Spiny Norman said:

captain_spalding said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Say if a tail elevator fell off, could a small rocket under the nose keep the nose straight?

SN is the aviator, of course, but my ‘feeling’ is that having the elevators fall off is a non-recoverable situation.

As usual, it depends.
I’ll cut a long story short and tell the tale of when my elevators jammed on me in a POS Metro 2 night freighter on the drop into Archerfield. The elevator was pretty solid, would not move at all. So I just reduced power a little and trimmed the nose down. I figured worst case they’d stay jammed and I’d just land on the 4,000 metre long runway in Brisbane, with all the fire crew ready for the arrival. With some testing I found that I could fly the plane reasonably well with just the elevator trim and I reckoned it wouldn’t be a huge task to get it down on the big runway.
Anyway it came good down in the Archerfield circuit area so I landed there.

I reckon it could be done on something like a 747 but I’d want a much longer runway. If need be full auto-brakes will stop the big plane in only 1,000 metres of ground roll, but that being said a mere 1,000 m in a 747 looks really short out the windscreen.
Oh, and then the 16 brakes catch on fire but that’s okay in the big scheme of things.

That’s why you have to have thousands of hours under your belt.