is in better condition.

Aircraft in the Ruins

Tennessee has entered a state of emergency, with nearly two hundred people being taken to hospital and some small towns experiencing power outages. It is estimated that according to the emergency response speed of Americans after a disaster, this airport will not be able to be repaired for a while.

ruins

Although the weight of an aircraft is larger than that of a regular vehicle, fixed wing aircraft, as a means of transportation that obtains airflow velocity differences through the wing surface for takeoff (to put it more colloquially, they create their own wind to fly), require wings of different sizes to match their size and mass. The larger the flight, the larger the wing area under similar wing loads. Therefore, in strong winds, even though planes with higher mass have slightly better relative stability, overall, even large wide-body passenger planes with hundreds of tons face strong winds, their huge windward area still causes them to blow unsteadily. (It can be understood that the larger the sail area of a sailboat, the more stable it is. Therefore, when encountering strong winds, a large sailboat may not be exponentially more stable than a small sailboat.)

Compared to typhoons, the airflow of tornadoes is more complex, but their impact range is smaller

There have also been cases of typhoon weather in China, where the huge windward area of the aircraft greatly increased its stress, ultimately breaking free from the fixed windbreak lock and diving into a nearby pile of soil. Even a few days ago, due to the impact of the epidemic, several of the planes parked at Kunming Changshui Airport were suddenly displaced by strong winds. And the previous super typhoon Morandi also caused a mess at Xiamen Airport. Fortunately, these large airports are relatively solid, and there is no such accident as the US military hangar being blown down, dozens of fighter planes being smashed and drenched by fire foam.

The plane that was blown away by a strong typhoon at Xiamen Airport back then

These aircraft are still on the ground, and if encountering strong winds in the air, it is even more dangerous, especially due to strong crosswinds and sudden changes in wind direction, which may directly "shoot" the aircraft about to land on the runway. At times, the aircraft may be damaged, and at times, it may cause casualties.