Thunderbirds are go! Just stick a couple of RATO units on it and you've got a zero-length-launch bizzjet.
Ouch. That's Truckee airport, where they have no de-icing, no hangars, no nothing. Dumb place to park an airplane. Probably snow accumulation on the empennage and motors made it tail heavy. Either that or she's just howling at the moon! The airplane type is a Cessna Citation X (Ten)- it can cruise at .92M and 51,000 FT. Ironically, you could do the same tail-stand to a straight-wing, big-ass P-3 sitting if enough people went aft to the galley when the plane was sitting on the ground. There used to be a red line painted on the deck in the galley- no more than three people were allowed aft of it unless the plane was in the air. Physics is a harsh mistress.
Yeah, other angles on the plane showed a pile of snow on the stab and engines. Delicately balanced! Maybe Cessna should move the main gear aft or the CG forward. Or just put a placard on the it somewhere saying "do not park when it's gonna snow." Dad story: post-war he decided to move from P-47s to B-29s. He had a nosewheel fail to extend for landing once. His solution was to tell the whole crew to get in the tail, land on the mains and hold the nose up. I think he said it finally settled down on the nose at the end of the run, with just a little scrape.
Actually, the problem with 'tail-stands' on the X come when the jet is covered with snow, and people come and brush off the forward portion of the plane first. That's the 'gotcha'. If you brush the snow off the tail first, it won't unbalance like that. The placard would work. Moving the gear would not- it's theoretically optimally placed already. You can fuel the center tank to weigh it down, but that causes other issues later on. A permanent CG move doesn't work either- that's a major redesign and you end up with a totally different set of performance stats. The real solution is not to park the fucking plane in Truckee in the middle of winter. It's going to be there until it gets above freezing long enough for all the snow and ice to melt off it. Maybe spring sometime.
Is the nose gear going to be able to take it if it suddenly slams down? "Hard landing" about covers it.
Usually they try to let it down easy on to an air bag or something. A slam-down usually causes damage- the mains are designed to take it. Those nose gear, not so much.
