New TV Show going to crash a passenger Jet!

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A passenger jet will be crashed at high speed in the desert as part of a new Channel 4 programme next year.

The plane will be destroyed in a bid to gain an unprecedented insight into safety issues for the new documentary Plane Crash.

The two pilots will parachute from the airliner, which will be loaded with cameras and sensors, after setting it on autopilot to crash.

Julian Bellamy, head of Channel 4, said: "It is an extraordinary idea and only Channel 4 would be brave enough to do it. Not even aircraft manufacturers have crashed something this big."

The show's producer Geoff Deehan added: "As well as making spectacular television, we hope Plane Crash will be one of the most useful experiments in the history of aviation.

"It will give us unprecedented answers to the big question: how can we make air crashes more survivable?"

The idea for the programme came after the crash of a British Airways Boeing 777 at Heathrow airport last year.

Channel 4 have not revealed exactly where the crash will be taking place or how much it is costing.

The channel's other new shows next year include Blitz Street, in which a row of 1940s terraced houses will be recreated and then subjected to a range of high explosives.

[BHawthorne]

Gotta love when reporters come up with ideas instead of engineers. It's sounds like pure sensationalism without any scientific data. What are cameras going to do? It needs a full sensor suite in the aircraft to properly pick up data (that would mostly only be valid for that aircraft)...

If they want to know how to do it right they should just go to any aircraft manufacturer's flight engineering department and have them wire the aircraft like a test craft. Last month I toured the engineering building for flight testing at Cessna. It's interesting stuff with how they need to compensate for weight in the aircraft with the data boxes and senors wired in orange all over. Three different sources are recording the data including one remote data collection room which is much like a mission control type of room used in realtime. Much of thier test aircraft have had years of testing with one random plane I looked over had data collection on over 4500 flights now.