IFR and lower ceilings with reduced visibility will be common through much of the period across central and southern AR terminals. Northern AR terminals are more likely to remain VFR…

National Weather Service Area Forecast

On December 3, 2021, two pilots—call them Jack and Ken—left Clarksville, Arkansas, in a Piper Cherokee 235. They flew south to Louisiana, where Jack, who operated an airframe repair shop in Clarksville, picked up a Cessna 182 that had suffered some sheet metal damage in a hurricane. They then flew the two airplanes to Minden, Louisiana, where they stopped for food and fuel before continuing to Clarksville, 175 miles to the north.

Ken, the Cherokee pilot, had checked the weather and considered it “very sketchy.” Neither pilot had an instrument rating. But Jack said they would climb to 1,500 feet to stay below the clouds, and they could land at Magnolia, 40 miles north of Minden, if the clouds turned out to be too low.

This Article First Appeared in FLYING Magazine

If you’re not already a subscriber, what are you waiting for? Subscribe today to get the issue as soon as it is released in either Print or Digital formats.

Subscribe Now

Featured

It was already dark when they took off. Jack was leading in the 182, and they were communicating on 123.45. The clouds were broken or scattered and the ground was visible, but the forward visibility was poor. Ken could see the icon of the 182 ahead of him on his ForeFlight traffic display. By the time they reached Magnolia, Ken thought they were in IMC, but Jack was confident that the weather would clear ahead and decided to continue.

They were at 1,600 feet msl—about 1,350 agl—and cruising at 140 knots, heading more or less due north. All Ken could see ahead of him now was the 182’s rotating beacon. He knew that he was in over his head and said so to his friend; but Jack, who seemed more concerned about Ken than about the weather, continuously coached him to keep his wings level. After some time, Ken tore his eyes from the attitude indicator to glance at his ForeFlight screen. He saw, to his surprise, that the 182 had turned toward the southeast and was backtracking toward him. He asked Jack what he was doing but got no response. Moments later, the 182 vanished from the screen.

Half a minute passed, and then ForeFlight issued a low-altitude alert. Alarmed, Ken pushed the throttle forward, hauled back on the yoke and climbed to 3,500 feet. Still in IMC, he turned eastward toward Hot Springs, but on learning that the weather there was 300 overcast he turned back northward toward Clarksville.

It turned out that Jack had been right about the weather farther north. The clouds cleared, and Ken was able to land at Danville, 25 miles south of Clarksville. Once on the ground, he tried again and again to call Jack’s cell phone, but there was no answer. He was sure there had been an accident. Perhaps, he thought, Jack had become so preoccupied with trying to keep him, Ken, safe that he had lost track of his own heading and altitude.

ADS-B data showed the 182 cruising northward at 1,600 feet until a mile and a half south of Trap Mountain, where it began a gradual descent and then a shallow right turn. Searchers found the wreckage of the 182 on the north slope of the mountain at an elevation of 1,070 feet. Trap Mountain is a narrow, steep wedge rising 500 feet above the surrounding terrain. Its charted height is 1,095 feet; the 182’s initial point of impact was the top of a 30-foot tree, just below the ridge.

The original plan had been to fly at 1,500 feet, as this would keep them in uncontrolled airspace, below the floors of airways and a couple of military operations areas, but clear of all terrain between Minden and Clarksville. (The terrain was a few hundred feet higher north of Trap Mountain than south of it, but since Jack expected the weather to improve to the north, he probably thought they would be able to climb a little higher there if they needed to.) We can’t know why the 182 strayed from its intended path, but the NTSB blamed “the non-instrument-rated pilot’s improper decision to continue visual flight rules flight into instrument meteorological conditions, which resulted in spatial disorientation and a subsequent impact with terrain.” Spatially disoriented pilots, however, typically make rapid, random changes of heading and altitude. The gradual descent and turn are more suggestive of distraction or instrument failure than spatial disorientation.

What is noteworthy about this accident is that we have a narrative of the events leading up to it—not, admittedly, from the point of view of the accident pilot himself, but at least from that of a bystander. Conditions in the air can look different to different pilots, however, especially to ones with varying amounts and kinds of experience. Jack had 2,500 hours and came from a family that had long been immersed in aviation. In his work he probably flew many types of airplanes, and in a variety of weather conditions. (Considering his relatively high time and the fact that he was an aviation professional, his lack of an instrument rating is puzzling, but, as I have learned in 60 years of flying, not everyone follows the beaten path.) 

I suspect—this is just a guess—that Ken was the less experienced pilot of the two; at least, he seems to have been less at ease than Jack was in, as he repeatedly put it, “sketchy” conditions. It may be significant that while Ken’s narrative repeatedly uses the phrase “in IMC,” it does not use the words “in clouds”; to Jack, that distinction may have made all the difference.

The condition of forward visibility, or lack of it, that Ken perceived as IMC could have appeared to Jack as night VFR minimums. In the dark, how are you to know whether a cloud is 2,000 feet away or whether the dim light you discern through the haze ahead is one or three miles away? The weather outlook was ambiguous, as it often has to be. Reduced visibility and ceilings—as opposed to straight-up IMC—would be common in the area, but not general. Better weather to the north was likely, but not certain. To a pilot used to scud running, words like “common” and “likely” are open doors. One of the oddities of the FARs is that they classify as VFR certain nighttime conditions that absolutely require reliance on the gauges. It’s possible that the same conditions that were IMC to Ken looked like unpleasant-but-legal VMC to Jack.

One could question the wisdom of Jack’s pressuring Ken to make a flight with which he clearly felt uneasy. Ironically—or perhaps not—it was the confident Jack who came a cropper and the hesitant Ken who got home safely.

This article is based on the National Transportation Safety Board’s report of the accident and is intended to bring the issues raised to our readers’ attention. It is not intended to judge or to reach any definitive conclusions about the ability or capacity of any person, living or dead, or any aircraft or accessory.

This article was originally published in the March 2023 Issue 935 of  FLYING.

The post The Road Not Taken appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

On December 3, 2021, a student pilot, 23, went from his home in Katy, Texas, to Cincinnati, Ohio, to take possession of a Piper Cherokee 140 that he had purchased. Surveillance video at West Houston Airport (KIWS) recorded that on his return, his fiancee and a third person emerged from the airplane with him. The next day he put 40 gallons of fuel into his airplane, and the day after that he flew it in the traffic pattern for 20 minutes.

On December 6, he called his flight instructor, with whom he had hitherto flown only in Cessna 172s, to ask whether his training could continue in the Cherokee. The instructor agreed, contingent on his looking over the airplane and its maintenance logs.

This Article First Appeared in FLYING Magazine

If you’re not already a subscriber, what are you waiting for? Subscribe today to get the issue as soon as it is released in either Print or Digital formats.

Subscribe Now

Featured

On the evening of the 8th, after dark, the young man arrived at the airport with a female companion. The pilot mentioned going to Pearland (KLVJ), a short distance to the southeast. The pair climbed aboard the 140 and took off, heading southward.

On the following day, the pilot’s fiancée came to the airport. She had been trying without success to reach him by phone. His car, she found, was still in the airport parking lot. The airport manager reviewed surveillance camera video and found the pilot and his companion—that must have been an uncomfortable moment—arriving and taking off a little before 8:00 p.m. He brought up the online ADS-B tracking information for the 140’s N-number, and saw the short track of the flight heading south, then turning left and terminating over an undeveloped area a short distance south of Interstate10. The airport manager and safety officer took off and spotted the 140 in the woods two and a half miles from the airport. Responders found it demolished; its two occupants were dead.

The tracking information publicly available online uses longer time intervals between ADS-B hits than the FAA’s radar does. The higher-resolution FAA track revealed movements that clearly pointed to pilot disorientation. First, there was a descending left turn with increasing groundspeed, followed by a climbing right turn, followed by another descending left turn to the northeast, then a hard right descending turn back toward the southwest. The airplane descended more and more rapidly. Radar contact ended 700 feet above the ground. Most likely, the pilot had strayed into clouds and then, descending over an unlighted area, he could not reorient himself in time to avoid the crash, or perhaps stalled in an attempt to pull up.

The pilot, who had logged 38 hours of flight time over the past year, had completed his solo and night requirements and was close to his private check ride. He had not yet done the simulated instrument part of the training. His instructor described him as friendly and a good pilot, one who intended to make flying his profession. 

His final flight was—to put it mildly—ill-advised. In addition to it being dark, there was a layer of stratusclouds 500 feet above the ground, and so, although the visibility below the clouds was good, the weather was officially IFR. The entire route to Pearland lay beneath the 2,000-foot floor of Houston Class B airspace, and it involved a dogleg to the south to avoid Hobby (KHOU). Along the way were some obstacles so tall that they poked through the TCA floor. In short, the proposed flight,although short in miles, was long in complications.

It was also illegal. The pilot’s student status precluded his carrying passengers. He had already demonstrated his willingness to ignore that restriction, but whether his nonchalance was due to an exaggerated sense of entitlement—not every 23-year-old student pilot can afford to buy his own airplane—or just youthful high spirits and resentment of restraint, we can’t guess. It seems likely, however, that one thing that entered into his choice to make that particular flight at that particularly inopportune time was the desire to impress. He was a young man; his passenger was an attractive young woman. What else needs to be said?

The desire to impress is almost, but not quite, a universal human trait. A few people are free of it. I myself know one, and I’m not even sure about her. When I began flying—I was not yet 20—I did a number of stupid things, most of them in order to impress certain women (at that time, I would have said “girls”). I still cringe today over one in particular that backfired so badly that in the mind of the woman in question, who atleast is still my friend, that flight eclipses all others that I have made since, and that I will make in the future. Since then, my need to impress has somewhat dwindled and now manifests itself mainly in a harmless proclivity for using fancy words. But I remember how I used to be, and so, while I deplore his judgment, I cannot but empathize with the young pilot who took off, impressively he thought, into that Houston night.

The quality of judgment that we pilots are expected to possess—and that is supposed to protect us and our passengers from actions that in retrospect will appear rash or completely idiotic—comes under the broad heading of “maturity.” It requires an ability to separate emotion from reason. That sounds easy, but the decisions that we consider rational are often influenced by biases, desires,and calculations of which we are barely—or not at all—aware. In theory, at least, we gain maturity from time and experience; some get a lot, some none at all.

One kind of situation presents a particularly obvious risk of ego-driven misjudgment. When we fly with another person whose esteem we crave, we may experience a sort of stage fright or “performance anxiety.” If that person is a pilot whom we perceive as our superior inexperience or native ability, the fear of doing something stupid, or just appearing awkward or flustered, flusters us and makes us awkward and stupid.

A poet I slightly knew in college once imagined a psych class called “Interpersonal Relations in the Group of One.” That would be a good class for pilots to take because, in addition to our desire to impress others, we may entertain a similar need to impress ourselves. Self-esteem is a powerful motive, and it affects pilots in both good and bad ways. On the credit side, it makes us work hard, try to perfect ourselves, and approach our flying with that attitude we call “professionalism.” On the debit side, it drives us to take unnecessary risks and to continue into worsening situations in order not to feel that we have “chickened out.”

As in finance, credit and debit in flying form a continuum. The hard part, sometimes, is to know which side of zero we’re on.

This article is based on the National Transportation Safety Board’s report of the accident and is intended to bring the issues raised to our readers’ attention. It is not intended to judge or to reach any definitive conclusions about the ability or capacity of any person, living or dead, or any aircraft or accessory.

This article was originally published in the February 2023 Issue 934 of FLYING.

The post The Fatal Desire to Impress appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Ever since Luke Skywalker plunged into the mesial groove of the Death Star, flying through canyons has seemed to be a supreme test of airmanship. Military pilots practicing terrain following love to thread the so-called “Star Wars Canyon” into Death Valley at 500 knots. When the new Top Gun installment came out, it was all about negotiating canyons, both geological and interpersonal.

It’s fun, and it’s dangerous. In fact, it’s fun because it’s dangerous. 

And that’s why three ex-Air Force pilots set off on a December morning in three Van’s Aircraft taildraggers to practice flying through a canyon in southern Colorado.

This Article First Appeared in FLYING Magazine

If you’re not already a subscriber, what are you waiting for? Subscribe today to get the issue as soon as it is released in either Print or Digital formats.

Subscribe Now

Featured

The flight leader, 70, who had been a captain with United Airlines after leaving the military, had 20,000 hours. He was flying a tandem two-seat RV-4. The two other airplanes were an RV-8, which is a slightly enlarged redesign of the RV-4, and a single-seat RV-3. As they neared the canyon, the flight leader descended and called for a change from echelon to trail formation. The airplanes moved into single file, several hundred feet apart.

The RV-3 was in the last position and remained above the canyon rim. From that vantage point, the pilot could observe the No. 2 airplane ahead of and slightly below him, and the leader’s RV-4 descending northeastward into the canyon. After a few seconds, they encountered one of the challenges that make canyon flying exciting: an S-turn requiring a 120-degree heading change to the right immediately followed by a 180-degree turn to the left, both within a space about 1,300 feet wide.

The leader’s RV-4 was completing the second turn in a steep bank at high speed when its left wingtip snagged the scree below the canyon’s eastern wall. The airplane cartwheeled and disintegrated—the pilot must have died instantly.

If this accident had involved a 100-hour pilot in a Piper Cherokee 140, we could write it off to ignorance and rashness. But the pilot was of the highest caliber and qualifications and most likely had flown this canyon or ones like it before, and so it is worth pondering why this outing ended the way it did. 

(For readers who use Google Earth and wish to better understand what happened, a view of the canyon is helpful. The wreckage came to rest at latitude 37.792822,longitude -104.57616; the first impact occurred a few hundred feet south of that point. And “left wing tip” is not a misprint. Although the crash occurred on the right side of the canyon, it was the steeply-banked airplane left wing that first struck the ground.)

In the portion of the S-turn leading up to the accident site, the rims of the canyon are about 500 feet apart and the canyon bottom is 200 feet below the surrounding plain. The second turn, the 180-degree one, must be completed with a radius of about 400 feet. The radius of the first turn is a little smaller—about 350 feet—but it’s not a full 180 degrees.

Turn radius in still air is a function solely of true airspeed and bank angle. This is true for every airplane, Piper J-3 through SR-71. Bank angle is limited by the G tolerance of the airplane and the pilot. The RV-4 is a 6-G airplane, corresponding to an 80-degree bank angle, but the greatest G loading an airplane can maintain continuously—without losing altitude—depends on the power available. In the case of a 200 hp RV-4 at, say, 1,300 pounds, it would be around 3.5 G or 73 degrees of bank. The required turn radius of 400 feet could be achieved at 120 knots. But, of course, the speed can change during the turn. You could enter at 160 knots with a 6-G, 80-degree bank, and, if you haven’t grayed out, gradually reduce the bank angle.

The skilled pilot, like an outfielder judging where the pop fly will fall, uses the instinctive calculus that millions of years have bred into us to solve this problem in many variables. The slower you go, the easier it is, but the fun is in going as fast as possible. At high speed, however, small errors in timing, bank angle, and path selection nibble away at the slender margins of safety that are the spice of the exercise.

There is one additional element that is invisible and defies intuitive calculation: the wind.

Traveling at 120 knots, the RV-4 makes a 180-degree, 3.5-G turn in about seven seconds. During those seven seconds, a 20-knot wind blowing across its track carries it 210 feet downwind; 30 knots, 315 feet. So much for the calculated turning radius.

The RV-3 pilot and the leader had discussed the wind before taking off. Strong winds and a possibility of moderate to severe turbulence were forecast for the area. The leader was not concerned. Nearing the canyon, the RV-3 pilot’s EFIS reported a 30-knot, south-southwest wind 2,000 feet above the surface; its direction was such that an airplane emerging from the S-turn would have been pushed toward the right canyon wall. But there was no way to know how the wind would behave down inside the canyon. The canyon itself might provide some shelter. On the other hand, it added the risk of up- and downdrafts, and its meandering topography could produce unexpected changes of wind direction and velocity.

Something in the situation must have made the second and third pilots reluctant to descend below the canyon rim, despite the cultural tendency to stay with the flight lead. Perhaps they had not flown this canyon before and intended to watch the leader fly it before doing so themselves. The statements they provided to accident investigators did not touch on their own motivations, beyond the RV-3 pilot stating that he remained above the rim “to assess potential turbulence.” The leader alone went deep into the canyon. It was the RV-8 pilot,following him through the turns in second position, who reported that the lead aircraft was flying at “high speed” when he clipped the talus slope.

The most likely explanation for the accident is that the southwest wind poured into the portion of the canyon aligned with it and carried the RV-4 toward the eastern rim. The fact that the airplane was steeply banked at a point where it should have been rolling out of the turn, and when most of the energy available from excess speed would have been used up, suggests a desperate attempt to remedy a miscalculation. It almost succeeded.

Because many people perceive it as dangerous, aviation is obsessed with safety. It is practically obligatory, after an accident like this, to deplore the pilot’s decision-making. The NTSB does. But aviation can also be an extreme sport. The pilot knew what he was doing, and how to do it. He made a mistake, and paid the highest price. Let’s leave it at that.

This article is based on the National Transportation Safety Board’s report of the accident and is intended to bring the issues raised to our readers’ attention. It is not intended to judge or to reach any definitive conclusions about the ability or capacity of any person, living or dead, or any aircraft or accessory.

This article was originally published in the December 2022/January 2023 Issue 933 of FLYING.

The post Windy Canyon Dangers appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

An hour before midnight. The stillness of a northern Minnesota lake. Ripples on pebbles exposed in the water, reboantic loons. Darkness. Starlight.

Then suddenly, close by, the incongruous snarl of an airplane engine. Red and green lights race into view, swooping and plunging. The airplane disappears behind trees, reappears, turns, seems to aim straight for the startled stargazers on the shore. It veers away, zooms upward. Its lights become momentarily hazy and diffuse. The airplane again turns, dives, disappears behind trees. Then a dreadful sound, part boom, part thud, for which there is no name. And then silence.

Moments later, shouts and footfalls, the unlimbering of boats, clatter of oars and outboard motors, lights and voices out on the water, searching. Clouds have moved in; the stars are extinguished. The wreckage of the Lancair ES rests 25 feet down, on the bottom of White Iron Lake. The pilot, 58, who had hoped to reach his cabin near Grand Marais that night, sleeps there as well.

From Ely, Minnesota (KELO), where the Lancair took off, to Grand Marais (KCKC) is only 58 nm, more or less due east. The kitbuilt four-seater would make the trip in 20 minutes. But on the night of the accident there were complications. It was dark and moonless. The area between Ely and Grand Marais is a wilderness completely devoid of lights. An AIRMET warned of possible IFR conditions in mist and fog. The Aviation Forecast Discussion issued from Duluth a few hours before the accident talked of a chance of “fog at all terminals,” as evening temperatures fell. However, conditions were expected to improve to VFR everywhere the next morning.

Between Ely and Grand Marais is the southern edge of a prohibited area, P-204, in which flight below 4,000 feet msl is prohibited to help preserve the primeval quality of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, where no motorized vehicles of any kind are permitted. The weather at Ely, where the pilot had landed earlier in the day and was now waiting for fog at Grand Marais to

lift, was VFR with clouds reported at 3,200 scattered, 4,100 broken, with unlimited visibility. Uncomfortably, there was a space of only a few hundred feet between the ceiling of the prohibited area and the base of the lowest clouds. The distribution of cloud cover—whether it was clearer to the east, or the scattered clouds became broken or solid—was impossible to know.

After taking off, the pilot flew northeast, making a somewhat unsteady track along the western edge of White Iron Lake. This made no apparent sense, as he was not going toward his destination. But perhaps it made sense in that there were habitations and lights in that direction, and his first instinct was to orient himself using those lights.

He was airborne for just four minutes before crashing into the lake near its north end.

Often, National Transportation Safety Board accident investigators interview friends and relatives of pilots to find out whether the route on which they lost their lives was one they had successfully flown before. They examine logbooks to see how much experience the pilot had in conditions similar to those of the accident flight. In this case, the accident docket includes no such information. We don’t even know if the airplane had a functioning autopilot—such airplanes usually do—or whether the pilot was in the habit of using it.

What we do know about the pilot is that he had 400 hours. From the FAA aircraft registry, it appears he may have acquired the airplane from its builder five years earlier. He had begun working on an instrument rating and had logged about 15 hours under the hood. His instructor told investigators that he was not ready for flight in IMC (instrument meteorological conditions) and “nowhere near ready for a check ride.”

It’s clear that the pilot became disoriented. Possibly he experienced some degree of vertigo. The zooming and plunging motions described by witnesses are not uncommon when a pilot becomes disoriented, panics, and begins to fly not smoothly but with a series of violent over-corrections. That’s where an autopilot comes in handy. With a flick of a switch, the rattled pilot can let go of the controls and try to calm down.

We don’t know what weather sources the pilot had consulted, or when. We don’t know how much night flying experience he had. We do know, however, that he lived in the Minneapolis area, and so it’s possible that most of his night flying experience had occurred in places with lots of ground lighting. It’s significant too that a flight from Minneapolis to Grand Marais never leaves ground lights, and so it may be that he had flown that route at night but did not realize how different the experience would be if the flight started from Ely.

The NTSB blamed the accident on the pilot’s “improper decision to attempt flight into instrument meteorological conditions.” The phrasing strikes me as imprecise, in that “instrument meteorological conditions” usually suggests fog and clouds, not just a dark night. There’s no way to know whether the pilot strayed into an unseen cloud or whether the lack of any horizon or ground lights was sufficient to disorient him, but I think it’s very unlikely that he made a deliberate choice to fly into IMC. He cannot have forgotten the difficulties he experienced flying under the hood. He may or may not have entered clouds—the radar record of his track suggests that he stayed below them—but in total darkness it makes no difference whether you’re inside a cloud or not.

It’s customary, when discussing pilots’ decision-making, to assume that a pilot is a “rational actor.” Rationally, the pilot’s choices were three. He could stay the night at Ely. He could follow Highway 1 down to Lake Superior and then hug the shoreline up to Grand Marais, a dogleg that would add 30 nm to his trip but keep him over some lights. Or he could try the short, direct flight. Knowing the outcome, we realize that the option he chose was distinctly the worst. But with VFR conditions at Ely, and after waiting hours for Grand Marais to go VFR, he may have ceased to think of what lay between.

He may have had no idea what total darkness—the proverbial “inside of a cow”—would be like. He probably also did not know how he would react to becoming disoriented, alone and in the dark, or how easy it would be for that to happen once the terrain ahead of him ceased to have any lights, or had so few, and those so small and faint that they could not be differentiated from stars.

But really, it was just a 20-minute flight. The terrain was flat, the clouds were thousands of feet up. How hard could it be?

This article is based on the National Transportation Safety Board’s report of the accident and is intended to bring the issues raised to our readers’ attention. It is not intended to judge or to reach any definitive conclusions about the ability or capacity of any person, living or dead, or any aircraft or accessory.

The post Flying Into Total Darkness, Inside the Cow appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

It was a snowy late-November morning at Chamberlain, South Dakota (9V9). A Pilatus PC-12 had sat out on the ramp during a night of intermittent snowfall and freezing drizzle. Its passengers, who had flown in from Idaho Falls the previous day to hunt pheasants, planned to return home that day.

While the rest of the party was out shooting, the private pilot, 48, and one companion got some isopropyl alcohol de-icing fluid from a hardware store, borrowed a ladder from the hunting lodge at which they had stayed, and spent three hours chipping snow and ice from the wings. The ladder was not tall enough to allow them to reach the upper surface of the T-tail, but the pilot was satisfied that the rest of the airplane was sufficiently clean.

Video of the Pilatus taxiing out showed snow falling heavily and white clumps adhering to parts of the fuselage and vertical tail. A couple of inches of snow (and presumably some ice) lay on the top of the horizontal stabilizer. The takeoff was recorded as well. The Pilatus roared down Runway 31, lifted off, banked to the left, and faded from sight in the snow and mist.

No one at the airport knew it at the time, but it crashed less than a mile from the runway. Of the 12 people aboard, three survived with serious injuries. The pilot was among the nine dead.

Thirty years ago, it would have looked like an open and shut case. Whatever residue of ice remained on the wings must obviously have triggered a premature stall. But we live in a different era now, with flight data and cockpit voice recorders in wide use. They tell accident investigators not what must have happened, but what really did.

The National Transportation Safety Board’s probable cause finding made no mention of snow and ice. It attributed the loss of control after takeoff and the ensuing stall to “the pilot’s improper loading of the airplane, which resulted in reduced static longitudinal stability.” Another contributing factor was “his decision to depart into low instrument meteorological conditions”—although that seems unfair, since the whole point of having an instrument rating and a powerful airplane equipped for flight in known icing is to be able to do exactly that.

The cockpit voice recorder picked up the sounds of passengers boarding the airplane, stomping snow from their shoes, clicking their seat belts. One passenger commented on how many pheasants they had bagged. Another recited a prayer of gratitude for various blessings—it was Thanksgiving weekend—and went on, with eerie prescience, “Father in Heaven, we ask for a special blessing now that we take off in this not-so-great weather and that [Thou wilt] watch over and protect us. Impress upon the mind of [the pilot] that he might know how best to travel this course that we are about to do, and we are thankful for this airplane and ask that You will watch over and protect us.” A collective “Amen” followed.

The pilot and the right-seat occupant radioed the airport manager, who was plowing the runway, to ascertain its condition. Their exchange was somewhat acerbic. The manager frankly told the pilot he must be crazy. The pilot good-naturedly replied that the snow berms on either side of the plowed portion of the strip were not a concern. As it turned out, he was right.

The pilot back-taxied to the approach end of Runway 31 and succeeded in turning the airplane around. The power came up, the Pilatus accelerated, and after 30 seconds it rotated. The pitch angle increased to almost 20 degrees, then eased back to about 10. Practically from the moment of liftoff, the stall warning sounded and an automated voice intoned the word “stall” over and over, no fewer than 19 times. Eleven seconds after rotation, a porpoising motion began, increasing in magnitude and rapidity. The bank angle increased to 64 degrees; the stick pusher actuated and, at a height of 380 feet, the Pilatus stalled.

With granular information from the flight data recorder, the NTSB conducted simulations to ascertain whether the airplane had been controllable and whether the accumulations of snow and ice remaining on it could have been a factor in the accident. The conclusion was that the airplane should have been controllable, and that the snow and ice had not significantly degraded its performance, though they may have affected the elevator control forces.

READ MORE: Classic Aftermath

The data recorder stored a number of previous flights, and the NTSB noted that the pilot, who had 1,260 hours in type, habitually rotated somewhat abruptly, tending to slightly overshoot the desired pitch attitude and then correct. Another pilot who regularly flew the airplane used a gentler, more gradual rotation, which the board found made speed control easier.

The board compared the accident flight with the previous day’s trip from Idaho Falls to Chamberlain. The cabin loading had been similar, and there were pitch oscillations after takeoff on that flight as well. The crux of the matter, in the NTSB’s view, was the combination of heavy weight—the airplane was 107 pounds over gross—and the CG location, several inches behind the aft limit, that resulted from 12 people, none of them lap children, and a great many dead pheasants occupying a 10-passenger airplane. An aft CG is associated with diminished stick forces and weak speed stability, conditions that may be difficult to manage on instruments.

The stall warnings that were heard practically from the moment the airplane rotated were due to the design of the Pilatus’s ice protection system. When ice protection is on, the triggering speeds for both the stall warning and the stick pusher increase considerably. According to the flight manual, the target rotation speed at max gross in icing conditions was 92 knots. The pilot rotated at 88, possibly because he wanted to get clear of snow build-up on the partially plowed runway. When the actual stall occurred, however, the indicated airspeed was only 80 knots. 

One can speculate about what passed through the pilot’s mind during the few seconds between the liftoff and the stall. The aural stall warning must have taken him by surprise. Since he had just spent hours removing snow and ice, his first thought may have been that it was caused by some lingering contamination on the wings. But now he was in near-whiteout conditions, and too low to risk pushing the nose down decisively. The airplane may not have responded to a gentle push on the yoke. Pitch oscillations made speed control difficult. There was little time to analyze or adapt—only enough for an exclaimed “Oh no!”

The pilot was the kind of person whom you would expect to follow rules. Yet he ignored the CG limits. Did he feel undue pressure to get his passengers back home? Probably not. There is no indication that he hesitated or considered the takeoff dangerous; in fact, he seemed less concerned than his prayerful passengers were. Did he understand how the extreme aft loading could affect the airplane’s flying qualities? He had made a similar flight the day before. Did he begin this one thinking it would be exactly the same? 

Sometimes you don’t know how near the edge you are until you go over it.

This article is based on the National Transportation Safety Board’s report of the accident and is intended to bring the issues raised to our readers’ attention. It is not intended to judge or to reach any definitive conclusions about the ability or capacity of any person, living or dead, or any aircraft or accessory.

The post A Wing and a Prayer appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

In August 2016, Le Rêve Bleu, a replica of the prewar Bugatti-de Monge 100P racer, crashed on its third flight. The pilot, 66—a 10,000-hour ex-U.S. Air Force pilot holding an ATP (airline transport pilot certificate), who had devoted years to the recreation of the fabled airplane—died.

The original airplane, now in the EAA museum, was built in the late 1930s. It was stored, incomplete, when World War II loomed, and it never flew. Intended to compete in the Coupe Deutsch de la Meurthe races, it had a drastically tapered, forward-swept wing (with an aspect ratio of 3.3), a minimal empennage, and contra-rotating tractor propellers driven by two Bugatti supercharged straight-eight engines of 450 hp each, mounted amidships, one behind the other. Racing speeds in those days were around 300 mph—the dominant competitors in Europe were carefully streamlined, but conventional Caudron monoplanes with six-cylinder inverted, inline engines of around 300 hp. Clearly, the Bugatti, if it worked, would be faster. Besides, some people thought it was the most beautiful airplane ever.

Bugatti’s aeronautical engineer, Louis de Monge, packaged the pilot, the engines and their cooling radiators ingeniously, wasting nary a cubic centimeter of the fuselage’s slender, perfectly streamlined spindle. The modern replica used two Suzuki Hayabusa motorcycle engines, 1.3-liter straight-fours, nominally rated at 175 hp at 9,500 rpm. Their integral gearboxes were retained, set in sixth gear. Hydraulic clutches, intended to protect against harmonic resonance during start-up, connected the engines to slender drive shafts that ran forward on either side of the pilot to a speed reduction unit driving the two fixed-pitch props. Thus, the two engines and propellers were almost entirely independent of one another. The only potential point of failure common to both was the lubrication system for the nose gearbox.

Unusual for an event involving a single fatality and a unique airplane, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) produced a detailed analysis. The circumstance was clear: the aircraft stalled during initial climb from the 13,500-foot runway at Clinton-Sherman Airport (KCSM) in Oklahoma. The airplane was equipped with half a dozen GoPro cameras that recorded its demise in granular detail. Using those recordings, the NTSB could dissect the accident/flight second-by-second, and reconstruct a test flight from a year earlier.

The first flight of Le Rêve Bleu—the name, conferred by the pilot, means “The Blue Dream”—took place in August 2015. The runway hop, intended to check stability and control, was successful, although during the rollout a brake pedal failed and the elegant airplane ended up nosed over in rain-soaked ground beside the runway. The second flight, in October, was a single circuit of the airfield. The airplane lifted off at 80 knots with both engines turning at about 6,000 to 6,500 rpm—presumably propeller-limited and well below their speed for maximum power. At 500 feet agl, it leveled out and slowly accelerated to about 110 knots. As it turned final, the engines continued to turn at around 6,000 rpm, although the throttle levers had been backed off considerably—behavior consistent with a propeller pitched for climb. 

Although the second flight was without incident, it was not the flight expected of a 2,800-pound, 350-hp airplane in the hands of a pilot fully confident in its performance. It suggested, in fact, an airplane with barely sufficient power. In any case, the pilot’s impressions were not made public. I have not found among the reports on various aspects of the project that are posted online any discussion of what took place or what changes, if any, were made during the 10 months that elapsed between the second and third flights.

The third flight was announced to be the last. The airplane was destined for a museum in the U.K. This must have been a disappointment to the many people who had contributed money, time, and effort to the project, hoping some day to see it—on YouTube, at the very least—roar past them at speed, a blue streak out of the past.

The pilot accelerated gradually, as if feeling out the airplane anew. He rotated at a little above 80 kias after having rolled nearly 8,000 feet. He retracted the gear immediately. The airplane climbed, but its attitude seemed somewhat nose-high. Then the angle of climb seemed to diminish, the right wing dropped, then came back up. A moment later the other wing dropped and the nose sliced to the left. The airplane was only 100 feet in the air when the stall occurred, and it was impossible to recover.

In-cockpit video revealed that about 30 seconds after the airplane became airborne the left engine’s rpm began to drift upward, approaching the redline. (“Left engine,” here, means the engine controlled by the left throttle lever.) The pilot pulled the left throttle back to idle and that engine rolled back to 7,000 rpm. He pushed the right lever fully forward but the rpm of the right engine did not change, but that of the left engine, surprisingly, surged upward again, briefly reaching 9,500 rpm.

During this sequence, which lasted 20 seconds, the indicated airspeed, which had never exceeded 85 knots, gradually bled off, and the angle of attack—displayed on a conspicuous digital indicator at the top center of the instrument panel—steadily increased, eventually reaching 18 degrees. The NTSB found that the probable cause of the crash was “the pilot’s failure to maintain airspeed during an engine anomaly…the reason for which could not be identified during post-accident examination.” Although the NTSB declined to say so, the “engine anomaly” was certainly a slipping clutch on the left engine.

Aviation usually avoids complex drivetrains. Each non-rigid transition from one component to another involves losses, and no matter how well engineered the separate components may be, their potential interactions are difficult to foresee. There was always a possibility, even a probability, that Le Rêve Bleu might suffer a failure of one of its engines or drives. With an empty weight of over 2,500 pounds, it was extremely heavy for its size. Its large wing area, 223 square feet, gave it a comparatively low wing loading, but its 27-foot span was a liability at low airspeed. So was the extreme taper, which would predispose it to a wing drop at the stall. Running at 7,000 rather than 9,500 rpm reduced the raw horsepower available from the engines by between 15 and 20 percent. The two-stage reduction gearing took away a few more percentage points, as did the inevitable inefficiency of a fixed-pitch propeller at an off-design airspeed. According to a 1945 NACA report on the interactions of contra-rotating propellers, the windmilling front prop could have peeled off another 10 percent of the thrust available from the other one.

It was foreseeable that the airplane would have trouble climbing at low speed; its drag was at a minimum at around 110 kias, which was the “blue line” speed marked on the airspeed indicator for single-engine flight, and so at 85 kias, it was “behind the power curve.” The single most important action the pilot could take at the first sign of engine trouble would be to get the nose down, even if this meant belly landing in the rough. He certainly knew this and most probably rehearsed the proper response in his mind.

So why, when he lost power on one engine, did he fail to maintain airspeed? Nobody knows. But the fact a 10,000-hour former fighter pilot, intimately familiar with his airplane and able to plan for the scenario, failed to execute the indispensable response is a caution to us all. We may not react as well as we imagine.

This article is based on the National Transportation Safety Board’s report of the accident and is intended to bring the issues raised to our readers’ attention. It is not intended to judge or to reach any definitive conclusions about the ability or capacity of any person, living or dead, or any aircraft or accessory.

The post An Aircraft Built for Speed Loses Power appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

On a freezing January evening in 2016, a Cirrus SR22T approached Greene County Regional Airport (I19) near Dayton, Ohio, its home field, after a 100 nm IFR hop from Indianapolis.

Conditions at the airport were VMC, with a 1,700-foot ceiling, 10-mile visibility and a 9-knot wind gusting to 14 and varying from 240 to 330 degrees. The sun had just set, and the temperature on the ground was 32 degrees Fahrenheit.

The 2,000-hour airline transport pilot, 33, descended from his cruising altitude of 9,000 feet and used the GPS approach for Runway 7, intending to circle to Runway 25. Passing through 4,000 feet, he switched on the anti-icing system, which on the Cirrus consists of a porous metal leading edge from which an ethylene glycol fluid with a low freezing point, called TKS, bleeds onto the wing surface. Six miles from the airport, in the clear just below the clouds, he canceled IFR and switched anti-ice off. Passing the final approach fix, he slowed, selected half flaps and began a descent.

The Cirrus entered a left downwind leg for Runway 25. Witnesses mentioned that it appeared unusually low and unusually close to the runway. It turned base, then final. The wings leveled only briefly between turns. On the base to final turn, the Cirrus stalled and spun, crashing 100 yards from the runway threshold and killing the pilot.

The airplane was equipped with a data-logging device. It showed that in the seconds preceding the loss of control, the angle of bank approached 50 degrees and the indicated airspeed was between 87 and 90 knots.

The National Transportation Safety Board noted that, according to the airplane handbook, at 60 degrees of bank the stall speed with half flaps was 95 knots, and could have been even higher had any ice been present on the wings. It attributed the accident to “the pilot’s failure to maintain adequate airspeed while turning from the base leg to final, which resulted in the wing’s critical angle of attack being exceeded and a subsequent aerodynamic stall.”

It is difficult to know the precise stalling speeds of particular aircraft, but we can assume that the full-flaps stall speed of the SR22T at gross weight is no more than 61 knots. This airplane was not at gross weight, however; it was on a positioning flight, and therefore probably carrying no cargo, and the pilot had messaged ahead that he would be requiring 48 gallons of fuel. The actual weight of the airplane was likely around 3,100 pounds, so its full-flaps stall speed would have been 57 kcas. The stall would probably occur at around 63 kcas, or 65 kias, with half flap. The maximum angle of bank recorded did not exceed 50 degrees, which corresponds to a level-flight G-loading of 1.56 and a stalling speed of 81 kias. The NTSB’s mention of 95 knots is a mere rhetorical flourish, irrelevant to the accident.

In cases involving a spin out of a turn — a fairly common type of approach-to-landing accident — the NTSB almost always alludes to the increase in stalling speed that occurs when an airplane is banked, but never mentions that it applies only when altitude is maintained. It is obvious when you perform a wingover turn, for instance, that you can put an airplane into a 90-degree bank and still not stall it. I’m not sure whether the problem is that the NTSB accident analysts don’t know this fact — which would be hard to believe — or that they merely feel that their analysis is more forceful if they omit to mention it.

In any case, the airplane did stall. Why?

The gusting wind could have been a factor. It was not very strong to begin with. Groundspeed and indicated airspeed tracked each other closely in the logged data, and the airplane would in any case have been turning into the wind. However, a sudden 14-knot gust from 330 degrees when the airplane was banked 50 degrees could conceivably have increased the wing’s angle of attack by a couple of degrees and caused it to stall. A gusty right crosswind is a little-recognized hazard on the base-to-final turn of a left-hand pattern.

From one of the witness statements included in the accident docket, some inferences can be drawn about the state of mind of the pilot. He had a busy schedule flying the Cirrus. According to the line supervisor at I19, who knew the pilot, “the goal for him” was to get back to I19 before the FBO closed, which was at 8 p.m. in summer and 6 p.m. in winter. The accident took place at precisely 6 p.m. It’s likely, therefore, that the pilot was trying to get down as expeditiously as possible. The facts that the airplane was low and close-in on the downwind leg — he had to turn right to widen out the approach before he turned left from downwind to base — and that the turn to final took place very close to the end of the runway are consistent with that theory.

It’s probable that, beginning from an unusually low downwind and having to make steeply banked turns because he had flown the downwind leg so close to the runway, the pilot found himself sinking and increased the angle of attack in the final turn to arrest his descent.

Ice remains a possible, but unknown, factor. The effect of ice on the stalling behavior of wings is difficult to predict, but it is well-known that very small amounts of ice can sometimes have disproportionately large effects. The pilot selected half flaps two and a half minutes before landing, but he did not begin to slow down until a minute later. He may have been in the habit of getting the airplane configured for landing well in advance of arriving at the runway — the essence of a “stabilized approach” and a staple of Cirrus standardized training — but it is also possible that he was concerned about ice and thought it would offer an extra margin of safety.

The fact that the pilot used anti-ice during his descent suggests that he saw some airframe icing; this would be consistent with the weather conditions and with pilot reports. That he turned off the TKS bleed upon emerging from the clouds is logical: In the clear, with no precipitation, no further icing would occur. It was unclear from witness accounts which wing stalled, although one witness stated categorically that the airplane rolled to the right. It is possible that the pilot turned off the TKS when the left wing appeared satisfactorily clean to him, and that he overlooked some residue on the right wing.

It’s often said that accidents arise from the combination of multiple factors that are harmless enough by themselves. Here you had a well-trained professional pilot, very familiar with his airplane, making a traffic-pattern approach to his home field in VMC. You could hardly imagine a less threatening situation. And yet it ended with an accident. To understand how that could happen, you cannot ignore all of the elements of the approach that were slightly unusual: that it was flown close in and low, that the banks were unusually steep, that the plane had been through icing conditions and that the pilot was most likely hurrying to get to the FBO. To this add the fact that the pilot was very familiar with and perhaps overly confident in the airplane, and you have a glimpse of how what should have been a completely ordinary maneuver could turn into a disaster.

This article was originally published by FLYING on March 7, 2018.

The post A Skilled Pilot, a Routine Approach, an Unexpected Catastrophe appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Late in August 2015, a 55-year-old Pennsylvania lawyer bought a 1981 A36 Bonanza. A private pilot with an instrument rating and around 800 hours of flight time, he had, according to a friend, “a lot” of IFR experience in a fixed-gear, fixed-pitch Piper ­Cherokee. The Bonanza, however, equipped with a Garmin 530 EFIS navigator and a flight director, was more airplane than he was used to.

He quickly obtained a “complex” checkout—six hours in flight and an hour and a half of ground instruction—from an instructor whom he knew. The instructor showed him how to set up the Garmin for IFR ­approaches, but the approaches they flew ­together were in VMC, without a hood. The instructor cautioned the pilot not to fly in actual IFR conditions until he had more experience with the airplane and its equipment.

A few days later, the pilot, accompanied by his wife, her father and a friend who owned a similarly equipped A36, flew to ­Florida to ­visit a daughter. The friend remained in Florida; on ­September 7, the others ­began the return trip north.

Just before the leg from Sarasota to Greensboro, North Carolina, the pilot filed an IFR flight plan—190 knots at 8,000 feet must have been a gratifying change for someone used to a PA-28—and got a telephone weather briefing. He cut the briefing short because thunderstorms were approaching and he wanted to get away before they ­arrived. The just-under-four-hour flight in VMC from Sarasota to Greensboro was uneventful. At the destination airport, ­Piedmont Triad (KGSO), however, he found an 1,100-foot overcast. The cloud layer was 1,500 feet deep.

The pilot asked the approach controller whether he should expect a visual approach. The question implies that he had seen breaks in the overcast, but the controller told him to expect the ILS to Runway 5R, and he did not demur. Presumably, the pilot attempted to set up the Garmin unit for the approach, as he had practiced, but he must have quickly become mired in confusion. The 530 is intimidating to a novice, with 20 knobs and buttons on its face and a seeming infinity of menu choices. The pilot’s distraction was such that he had to be told three times that his runway was 5R, not 5L.

The approach controller assigned a heading of 020 to intercept the localizer. The Bonanza was then 9 miles from the initial approach fix, PAGAN intersection. About two minutes later, the pilot asked the controller, “How do you like this route of flight?” The controller took the unconventional question in stride, replying that the airplane seemed to be a little to the right of course; he amended the heading to 360, a 20-degree adjustment. Surprisingly, the pilot asked, “Turning left or ­turning right for 360?” Nonstandard phraseology and illogical questions are often the first signals that a pilot is headed for trouble.

A little later, the ­controller asked, “Are you established on the localizer?”

“I believe I am,” the pilot said.

But the Bonanza had flown through the localizer. The pilot ­requested “vectors to final”—by which he possibly intended something like the ­virtually ­obsolete GCA (ground-controlled approach), in which the controller guides the airplane all the way to the runway. Instead, the controller canceled the ILS clearance and vectored the Bonanza back around for another try. While the controller was talking to ­another facility on a ­l­andline, the Bonanza ­pilot called again asking for vectors. His voice was “strained,” and the controller ­noticed that he was at 2,500 feet rather than the ­assigned 3,000.

Finally, the pilot said, “We need a descent; we are almost disoriented.”

The controller now realized that the pilot was in trouble. He decided to simplify matters by giving him no-gyro turns rather than vectors. He had his radar screen set to so large a scale, however, that he did not discern that the pilot was ­actually flying in circles, first to the right, then to the left. The Bonanza continued to lose altitude.

Finally, the controller told the pilot to climb and maintain 4,000 feet, above the overcast. “I’ll block altitude for you.” He thought that once in the sunshine above the clouds, the pilot would be able to collect and reorient himself. But the Bonanza did not climb. It continued to descend, whether deliberately or inadvertently. The terrain below was relatively flat, and the airplane emerged from the clouds in one piece. But that was not to be the end of the story. Witnesses on the ground saw the airplane maneuvering erratically and banking steeply. It “looked as if it were a trick airplane practicing stunts, or else someone trying to stabilize the airplane but continuing to overcorrect …”

Surprisingly, although he was now in good VFR conditions below the overcast, the pilot never regained control. Perhaps panic or vertigo had become too extreme for him to fight his way back. The A36 stalled and spun before crashing 7 miles from KGSO, almost exactly beneath the Runway 5L ILS. No one survived.

The National Transportation Safety Board’s finding of probable cause exposes the difficulty the board sometimes has with the concept of “cause.” The cause of the accident, the NTSB says, was spatial disorientation. Certainly, this is true. But the pilot’s inflight decision-making, which put him in the position of having to make an ILS approach, against the advice of his instructor and with still-unfamiliar equipment, is not mentioned, even though the narrative strongly suggests that the pilot became disoriented, at least partly, because he was overwhelmed by his new equipment.

The NTSB criticized the FAA for failing to train controllers “to recognize and effectively respond to disorientation scenarios.” The NTSB objected that no-gyro turns in both directions may have worsened the pilot’s disorientation and was scandalized that most controllers at the facility were unfamiliar with the concept of a standard-rate turn. The exact rate at which a pilot turns during a no-gyro approach is, however, of only marginal importance to a controller.

Something to notice about this accident is how a pilot’s ability to cope deteriorates over time, to the point that he can no longer even avail himself of the seemingly elementary expedient of climbing back above the clouds in a straight line.

It is important for pilots, and particularly low-time pilots, to understand that the very stress of trying to solve a problem erodes one’s power to solve it. Unlike most other ­challenges in life, those which are encountered in airplanes may be life-threatening. In menacing circumstances, the brain seems to become blinkered, abandoning rational analysis in favor of raw impulse or, worse, total paralysis.

You may overlook the ­obvious and make unreasonable choices. You may find yourself unable to interpret the readings on your instruments. You will not perform as well as you expect, and certainly not so well as you did in the same situation on a check ride or in a simulator. This is why it is so important not to skirt risk closely, but to give it a wide berth.

A different lesson, and one of broad application in life, may also be drawn from this story. However much you love it, don’t go into the clouds with your new EFIS until you’ve really gotten to know it.

This article was originally published by FLYING on March 9, 2017.

The post More Than He Could Handle appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

According to the pilot’s own account, he and his lady friend were on a weekend jaunt to Saline Hot Springs, a tiny, rather charming clothing-optional oasis located in the middle of nowhere on the eastern edge of Death Valley in California. He approached the 1,350-foot gravel and rock “Chicken Strip” at 60 knots in his Grumman Yankee, landing uphill, as recommended. Something went wrong, and the Yankee came to rest upside down at the far end of the strip. The pilot broke out what was left of his side of the canopy, and he and his friend crawled out, uninjured. The airplane, however, was a total loss.

That happened in June 2016. Seven months later, the pilot flew his other airplane, a Mooney M20, into a mountainside in southern California.

[elementor-template id=”143209″

The pilot, 56, an electronics engineer, commuted three times a week from his home in Tehachapi, California, to the company in Los Angeles where he had worked full time prior to his semi-retirement in 2015. He would land at Torrance (KTOA), a large GA airport 10 miles south of Los Angeles International (KLAX).A colleague would meet him there and they would drive to work together. The straight-line distance from Tehachapi (KTSP) to Torrance is about 95 statute miles.

Tehachapi lies in a valley ringed on three sides by mountains, and overlooks to the east the Mojave Desert, NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center, Edwards Air Force Base, and the Mojave Spaceport of Burt Ru-tan and SpaceShipOne fame. The natural route from Tehachapi to Torrance would be to fly eastward out of the valley, then turn south. You would probably cruise at 5,500 or 6,500 feet, depending on wind conditions, to cross the mountains on the south edge of the desert—home, incidentally, to the portion of the San Andreas Fault which is said to be preparing a cataclysmic temblor for Los Angeles.

You would fly over Van Nuys Airport (KVNY), staying above Burbank’s Class Charlie airspace, drop down to 3,500 feet to thread the VFR corridor through the Los Angeles Class Bravo—don’t forget to change your transponder to 1201, the required squawk code in this corridor—and then call Torrance.

These are the published VFR procedures. And it appeared, from the tracks stored in his Garmin GPS, that the pilot, who had more than 2,500 hours and an instrument rating, usually did make the trip VFR. The Garmin stored records of 35 trips, beginning about a month before the fatal accident. Of these, 17 were be-tween KTOA and KTSP. In a few cases, the pilot had taken off but eventually turned back, presumably be-cause of clouds over the mountains. It was winter, when Los Angeles would be free of the morning coastal stratus of the spring months but prone to frontal passages and lingering clouds over the mountains to the north.

Between the Garmin and ATC radar, the final, fatal flight was precisely documented—and perplexing. After emerging from the Tehachapi basin, the pilot had flown straight toward the Lake Hughes VOR, which is located on a 5,800-foot peak in the mountains that mark the south edge of the desert. The track was west of all the other stored routes, and differed from them in being absolutely straight. The airplane was obviously on autopilot, whereas it had also been obviously hand-flown on all the previous trips.

KTSP is at an elevation of 4,000 feet. The Mooney had initially climbed to 7,500 feet, then turned toward Lake Hughes VORTAC and immediately returned to 6,500. It stayed there for a short time, then descended to 5,750 feet, where it remained until it struck the mountain just 70 feet below the summit and a stone’s throw from theVOR antenna.

National Transportation Safety Board accident investigators could find no explanation for the altitude of 5,750 feet. The hemispheric rule called for 6,500, since the heading was 210. Fox Field (KWJF), 10 miles or so east of the Mooney’s track, was reporting overcast at 2,400 feet, or 4,750 feet msl. It is extremely probable that a similar ceiling prevailed over the mountains and the ridges were obscured. The pilot was not in contact with air traffic control, and the NTSB determined that he must have, at some point, entered IMC.

The reason for the 5,750-foot altitude, which the pilot maintained quite accurately, can probably be inferred from his previous tracks and altitudes. Although he sometimes flew at 6,500 or 7,500 feet, on three occasions he had crossed the mountains at 5,700. Even at that height, he still had 1,000 feet of ground clearance, because the mountains east of Lake Hughes are only3,500 to 4,500 feet high. Only a couple of isolated peaks rise to 5,200 or so. On one occasion he had passed about a mile and a half east of Lake Hughes, but he was thenat 7,000 feet and would not have formed a definite ideaof the height of the VOR.

He knew that he could drop down below the overcast once he had crossed the initial group of ridges. He was low enough to be out of the way of IFR traffic—hence the odd, neither-here-nor-there altitude—but high enough to get safely over the mountains. To ATC radar, he would look like scud-running VFR traffic. The hemispheric rule does not apply to traffic flying less than 3,000 feet above terrain.

The elevation of the Lake Hughes VOR is indicated in tiny, faint characters on the sectional—much less conspicuously than the heights of charted obstacles. But it is unlikely that the pilot consulted a sectional chart. He was improvising and believed that he was so familiar with the terrain that he had no need of a map.

But there was a critical difference between this flight and the others. This time he was navigating by the VOR, not by pilotage, and the VOR turned out to be a trap. Two aspects of this accident are worth reflecting upon. One is the role of habit and the sense of security that it brings. Familiar tasks frequently repeated dull alertness. The pilot probably felt no threat from these low, forgiving hills.

The other is the pilot’s evident willingness to impro-vise, to take chances, to shrug off norms and regulations. Most pilots would not consider a Yankee, with its high approach speed and small tires, a good candidate for a rugged desert strip a third the length of the typical GA airport. He tried it anyway.

The willingness to take a chance and the optimism about likely outcomes that took him to Saline in the Yankee were also, perhaps, in play when he decided to fly blind across mountains within—he thought—a few hundred feet of them. Perhaps they also made him reluctant to subject himself to the regimentation, scrutiny, and delays of an instrument flight plan.

Adventurousness is not a vice, even in pilots. Which of us has never done an unwise thing, taken a chance, or broken a rule? Proverbially, there are no old, bold pilots, but in fact, there are plenty. The trick is to strike a balance—to know when to be rash and when to draw back.

This accident represents the convergence of a psychological willingness to behave unconventionally and a confident lack of concern born of habit. Unfortunately, it is not always in our power to recognize our mistakes as we are making them. That’s why we fall back on rules and procedures: They insulate us from our own frailties. One may feel a grudging admiration for bold nonchalance—but really, all things considered, he should have filed.

This article appeared in the Q2 2022 issue of FLYING Magazine.

The post Improvisation Is Not a Flight Plan appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Familiarity in flying has several components. There is the foundational element of general familiarity with airplanes and how to fly them. There is familiarity with systems; this may be of a general kind (knowing how to lean the mixture or adjust a constant-speed propeller, for instance) or specific to a particular airplane or type (such as knowing to use the left main tank of an old Beech Bonanza for takeoff when both mains are full because all return fuel from the injection pump goes to the left tank).

There is familiarity with handling characteristics: whether, for example, a certain type pitches up or down with flap deflection. There is muscle memory, knowing how much effort will be required to pitch or roll, and where to reach to lower the gear or switch fuel tanks. There is knowledge of cruising performance, clean and dirty descent rates, quality of stall warning, and post-stall behavior.

Although FAA regulations set quite precise requirements for familiarity and currency—becoming more rigorous for more complex and higher-performance airplanes—it is really hard to tell how much familiarity is enough and, for that matter, whether there is such a thing as too much familiarity. A pilot may know an airplane very well but usually fly a different type. Habits acquired from the more recently flown, or more familiar, airplane might be unconsciously applied to the other. The key word is “unconscious.” Familiarity is the thing that allows you to act without thinking. “Without thinking” is commonly a reproach, but instinctive, unconscious flying is also the hallmark of a natural and skilled pilot. There is a middle ground to be found between too much thought and too little.

How to make the first flight in a homebuilt airplane is a subject of ongoing debate, with one school arguing for short runway hops, reasoning that a few feet is not very far to fall, and another for immediate up-and-away flight, in order to get far from the rocks and hard places as quickly as possible. The impatient purchaser of a Lancair 235 tried to have it both ways.

What Happened

The pilot, 81 years old, had not flown in six months. He had about 450 hours total time. He had no experience whatsoever in the Lancair, which was turned over to him by a broker who asked him not to fly it until he had found someone with experience in the type to fly with him. The pilot promised he would not; however, he wanted to taxi-test the airplane. On his second taxi run down the runway, as the surprised broker looked on, the airplane took off and flew away.

Most likely, the pilot did not intend to break his promise to the broker, who was his friend. The airplane probably became airborne unexpectedly, and he thought it best to get familiar with it before attempting a landing.

He was gone for an hour. When he finally returned, the pilot made two landing approaches, each time going around. A witness observed that the pilot was having trouble with pitch control: “Nose up, nose down…nose up, nose down.” On the third approach, he landed long, bounced twice, climbed to 100 or 150 feet, stalled, and spun.

The National Transportation Safety Board identified the pilot’s lack of familiarity with the airplane as a contributing factor, the cause of the fatal accident being simple failure to maintain flying speed. It’s possible, however, that the pilot was not only unfamiliar with the Lancair 235 in particular but also with airplanes in general that are flown with fingertips rather than a fist. An extremely sensitive airplane is difficult for an inexperienced pilot to cope with because anxiety makes you more ham-handed and likely to overcontrol.

Some airplanes have design quirks that set them apart from others. One is the Piper Comanche, whose manual pitch trim—like that of the Ford Trimotor—consists of a crank handle in the ceiling. Early Comanches did not have electric trim, the operation of which is intuitive: forward button means nose down/go faster. Vertical trim wheels are similarly natural. The overhead crank, however, has built-in unfamiliarity.

The 3,000-hour pilot of a Comanche 250 was observed adjusting the overhead trim control as he taxied out to depart. During the takeoff roll, the propeller struck the runway surface. After breaking ground, the airplane pitched up, stalled and crashed vertically, killing all three aboard.

In principle, it should be impossible to strike a prop even with a flat nosewheel tire and a fully compressed nose strut. However, the nose-strut drag links and torque link were fractured “as if the nose gear had been forced rearward while extended.” Whether this damage arose from the crash or preceded it could not be determined; what was determined, though, was that the pitch trim was set in the full nose-down position, which would have the effect of lifting the tail as the airplane gained speed.

• READ MORE: Previous editions of Peter Garrison’s ‘Aftermath’

Another Comanche crashed somewhat similarly, although the fragmentation of the wreckage was such that the trim setting could not be determined. It was the 700-hour pilot’s second solo flight in the airplane, which he had bought two weeks earlier. He had taken the precaution of getting 15 hours of dual in it in the meantime. A witness reported the pilot appeared to intend to perform a short-field takeoff: He ran up to full power before releasing the brakes. The airplane seemed to rotate prematurely, and the witness, who was an experienced pilot, judged that it looked slow. Rather than level out to gain speed, however, it kept climbing “steeper and steeper” until it stalled and spiraled to the ground.

Although this was an early Comanche, manufactured in 1959, it was equipped with electric trim. The overhead trim is faster-acting, however. The inexorable increase in pitch angle is suggestive of an airplane that was either mistrimmed in the first place or whose pilot is inadvertently applying trim in the wrong direction while trying to get the nose down.

Fuel systems, especially ones in low-wing airplanes, which do not have a “both” position, can be a source of trouble. There are many instances of pilots using an empty tank for takeoff when there was fuel in another. Opportunities for confusion multiply as tanks become more numerous.

A 1,300-hour commercial pilot, flying a single equipped with aftermarket tip tanks, crashed while trying to return to land immediately after taking off. The pilot, who had only a few hours in the airplane, had taken off with the fuel selector on a tip tank, although use of the tip tanks was limited to whatever is meant by “level flight.” The NTSB’s report on the fatal accident does not provide information about the pilot’s previous experience, but the fact that he took off with a tip tank selected suggests he probably landed on his preceding flight with that same tank selected—also forbidden—and his previous experience may have been in airplanes, such as high-wing Cessnas, that do not require so much attention to tank selection.

Mistakes breed in the shadowy land between the systematic and the instinctive. Only by forcing our actions up into the realm of conscious procedure—for instance, by methodical use of checklists and each crewmember’s critical attention to the actions of the other—can we reduce our reliance on instinct and the unconscious errors that come with it.

This story originally published in the December 2019 issue of Flying Magazine

The post A Pilot Gets Caught Between Procedure and Instinct appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

On a clear June afternoon in 2020, two senior Navy pilots left Jasper, Alabama (KJFX), headed for Pensacola, Florida, 200 nm distant, where they were based. They were flying a Piper Turbo Lance of which the left seat pilot was a co-owner. After a 30-minute cruise climb, the Lance leveled out at 15,000 feet.

About nine minutes later, the pilot asked Atlanta Center for a descent to 10,000, which was granted. After another minute, he reported an “engine fluctuation” and requested a further descent and deviation to Selma (KSEM), which was close by. Center cleared him to 5,000. Shortly afterward, the pilot, his voice tense but calm, declared an emergency. 

The center controller offered the pilot his choice of Runway 15 or 33; he was currently lined up with 15. The pilot reported two souls on board and said that the prop was turning but he could not tell whether the engine was producing power. “I may be dead-stickin’ it,” he said. 

• READ MORE: Previous editions of ‘Aftermath’

Three minutes after the pilot declared an emergency, the center controller advised him that Selma was at 12 o’clock, 9 miles. The pilot said that he could not make a straight in—presumably he was still too high—and would fly a pattern. Then he added, “I’ve got a fire, looks like as well, sir.”

Half a minute later, the pilot requested the frequency for Selma. The controller gave him the CTAF frequency, 122.7. 

That was the pilot’s last communication. The Lance had not yet turned toward the runway, but it remained in radar contact a little while longer. The airport was now at 9 o’clock, 4 miles, the controller said.  Then, “Do you copy? Radar contact lost, respond if you can.”

Now then the wheels of accident response began to turn. Another controller provided the phone numbers of the police and the airport at Selma. A cropduster spotted the heavily fragmented wreckage of the Lance in a field. It had struck the ground at high speed a few miles from the runway; both pilots had died in the crash.

The Investigation

The National Transportation Safety Board’s accident investigation naturally focused on the engine. It had failed catastrophically, the No. 6 (rearmost) connecting rod breaking, smashing a hole in the top of the crankcase and disintegrating into pieces, most of which could not be found. The No. 5 rod had also separated from the crankshaft. The camshaft was broken in two. Almost all of the connecting rod bearings were deeply scored—the crankshaft journals not so badly—and the aft end of the crankshaft was discolored by intense frictional heating. There were also score marks in the oil pump.

The key finding was that the perforated cylindrical screen through which the lubrication system takes in oil from the sump was 60-percent filled with a mixture of carbon flakes and metallic material. The accident report conflates “metallic” and “magnetic,” leaving some confusion about whether the “metallic” debris, which accounted for three-quarters of what was found, was entirely ferrous or not, and therefore about how much of the non-magnetic material may have been non-ferrous metal as well. In any case, however, the verdict of the NTSB was that the obstruction of the screen had led to oil starvation and to the eventual—and inevitably—failures of the rods.

The investigation therefore focused its attention upon the mechanic who had maintained the airplane.

It emerged that the owners had persistently reported low oil pressure. The mechanic had removed and replaced the oil pressure relief valve, removed and flushed the oil cooler, and at least twice raised the oil pressure using the adjustment screw. In response to a direct question as to whether he had cleaned the suction screen at the last inspection, the mechanic replied that the oil cooler had been flushed. The NTSB seemed to consider this reply evasive.

Normally, every step an A&P takes during an inspection is recorded. The oil filter had been cut open and examined at every annual, and nothing unusual reported. Recently, a spectroscopic oil analysis had been performed, but the mechanic did not know the result. Significantly, however, his notes on the most recent annual inspection, less than 90 days before the accident, made no mention of removing and cleaning the suction screen, which is recommended to be done every 50 or 100 hours, depending which guidance you consult. In fact, it turned out that the most recent record of cleaning the screen was dated 11 years before the accident.

It was impossible to know how long the accumulation of debris had been there. The NTSB assumed that it had been there a long time, and was the reason for the repeated reports of low oil pressure. The investigation concluded that the engine failed because of the blockage in the screen, and identified as the probable cause of the accident “the mechanic’s failure to clean the oil suction screen during the most recent maintenance…”

All pilots imagine being in the position in which the two pilots of the Lance found themselves, and wonder how they would react. Certainly, the actions of the Lance pilots were appropriate and, as people in the business like to say, “professional.” They must have heard a great deal of alarming noise as the No. 6 connecting rod broke loose from the crankshaft and punched a big hole in the crankcase, but they remained calm, they made the correct decisions, they flew the airplane. They were lucky that there was a good airport in easy gliding range and they were already talking to a controller. 

They believed that their problem was simply a power loss. A dead-stick landing, while challenging, was very likely to succeed. The reason they came down so fast is not clear—rather than buy themselves as much time aloft as possible, they descended from 15,000 feet to near sea level in nine minutes—but it turned out to have been the right thing to do when fire broke out in the cowling.

We cannot know what happened in the final minute of the flight, when the two pilots lost control of the airplane. Probably they were blinded or overcome by smoke. The NTSB’s description of the wreckage mentions “thermal damage”—that is, the effects of fire—both ahead of the firewall and behind it. Wiring and thermal insulation under the glareshield were burned. 

Frustratingly—because any inflight fire is a potential teaching tool for other pilots— the NTSB does not explain, or even speculate upon, how the fire got past the firewall or what the original source of ignition may have been. The gear and flaps were up and the mag switch turned off, but the fuel selector was on the left tank. It is possible that the continuing flow of fuel to the engine fed the fire. 

The fatal crash was a sad and terrible consequence of what may have seemed, before, like a minor omission. But it was a minor omission many times repeated. 

“For want of a nail…”

The post The Danger of Repeated Omissions appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Near noon on a warm August day, a Cessna T210N, inbound from Colorado Springs, approached Meadow Lake Airport (KFLY), at Peyton, Colorado. The field elevation is 6,877 feet, but the density altitude was closer to 10,000. A gusty 10-knot wind blew from the north. Two Cessna 150s were in the pattern doing touch-and-goes, making right traffic for Runway 33.

The 210 passed south of the traffic pattern, turned north well east of the downwind leg—the area west of the airport is residential—and then entered the pattern behind the trainer that had just turned downwind. The 210 followed the 150, gaining on it slowly, and extended its downwind until the 150 had turned final.

By the time the 210 turned base, it had drifted somewhat westward, perhaps because of the quartering tailwind or because the runway, which was on the pilot’s right, was so far behind him that he could no longer accurately judge his position with respect to it. The 210 overshot the extended centerline, and the pilot turned tightly in order to re-establish himself on the final approach course. Rolling out of the turn at a very low altitude but still a mile from the runway, the 210 stalled, crashed, and burned. The pilot, a 46-year-old doctor with 200 hours, died.

Conflicting Reports

The NTSB, noting that there was no evidence of a mechanical malfunction and that the airplane carried ample fuel, concluded that “…it is likely that the pilot entered the traffic pattern behind a slower airplane, and, in an attempt to add more space between his airplane and the one ahead, he reduced speed and increased airplane pitch to the point where it exceeded critical angle of attack, which resulted in an aerodynamic stall as he turned onto the final leg of the traffic pattern.”

The board’s analysis does not match the actual circumstances of the accident. It may have been influenced by the account of the instructor in the 150 that was ahead of the 210, who suggested that the pilot of the 210 may have slowed his “much faster” airplane to keep distance between himself and the slower 150. In fact, by the time the 210 stalled, the 150 had ceased to be a factor at all. 

• DON’T MISS OUT: Subscribe to FLYING Magazine

FAA radar recordings show the 210 in trail behind the 150 on the downwind, with a groundspeed of about 110 knots. Correcting for density altitude, and taking into account a tailwind component of around 10 knots, this translates to a true airspeed of around 85-90 knots—not excessively slow for a 210.

The 210 maintained a fairly constant height on the downwind leg until the runway was behind it, when it began to descend. Its groundspeed increased by about five knots as it turned base, suggesting that the wind may have been more easterly than reported. The combination of its westward drift and its increased groundspeed on base carried it past the extended centerline. The pilot of the 150 described the 210 as “banking steeply” from base to final and then pitching up slightly.

The striking thing about the radar data is the rapid loss of both altitude and groundspeed—nearly 25 knots—during the turn to final. Some of the loss of groundspeed resulted from turning into the wind, but it is more difficult to account for the loss of altitude. By the time the stall occurred, the 210 was still a mile from the end of the runway, but was reported by one witness to be only 30 to 50 feet above the ground. Another witness told a newspaper reporter, “I have never seen a plane flying so close over my head.”

About The Pilot

Investigators uncovered a couple of pieces of information that seemed relevant in retrospect. A mechanic who had flown with the pilot to break in some newly replaced cylinders recalled that he had to remind him to use flaps. Photographs of the wreckage show clearly that the flaps were retracted.  With a forward CG, 30 degrees of flap would have reduced the 210’s stalling speed in a 45-degree bank by nine knots. 

The pilot had failed his first private check ride. His deficiencies were in soft field takeoffs and short field landings. Both are skills requiring sensitivity to the feel of an airplane at speeds close to the stall. An instructor who gave the pilot eight additional hours of instruction before endorsing him for retest did not remember much about him, but did comment that eight additional hours after a failed private ride seemed like a lot.

The standard glidepath angle for a landing approach, used by both ILS and VASI systems, is three degrees, which requires a height of almost 300 feet a mile from the runway threshold. The pilot’s excessively low altitude when turning to final hints that, possibly from force of habit or because he was too dependent on “the numbers,” he may have descended with the manifold pressure setting that he would use for a normal base leg, much closer to the runway. The added drag of the steep turn would have eaten up some speed. The “slight” pitch up reported by the witness suggests that the pilot belatedly became aware of his low altitude and instinctively attempted to correct it by raising the nose.

Since there is no aim point until you turn final, flying a pattern requires some intuitive spatial sense and a feel for distances and descent rates. Novices crave precise guidelines, but they are elusive. 

The size and shape of the pattern can be adjusted to suit the airplane and the circumstances; a faster airplane overtaking a slower one, for instance, need not remain in trail, but can sidestep outward. 

A pilot extending the downwind for traffic should not begin to descend on passing the threshold; in fact, in the extreme case of a downwind leg extended three miles, the descent should begin only with the final approach. 

A pattern flown on the upwind side of the runway in crosswind conditions should be shifted outward in order to avoid overshooting on the base leg. All such adjustments are learned from experience; they cannot be readily converted into exact prescriptions.

Two rules, however, apply in almost all circumstances. One is that unless instructed to by the tower, you should not allow your indicated airspeed to drop below around 1.3 times your stalling speed until you are on short final and, as they say, “landing is assured.” Luckily for the mathematically impaired, this multiplication can be performed on the ground before taking off.

• READ MORE: Previous editions of “Aftermath”

The other is that you should never make steeply banked turns at low speed and low altitude.

The pilot of the 210 made several minor errors. He flew his downwind leg in trail behind the 150, although the 210, a faster airplane, naturally would call for a wider pattern. He began his descent from the downwind on passing the threshold, although the 150 ahead of him had shown no sign of turning base. And, on seeing that he had overshot the centerline, he tried to hurry back to it. There was no need to hurry; because he was now more than a mile from the runway, he could have taken his time.

Low-time pilots make small errors like this every day. They are rarely fatal. But this time, the accumulation of innocuous elements turned into a massive failure of energy management. The pilot lost awareness of speed and altitude—and that error can easily be fatal.

Editor’s Note: This article is based on the NTSB reports of these accidents and is intended to bring the issues raised to our readers’ attention.

The post For One Low-Time Pilot, A Pattern of Small Errors Proves Fatal appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

A pilot friend—now in his late 70s and, for health reasons, no longer flying—recalled donating an unusual homebuilt of his to a museum. It was the airplane in which he had done a lot of his early flying, including episodes of scud running in the Pacific Northwest that he would occasionally describe with that combination of relish and shame that pilots reserve for situations of their own making from which they were lucky to escape with their lives.

“When I taxied up and shut down the engine,” he said, “a warm feeling filled my whole body. And I realized that it was the feeling that this was the last time I would fly that airplane, and it hadn’t killed me.”

Scud running, flying VFR under low clouds and with limited visibility, is one of the most dangerous and ill-advised things a pilot can do. Despite being counseled against it, however, many—perhaps even most—new pilots find themselves scud running at some point. The lucky ones get a scare and start working on an instrument rating. The unlucky ones—well, results may vary.

The Journey Begins

A pilot, 69, and his wife set out from California in a Mooney M20K, bound for the pilot’s home field of West Houston Airport (KIWS) in Texas. When they descended to refuel at Bullhead City, Arizona, they got a low-battery warning; but after fueling, the engine restarted easily, the voltage indication was normal, and they decided to continue.

It was dark when they reached El Paso, Texas, and on final approach, the instrument-panel lights went out, along with the Garmin GPS. With the help of flashlights, they landed uneventfully. Over dinner, they discussed the problem. They thought it most likely alternator trouble and decided that the wife should continue to Houston on a commercial flight; she had to be at work, and the pilot “did not want her to go down [with him] if something went wrong.” Most of the time, there is nothing premonitory about those macabre pilot jokes.

The pilot left El Paso at 12:50 p.m. the next day. He had obtained a Leidos weather briefing an hour earlier: VFR was not recommended in Central Texas, and in East Texas, there were thunderstorms and moderate to heavy rain. In Houston, however, there was no rain. The briefer advised the pilot to check the Houston weather for updates while en route, but there is no record he did so.

He cruised at 9,500 feet, enjoying a 20-knot tailwind. Whatever impediments to visibility there may have been in Central Texas, he flew either over or around them. As he approached Houston, however, a layer of cumuliform clouds was moving across the area. The bigger buildups lay to the south and east, over the Gulf, but the northern edge of the clouds just overlapped the final miles of the pilot’s flight. Houston Executive, 9 miles west of KIWS, was reporting 1,000 overcast, 4 miles in light rain; 20 minutes later, the ceiling was down to 900 feet and visibility at 2.5 miles.

There was no shortage of airports with better weather west and north of Houston. Unlike pilots who have flown for a long time into gradually worsening weather, the Mooney pilot knew there were better conditions nearby. Furthermore, he was familiar with the area; he must have known plenty of places where he could land and leave the airplane until the weather at KIWS improved.

Nevertheless, he continued toward West Houston Airport.

What Happened

He passed midfield over Houston Executive at 2,775 feet msl. He was still above the clouds, but he must have been either able to recognize landmarks through gaps or tracking his progress on the GPS, because immediately after crossing Executive, he turned right 90 degrees, flew south a couple of miles, and then turned eastward about a mile south of Interstate 10. He continued generally eastward, with deviations left and right, for around 8 miles, then turned northward and began to descend.

He was not in radio contact with any ground facility. His route was that of a VFR pilot who might habitually approach West Houston by keeping the interstate on his left until he passes the four-lane Highway 99 and Fry Road, which runs north to south a mile east. These were unmistakable landmarks—or so it seemed.

At some point, the Mooney got under the clouds. Witnesses reported seeing a low-flying airplane going northwestward. As it began a descending right turn, a wing clipped power lines, the airplane pitched up, then nosed over and crashed in a field about 4 miles northwest of its destination.

• READ MORE: Peter Garrison Archive

The pilot’s wife told accident investigators that her husband, who had 250 hours total time, was careful to avoid bad weather, and that they had remained in California several days longer than planned while waiting for the outlook for their return flight to improve. This fact, which seems so incompatible with the way events unfolded, actually highlights the psychological power of a destination tantalizingly close at hand.

We have all experienced that irrational impulse called “get-home-itis.” It is the insidious demon that persuades pilots that a fuel gauge saying empty doesn’t really mean it, that worsening visibility will soon improve, and that the rough-running engine will be OK for another 20 miles. It is perhaps especially difficult to accept, at the end of a textbook VFR flight with a good tailwind, that a few inconvenient wisps of water vapor are going to ruin the day. Hangar, dinner, bed—how sweet they seem.

Scud running into unfamiliar terrain is scary, but close to home, you may feel that you will always be able to find your way. But perhaps that very familiarity of the area was the thing that ensnared the Mooney pilot. He knew perfectly well how to get to West Houston. But when you’re just a few hundred feet above the ground, the usual landmarks look different. He may have mistaken Fry Road for Highway 6, a mile or so farther along, which passes just east of KIWS. To compound his perplexities, all this was taking place inside the 30 nm veil of Houston Class Bravo, right under the baleful and all-seeing eye of ATC radar. If he got lost and ended up having to ask for help, he would be in legal trouble. But he was heading north, and it looked brighter there. Besides, he had to be near the airport. It must be just ahead.

It wasn’t.

Exactly why the flight ended as it did, we can’t tell. Why did the pilot get low enough to hit power lines? Could he have been distracted by an electrical problem like those that had plagued the previous flights? Did the GPS go out again, at the worst possible moment? Impossible to know. But one thing is pretty certain: If he had stayed in VMC, his casual joke about going down would have remained a joke and soon been forgotten.

Inconsequential Decisions

This accident illustrates a phenomenon for which psychologists, economists and social scientists probably have a name. I will call it the “momentum of inconsequential decisions.” The decision to fly to a certain location at a certain time may be arbitrary; you could go at a different time or to a different place—or not go at all. Plans can be changed with a text or phone call. By and large, people accept the judgment of the pilot.

• DON’T MISS OUT: Subscribe to FLYING Magazine

But once you are airborne and en route, the initial decision gains mass and momentum from the mere fact of its having been set in motion.

In June 2019, the non-instrument-rated owner of an A36 Bonanza offered to take a friend on a trip of several hundred miles, in order to consider a job offer. She was hesitant, but he encouraged her. They encountered weather along the way. What began as a reluctantly accepted friendly favor became that nebulous juggernaut: a commitment to be kept. The pilot did not turn back. Instead, he flew a more and more sinuous path at lower and lower altitude. You know the rest.

Editor’s Note: This article is based on the NTSB reports of these accidents and is intended to bring the issues raised to our readers’ attention.

This article originally appeared in the November 2021 issue of FLYING.

The post A Pilot Goes One Airport Too Far appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

On a January afternoon in 2017, a sport pilot, 61, flew his amateur-built Buccaneer amphibian from the Orlando, Florida, area to Blue Springs State Park in Orange City to meet a friend and camp there beside the Suwanee River. The two-seat airplane, powered by a pylon-mounted 80 hp Rotax, had been built in 1992; the pilot had purchased it from the builder nine months prior.

The pilot, who had not visited the area before, flew up and down the river for some time looking for his friend. When he located him—just arriving—he landed northward on a straight segment of the 100-yard-wide river and tied up at a boat dock. Learning that his friend was about to go downstream on a paddleboard to hunt for a dog’s life jacket that had fallen into the water earlier in the day, the pilot said that he would help in the search after he had unloaded his gear from the airplane.

What Happened

A short time later, the Buccaneer took off northward, made a 180-degree left turn, and dropped down to treetop level to follow the river downstream. In the meantime, the paddler had retrieved the life jacket and was making his way back toward the campsite. His view was obscured by trees at a bend in the river, but he heard the airplane’s engine stop suddenly.

An 8-year-old boy saw the accident from upriver, nearly a mile away. He said that the airplane was flying below the tops of the trees lining the riverbanks when suddenly it flipped over backward and fell into the water.

It took the paddler and another would-be rescuer three or four minutes to reach the airplane. It lay inverted in shallow water. They tried to extricate the pilot, but he was already dead from impact injuries.

Directly above the wreckage, several power lines crossed the river. Their presence is indicated on the Jacksonville sectional chart by a tiny tower icon. There was nothing—no pennants, no red-and-white balls—to enhance the visibility of the wires themselves, but then there was little reason to expect a 40-foot-tall boat or a low-flying airplane to pass by here. However, a conspicuous 100-foot-wide clear-cut path marked the trail of the wires through the forest on both sides of the river. Because the pilot had flown over the power lines and touched down beyond them when he landed, it seemed unlikely that he had not been aware of them.

Telling Details

The National Transportation Safety Board confined its determination of the probable cause of the accident to “the pilot’s failure to see and avoid power lines while flying at low altitude.” That is exactly correct, but why did it happen?

The NTSB’s public docket on the accident supplies a few interesting details. The pilot and his friend were acquainted through the local hang-gliding community and Facebook. The friend described the pilot as “an icon in the community” and experienced, with 9,000 or 10,000 hours in light-sport aircraft.

Now, few people have that much time in light-sport aircraft because the category came into being only a few years ago. Of course, he could have just meant small, sporty aircraft. But while his logbook was not found, the pilot’s recent medical-certificate applications were. In 2014, he had reported 982 hours of flight experience. Two years later, he reported 8,000 hours. By the time the information reached his friend, his time had swelled even further.

• DON’T MISS OUT: Subscribe to FLYING Magazine

Now, exaggerating one’s flight experience is a venial sin—just so much harmless bragging.

What strikes one as odd about the story of the airborne search for the life jacket, however, is the disproportion between the means and the end. To get on a paddleboard and go downriver looking for a life preserver makes sense; to use an airplane for such a search does not. The paddler can scan the banks at leisure for the brightly colored object. At 70 mph, or whatever the searching speed of the Buccaneer might be, its pilot could not take his eyes off the shores for an instant. Maybe it would make sense if there were miles of river to search, but the life jacket was not long gone, and the Suwanee is not white water.

Questions Abound

The grandiosity of the pilot’s action might be of a piece with his exaggeration of his flight experience. It might come from a desire to show off, to impress, to arrest the attention of onlookers. If so, he would not be the first pilot so inclined.

So to begin with, there is a question of the pilot’s good judgment in deciding to conduct a search for a small object while flying below the treetops along a sinuous river—a river with which he was unfamiliar, and whose twists and turns he could not anticipate.

And then there is the question of situational awareness, or at least of memory. How could he forget the power lines that he had flown over half an hour earlier? Perhaps it’s significant that when he landed over the power lines in the first place, he did not expect to encounter them again; there was a bend in the river to the south, so he would certainly take off northward. Unconsciously, perhaps, he edited the power lines out of his memory as something already over and done with, and then failed to retrieve the memory of them when, on an unexpected new mission, he turned back southward after taking off.

Why did he not see the wires as he approached them? According to witnesses, the sky was gray and overcast at the time, and they were hard to see. Near eye level, they may have blended into the background of foliage. Perhaps the anticipation of soaring triumphantly over his paddling friend’s head distracted the pilot. And he may have been looking sideways and down, not up or straight ahead.

Flying at low altitude is enjoyable, but it is also dangerous. Part of the danger is that you will fail to notice an obstruction; part is that you are turning over some of the control of your flight path to the whims of the terrain. But the most serious danger is that, if you make a mistake, you will have very little time or space in which to correct it.

No Room for Error

In a similar accident that occurred just nine months after this one, a Cessna 172 collided with power lines 40 feet above the Mississippi River near Ramsey, Minnesota. The 300-hour pilot, 47, most probably failed to see the power lines—although they were marked by red balls—because he was coming around a bend in the river and facing the evening sun.

The NTSB included the pilot’s “personality” among the causes of the accident. He was known to be a person who could not resist the impulse to do reckless things and brag about them later. His instructor urged him to cool it and, at one point, sardonically suggested that if he intended to die in an airplane crash, he should at least not take his wife and son with him.

He took only his wife.

Editor’s Note: This article is based on the NTSB reports of these accidents and is intended to bring the issues raised to our readers’ attention.

This article originally appeared in the December 2021 issue of FLYING.

The post Trouble Flying Low Upon the Suwanee River appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

A group of Southern California pilots and friends would gather on Sunday mornings to fly in formation to nearby airports for breakfast. On a June morning in 2002, they met at Van Nuys Airport (KVNY) for a trip up the coast to a little seaside airport called Oceano (L52). Eight airplanes were in the group: two Bonanzas, three Comanches, a 210, a 310, and a Glasair. After the flight leader, 59, a 3,000-hour commercial and instrument pilot, conducted a formation safety and procedures briefing, they departed in two sections of three trailed by the remaining pair.

The coast runs generally westward from Los Angeles before bending north at Point Conception, south of Oceano. The flight headed west for half an hour at 4,500 feet before the leader turned northward and instructed the others to transition to single file. The second Bonanza remained in close formation with the lead.    

The terrain below soon became a jumble of ridges and canyons, oriented generally west-northwest, with rapid changes in elevation from 1,500 to 5,500 feet. Here, the lead pilot dropped down and entered a canyon, as he had done many times before. His wingman stayed with him. In loose trail, and at a somewhat higher altitude, the Glasair and one of the Comanches followed. Three of the other airplanes broke out of the formation, transmitting that they would rejoin the others at breakfast.

The Fun Ends

As the four airplanes approached the head of the canyon, the pilot of the Glasair, who was doing about 120 knots, saw that he was gaining on the Bonanzas and that the second Bonanza was gaining on the first. He heard a fragmentary transmission, and made out only the word “ninety.” The second Bonanza now appeared to him to be only a few yards behind the first, and both were approaching the steeply rising end of the canyon. Anxiously, he asked the lead whether he was going to clear the ridge. He inadvertently kept his mike keyed and did not hear the reply, but another pilot did: “I don’t think so.”

Seconds later, the Glasair pilot made the decision that saved his life. He pulled up hard to the left. The lead Bonanza was at his two o’clock when he saw it collide with the flank of the ridge and explode in flames. An instant later, the second Bonanza crashed beside it. The Glasair cleared the canyon’s edge by 50 feet; the Comanche crossed it safely as well.

By the time ground rescue units reached the scene, little remained of the two Bonanzas beyond their outlines in ash on the ground. They had pancaked, 75 feet apart, into a 45-degree brush-covered slope, 500 feet below, and half a mile from the saddle at the head of the canyon. Six people, five of them pilots, died.

Fate Both Cruel and Kind

The Fates handed out good luck and bad that day, in their usual capricious way. In the second airplane were an older couple who did not usually fly with the group. The husband, a retired high school woodshop instructor, had once flown cropdusters. His wife had a sore knee on the day of the flight, and it had been decided that, rather than squeeze her into the back seat of one of the Comanches as originally planned, she and her husband would ride in the second Bonanza. The pilot who gave up the front seat to her moved to the back seat of the lead airplane.

On the other hand, the Fates smiled upon the owner of another Bonanza. He had taxied out to join the group that day, but turned back when he found that his alternator was not working. Had his alternator not failed, he probably would have been the one on the leader’s wing. 

• READ MORE: Aftermath Archive

Another who was spared was a woman who had often gone on these breakfast flights in the lead’s airplane. She was working on her instrument and commercial at Van Nuys, and her instructor, who knew the lead and thought his formation and canyon flying was reckless, pressed her to stop flying with him, eventually threatening to quit giving her instruction if she persisted. Reluctantly, she changed her work schedule to give herself an excuse for not flying on Sundays. When the instructor called to tell her what had happened, she said, “You saved my life. I would have been in the right seat.”

After the Glasair pilot cleared the ridge, he noted the outside air temperature; it was 87 degrees. The density altitude at 4,900 feet, the pressure altitude at which the Bonanzas struck the ridge, was therefore around 7,800 feet. Under those conditions, a naturally aspirated Bonanza with three aboard can climb at about a five-degree angle, or one foot up for 11 feet forward. That corresponds roughly to the slope of the canyon bottom until a point, about a half mile from the ridge, where the terrain suddenly begins to ascend more steeply.

Assuming that the lead airplane was slowing to its best-angle-of-climb speed—and that is why the second Bonanza was gaining on it—it would travel half a mile in about 20 seconds. A mile from the ridge, there is a tributary canyon on the left through which the Bonanzas might have escaped if the leader had turned into it; but at that point the slope of the canyon bottom had not yet begun to steepen, and the danger of a 500-foot obstacle a mile ahead may somehow not have been obvious.

Possibly the lead pilot, who was familiar with the area, mistook the fatal canyon for a different one with an easier exit. In mountainous terrain it is very easy to mistake one ridge or canyon for another. It is also very difficult, if not impossible, to accurately gauge the slope of the terrain ahead and to estimate the airplane’s ability to clear it. Flying close to terrain at the bottom of a canyon is, as one of the pilots in the group later said, “quite a rush,” but the rush is the same whether you fly down the canyon or up, and downhill is obviously safer. 

Apparently, the lead pilot did not recognize the danger he was in, and into which he was taking others, until too late. He never called “Break!” to dismantle the formation. The attention of the pilot of the second Bonanza was fixed on the lead; he probably never saw what was coming. But there were two other pilots in the lead airplane. Did they have misgivings about descending into the canyon? Did they say something? Or was their reliance on the expertise and judgment of the charismatic lead pilot, whom they may have considered their superior and mentor—so great that they passively accompanied him into that fatal cul-de-sac? 

• DON’T MISS OUT: Subscribe to FLYING Magazine

When we read about airplane accidents, the persons involved may appear as two-dimensional beings defined by one or more characteristics—impatience, laziness, ignorance—or as faceless figures with no characteristics at all. But real people, and the situations in which they find themselves, possess many complexities. All the more when the cast consists not of a single pilot but of a whole group of pilots and their passengers, many of whom are pilots themselves. Many accidents have demonstrated that the presence of multiple pilots, when they are not operating as a disciplined crew, does not increase the safety of a flight.  

There is happiness to be had in taking risks, and we are free to pursue it. But it is one thing to take risks alone, and another to take them on behalf of others. 

Editor’s note: This article is based on the NTSB report of this accident, and is intended to bring the issues raised to our readers’ attention. It is neither intended to judge nor to reach any definitive conclusions about the ability or capacity of any person, living or dead, or any aircraft or accessory. 

The post Sometimes in Flight, There Is No Safety in Numbers appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

In January 2019, an Oregon pilot, 63, failed to return home when his wife expected him. He was, however, in the habit of disappearing in his airplane for a couple of days to “decompress,” and in any case, he had been talking about flying down to Arizona to visit some friends, so his absence did not alarm her. She sent him several text messages, but he did not respond.

After a couple of days without word, his wife became concerned. She called the friends in Arizona and learned her husband was not there. She went to the Troutdale Airport in Oregon, where his Rockwell Commander 112 was based, and found her husband’s truck—but not the airplane. His briefcase was in the truck, so she guessed that if he had gone flying, he had intended to return.

She filed a missing-person report with the local sheriff’s office, and the FAA subsequently put out an alert notice.

On the fourth day, using cellphone pings and an ELT signal, searchers spotted wreckage scattered on a steep slope near the summit of 11,250-foot Mount Hood, a volcanic cone 30 miles east of Troutdale. A recovery team brought back the pilot’s body, as well as photographs of the wreckage debris and point of initial impact, a horizontal slice in a steep wall of snow and ice at an elevation of 9,700 feet. Fragments of the Commander were scattered down the glacial face to the 8,000-foot level.

The airplane, which was not insured, was never recovered. A forest-service team that visited the site during the following summer found few remnants; most had disappeared into crevasses or been buried in snow.

Toxicological testing identified a number of drugs in the pilot’s system, almost none of them approved by the FAA. Oxycodone and its metabolite were present at high levels; the pilot, who installed floors for a living, suffered from chronic back pain and was looking forward to surgery to relieve it. Also present were modafinil, an anti-drowsiness drug, and metabolites from kratom, which has stimulant and sedative effects, and marijuana. 

It is seldom possible to say confidently that an accident had a pharmaceutical cause, but in this case, the National Transportation Safety Board chose to do so. “Contributing to the accident,” the Board wrote in its analysis of the crash, “was the pilot’s degraded decision-making and performance due to his use of multiple sedating and impairing drugs.”

Somewhat surprisingly, because it usually covers all bases, the NTSB did not mention hypoxia as a possible element, at least in combination with the other judgment-impairing factors.

The principal cause was related, again, to judgment: “The pilot’s decision to fly the airplane in close proximity to mountainous terrain in an area of mountain-wave activity that exceeded the performance capabilities of the airplane.”

FAA radar data retained the track of the fatal flight. After leaving Troutdale, which is just east of Portland, Oregon, the pilot had followed the Columbia River eastward to the Cascade Locks area before turning south and approaching Mount Hood at an altitude of about 10,000 feet. Keeping the mountain on his left, he made a 6-mile-wide half-turn around it.

The wind was out of the north at around 20 knots, so his groundspeed during the southbound portion of the orbit was 40 knots higher than after he turned back northbound. Perhaps to keep his distance from the peak, he veered away from it for a minute or two before resuming his orbit. He had climbed almost to 12,000 feet, aided by updrafts on the north side. Now, with the wind at his back, he spiraled inward toward the summit and swung around the south side just 1,500 feet horizontally from the surface.

As he again came around the eastern flank, the airplane, which had been maintaining its altitude pretty steadily, began to sink. Rather than steer away from the mountain to put some distance between himself and it, he continued around it in a tightening spiral, perhaps looking for the lift that had buoyed him on his first pass around the north side. It wasn’t there. Descending at 2,500 fpm, he struck the steep face of the glacier.

The NTSB’s analysis emphasizes the power and unpredictability of mountain waves, which can persist for many miles downwind of a peak or ridge, alternately rising and falling. In this case, however, waves—which develop at a distance from the mountain—were not involved; it was turbulence in the immediate surrounding of the peak.

It also cites the manufacturer’s performance tables to the effect that the 112’s rate of climb at gross weight at 12,000 feet is little more than 200 fpm. I suspect that they used the wrong handbook. The 112 was always an over-heavy and under-powerful airplane, but this one was several hundred pounds below gross weight, and it was turbocharged—photographs of the engine on the mountainside, far from other parts of the wreckage, show the turbocharger plainly. The ominous 200 fpm number is implausible.

• Get FLYING Magazine delivered to your home with a subscription. Click to subscribe

That mountain peaks may harbor dangerous winds—Aeolus incarcerated his in a mountain cave—can hardly have been news to the pilot, who had repeatedly crossed the Sierra Nevada along the rugged route between Portland and Phoenix, and was sufficiently fond of pleasure flights circling Mount Hood that he had taken his wife, no fan of flying, around it several times. He had flown one of his Arizona friends into the demolished crater of Mount St. Helens. He was not a new arrival from Kansas.

Nor is it likely that he was unaware of the wind direction. “There is no evidence that the pilot obtained an official weather briefing before the flight,” the NTSB said, as if an official weather briefing were the only way to find out which way the wind is blowing. You don’t need a weather forecaster…

As for the capabilities of the airplane, he had owned it since the mid-1990s and had flown 1,200 of his 1,350 hours in it. He knew how it performed, and his flight path strongly suggests that he was not driven toward the mountain against his will. He wanted to get close to it.

If you peel away all the speculative contributing factors, you come back to the kernel of the probable cause. The pilot misjudged his trajectory and, perhaps lulled by rising air farther from the mountain, failed to anticipate the powerful downdrafts that might exist close to its surface. Perhaps the drugs he was carrying around in his system played a part—not so much in the decision to fly close to the mountain, which he had done before, as in his estimation of distance and closure rates and turn radius. As he came around the east side of the peak, rapidly losing altitude, he could have turned right, where the flank of the cone dropped away. Instead, he continued to turn toward the mountain. Perhaps he thought he would just swing thrillingly close by the west side and then turn back toward home.

The mountain had its own ideas.

Too Close to the Rocks

The 2007 accident that ended the life of the adventurous Steve Fossett had much in common with this one. Fossett too was flying an airplane of moderate performance—a Citabria—in high mountains on a windy day. Exactly what happened to him was never known, but it appeared likely that he misjudged his speed and height in relation to a mountain bowl and, driven by the wind, could not turn tightly enough to escape. The site was so remote that two years passed before a hiker stumbled upon Fossett’s wallet, some distance from the charred ruins of his airplane, over which searchers had repeatedly flown without recognizing what it was. Like the 112 pilot, Fossett was out flying for fun, decompressing, and presumably savoring the pleasure of mildly risky behavior. He had taken much greater risks before; there was nothing out of the ordinary about this one.

What I wrote about Fossett in the Los Angeles Times applies equally well to the ill-fated pilot of the 112: “A cautious pilot would have weighed the likelihood of unpredictable turbulence against the limited capabilities of his plane in the [high,] thin air, and would have kept a good deal of space between himself and the rocks.” 

Neither man was quite that cautious.

The post The Moth and the Flame appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

“You’ve got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em.”

The pilot was 79 years old. He had 1,300 hours, a private certificate, and an instrument rating, but seldom flew. He kept his airplane, a Piper Dakota, hangared at North Bend, Oregon, and would take it out from time to time to fly up and down the nearby Pacific coast. He had logged only 31 hours during the past five years, and he had not had a recent flight review or renewed his medical.

The hangar alongside his was occupied by a friend who was a flight instructor and A&P. He had administered the pilot’s last flight review and performed the inspections required to keep the Dakota in airworthiness. When the pilot took off on January 13, 2017, for the flight that was to be his last, he had not flown, as far as his friend knew, in the past year. When they had last flown together, the pilot was behind the airplane and intermittently confused about tower communications and pattern entry procedures. After the flight, the friend expressed concern about the degradation of the pilot’s skills; but the pilot confidently replied that he was sure he could get back into shape with 30 minutes of instruction.

Medical Issues Unreported

Since childhood, the pilot had suffered from an unusual medical condition, multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS), which he never reported to the FAA. Whether MCS is a physical condition or a psychological one is controversial among doctors. The pilot would experience flu-like symptoms and a blotchy rash if he was exposed to chemical odors like those in perfumes and soaps. He would drive only one particular car, and then only with all the windows open. More alarmingly, his eyesight, in one eye or both, would sometimes be affected. His son related that about a year before his last flight, his father had lost vision in both eyes while driving and had pulled to the side of the road guided only by the rumble strips.

On the day of his fatal accident, his communications with the North Bend tower were somewhat confused, and he failed to comply with a few instructions. Thirty-five minutes after he took off, Seattle Center called the tower on the land line to inquire whether they knew the position of the Dakota. The pilot had squawked “7700,” the emergency code, and reported to Center that he was having vision problems. A helicopter pilot overheard him saying that he had lost vision in his right eye and was becoming dizzy. He had given his location as Port Orford, a coastal community about 50 miles south of North Bend.

The Story the Dakota Told

The wreckage of the Dakota was found on the beach near Port Orford. It appeared from marks on the sand that when the airplane crashed it was heading eastward toward cliffs 600 feet from the water’s edge. The impact had been sufficiently violent to tear off the left wing and bend it back alongside the fuselage.

The fact that the airplane crashed on the beach suggests that the pilot had initially retained enough of his eyesight to try to put it down there, but lost whatever vision remained before he could complete the maneuver. Otherwise, he might have been expected to trim the airplane to climb and turn on the autopilot—assuming that it had a working autopilot—in the expectation that sooner or later his vision would return. (Although the National Transportation Safety Board’s report on the accident describes the pilot’s condition and symptoms, it does not say how long his occasional spells of blindness would last.)

A Rare Happenstance

Loss of vision for more than a few seconds while flying—as opposed to loss of consciousness due, for instance, to hypoxia—is, I believe, very rare. I have been studying accident reports for many years and have seldom heard of it. High G maneuvers sometimes result in gray-out—a curtain seems to descend across the field of vision—but that effect is brief. There is an account from the Korean War of a Skyraider pilot, Kenneth Schechter, blinded by enemy fire, being guided to a safe landing by another airplane; Schechter died in 2013 at the age of 83. I remember an instance, decades ago, that did not end so well. The pilot of a Piper Comanche encountered severe turbulence. His seat belt was not cinched tightly, and his head hit the cabin ceiling. Though conscious, he ceased to be able to see, and he ultimately crashed. Since I read about that accident, I have always tightened my seat belt at the first hint of turbulence. 

Anything to Get in the Air

I have described the Port Orford crash to non-pilot friends as an illustration of the lengths to which pilots will go to keep flying. They are incredulous; who, they ask, would pilot an airplane if there were the slightest chance of becoming blind while up in the air? Who? Well, who would drive a car after having a few drinks? 

It is not uncommon for pilots to conceal disqualifying medical problems from the FAA. In fact, it is bound to happen. The FAA’s medical questionnaire is not a reliable way to elicit information when respondents’ livelihoods—or even just their ability to continue flying and therefore to continue life as they know it—is at stake. For many pilots, the possession of a pilot’s certificate, and, even more, of an airplane, is a pillar of their sense of self. It is who they are.  

Most pilots—well, maybe not most bold ones—eventually grow old. Some stop flying because they find themselves becoming increasingly anxious in the air, for no rational reason. Some lose their medicals, or become uninsurable, or late in retirement can no longer justify the expense. Some who fly into their 80s find themselves gradually reducing the complexity of their flying, so that men and women who once did not hesitate to launch on thousand-mile night IFR trips in winter now allow themselves only hour-long hops on calm, sunny days. No matter; they are still pilots. That is the important thing.

FLYING’s late and much-beloved columnist, the endearingly homespun Gordon Baxter, confessed in his column to having once lost consciousness while flying, but to having continued to fly by himself afterward. Readers reacted with indignation and horror, and Bax stopped flying alone. I wondered at the time why he had ratted himself out. Did he think his syncope was a unique event, unlikely to be repeated? Did he unconsciously want to be forced to stop by some power greater than that of his own will?

Relatives and friends must often be aware of the ebbing of an aging pilot’s capacities. The situation is a classic one, not different from the problem, which practically every family faces sooner or later, of how to deny the car keys to an infirm and unreliable grandparent. The difficulty may be greater with a pilot, however. Dangerous drivers endanger those all around them, and leave families no choice. Dangerous pilots, if, like this one, fly alone and in remote places, endanger principally themselves. The danger, furthermore, is seldom imminent; and so friends and relatives hesitate, and talk it over, and resolve to do something soon. 

Now and then, the problem resolves itself, as it did at Port Orford. 

We often talk about the importance of judgment in flying safely. We think of judgment as improving, like wisdom, with age, but that is not always true of the last and most difficult judgment call a pilot has to make: the ultimate no-go decision, the decision to say goodbye, once and for all, to the title of “pilot.”

The post The Tragic Day When a Pilot Was Literally Flying Blind appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

On a clear January day in 2018, the 68-year-old sport pilot of a Van’s RV-12 took off from Fort Myers, Florida, bound for Everglades City, a trip of 51 nautical miles. Before taking off, the pilot had requested flight following, but when he was airborne and the tower controller told him to contact departure control, the pilot did not respond. The controller repeated the instruction and, after checking whether the departure controller had heard from the pilot, tried a third time. There was still no response.

A minute later, the departure controller established radio contact with the pilot. Communication did not go smoothly.

Departure controller: “Two-six-two Whiskey Sierra, Fort Meyers, are you up?”

Pilot of 262WS: “Two-six-two Whiskey Sierra.”

Departure: “Two-six-two Whiskey Sierra, radar contact, turn right heading one-seven-zero vector, climb, maintain VFR 2,500.”

Pilot: “Continue my climb to—say again?”

Departure: “Two-six-two Whiskey Sierra, maintain VFR at 2,500.”

Pilot: “Maintain 2,500. Course is now what?”

Departure: “Two-six-two Whiskey Sierra, turn right heading one-seven-zero, maintain VFR at 2,500, vector to get you south of RSW.”

Pilot: “Course one-two-zero, stay at 2,500.”

Departure: “November two-six-two Whiskey Sierra, I don’t have time to talk to you four times per control instruction ‘cause there’s a lot going on. Please listen up. Fly heading one-seven-zero, maintain VFR 2,500, over.”

Pilot: “All right, one-seven—ah, stay at 2,500.”

Departure: “I need a call sign with a control instruction please, two Whiskey Sierra. Verify one-seven-zero heading, 2,500.”

Pilot: “Two-six-two Whiskey Sierra, two-five-zero-zero at one-seven.”

Departure: “Two Whiskey Sierra, sixth time now, heading one-seven-zero.”

Pilot: “Heading is one-seven-zero, Whiskey Sierra, two-six-two Whiskey Sierra.”

Departure: “November two-six-two Whiskey Sierra, your altitude indicates two thousand niner hundred, and you’re restricted to 2,500.”

Pilot: “I’ll [sic] pulling back the power and going down to 2,500.”

Departure: “November two Whiskey Sierra, please use your call sign when you give me the altitude read-back.” Twenty seconds pass. “November two Whiskey Sierra, I need your call sign when you read back the altitude. Verify maintain 2,500.”

Pilot: “I’m at 2,500, two-six-two Whiskey Sierra, one-seven-zero.”

Departure: “Thank you.”

This distracted, fumbling exchange might have passed for an episode of stage fright between a novice pilot and a testy, by-the-book controller. The pilot was not a novice, however. He had been flying for years and had reported 530 hours on his most recent insurance application.

The pilot checked in with approach control. After a few minutes, the controller issued a warning for opposite-direction traffic at 6 miles, and the pilot acknowledged. Six seconds later, he transmitted: “Mayday, mayday!”

The RV went down in a densely wooded area. The wreckage path, through tall trees, was 700 feet long and 100 feet wide, oriented about 60 degrees to the right of course. The first items in the debris field were the left wing and fragments of the cockpit canopy; the wing had folded upward from overstress and shattered the canopy. The rest of the wreckage was fragmented from plowing through numerous trees. The pilot was wearing a five-point safety harness, which separated from the airframe.

• READ MORE FROM PETER GARRISON: Aftermath

A Dynon EFIS recorded several parameters of flight data. It told a strange tale.

For several minutes, the pilot had been gradually descending. When the traffic warning came, he was at 1,700 feet. He acknowledged. There was a slight pitch up, followed by a negative 3-G push over to a 45-degree dive. Manifold pressure dropped toward idle at the moment the pilot called mayday, then returned to full throttle. The airplane rolled inverted, its descent rate approaching 10,000 fpm. The left wing failed two seconds before the end of the recording.

In a criminal proceeding, a judge may determine when testimony about a defendant’s past actions and demeanor is admissible. For the National Transportation Safety Board, it always is, and in this case, there was no lack of it.

The pilot was a lawyer with a checkered history. According to an article in the Portland Oregonian, he had been disbarred in California. He had been denied admission to the bar in Oregon, where he lived, on grounds of his “moral character.” He had been arrested after an altercation with a judge in an elevator and sentenced to probation and anger-management treatment.

Another thread in the pilot’s life was a persistent propensity for claiming military honors that he did not really possess. He had allegedly served decades earlier as an enlisted man on an aircraft carrier—if a long interview he gave to an oral-history collector for the Library of Congress can be believed. But he had carried a pattern of “valor theft” to the extreme of using photo-editing software to insert his face onto the uniformed body of a much-decorated captain. A few days before the fatal accident, he had been released from jail in Virginia, where he had been serving a sentence of several months for violating a protective order with respect to one of the people—he called them “terrorists”—who were investigating his military impostures.

A turbulent personal life is sometimes said to correlate with an elevated propensity for accidents.

But there was still more. The pilot suffered from a host of medical conditions that he had not reported to the FAA, including depression, PTSD (thought to be related to his legal entanglements), an enlarged heart and coronary artery disease, and he was using several psychoactive medicines that bore warnings against driving or operating machinery.

According to the NTSB, the cause of the accident was “the pilot’s unsafe maneuvering and exceedance of the airplane’s operating limitations, which resulted in an in-flight failure of the left wing. Contributing to the accident was the pilot’s underlying psychologic or psychiatric disease.”

“Unsafe maneuvering” is a mild description for a negative 3-G, 45-degree dive from an altitude of 1,700 feet. Furthermore, the failure of the left wing, which must have been due to a sudden effort to pull up, was incidental; even if the wing had not failed, the airplane would not have recovered from the dive.

The NTSB struggled to frame its analysis of the accident. The suddenness and violence of the final plunge could suggest a precipitous physical crisis, but the autopsy found no sign of aneurysm, stroke or infarct. To judge from the Dynon’s altitude trace, the airplane was being hand-flown, and so the cause was not a runaway autopilot. “The exact cause,” the NTSB conceded, “could not be determined, given the lack of mechanical anomalies or weather phenomena that could explain the accident sequence.”

One sentence in the accident report, however, contained a hint of an otherwise unelaborated possibility.

“His unreported psychiatric disease,” the Board wrote, “if not well-controlled, could have led to intentionally unsafe maneuvering.” Exactly what sort of “intention” the Board meant, it did not say.

This story appeared in the September 2021 issue of Flying Magazine

The post Puzzling Personality appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

The pilot, 40, was an instrument flight instructor and held a commercial certificate, with airplane single-engine and multiengine land ratings and an instrument rating. He had something over 1,400 hours and made his living giving flight instruction. His logbook displayed the required endorsement for “training stall awareness, spin entry, spins and spin-recovery procedures.” He mostly flew a Cessna 172, but he had recently administered a flight review in a Stearman. I will call him Jack—not his real name.

In July 2019, Jack bought a homebuilt Poberezny Acro Sport II from its builder. A small two-seat tandem biplane designed by the late founder of the Experimental Aircraft Association, Paul Poberezny, the airplane had a 160 hp Lycoming engine, a gross weight around 1,500 pounds, and a wing loading of 10 pounds per square foot. It would be expected to be a lively performer. Naturally, it’s a taildragger. Jack, his uncle and some friends brought it, disassembled, to his home field, where they reassembled it over a couple of weeks.

On August 9, a Thursday, Jack made his first flight in the Acro Sport, taking it once around the pattern. After landing, he taxied back to his hangar, spun the airplane around three times, and shut it down. The engine ran like a million bucks, he told his uncle, who was watching, and the controls were very responsive. He was happy with his purchase.

A pilot with whom Jack shared hangar space talked with him on Friday. They discussed the first flight, and the pilot asked, out of curiosity, what the Acro Sport’s stall speed was. Jack replied that he didn’t know because the airspeed indicator was out of view, and he couldn’t see it while piloting the aircraft in the rear seat.

Like other small tandem-seat biplanes, the Acro Sport is flown solo from the rear seat. The instrument panel is in the rear cockpit; typically, a rudimentary panel—consisting of airspeed, altimeter and little else—might be provided in the front cockpit as well. Most likely, what Jack meant was not that he could not see the airspeed indicator from the rear seat, but rather that during the landing, when the view forward is blocked by the long front end of the airplane and one orients by peripheral vision, there is no time for looking down at the instrument panel to check the speed at touchdown.

Jack invited a friend, who was also a pilot and had built his own experimental Kitfox, to go up with him on his next flight. On Saturday afternoon, they took off from Runway 27, flew a wide circle, and returned for a fast pass over Runway 9 at 150 feet, followed by a zoom climb.

There were several witnesses, and their accounts coincided. One witness had talked with Jack before the flight, and the man and his son stayed to watch. The man thought the engine was running at full throttle during the pass. He said that the biplane went straight up in the air about 500 to 600 feet before its left wing dropped and it made two or three “spirals down” before hitting the ground.

A woman who was sitting at her campsite a quarter-mile from the end of Runway 9 saw the airplane “going almost straight up in the air.” She thought to herself, “Wow, he is really climbing very steep.” Then she saw the left wing quickly dip down and the airplane go almost, but not quite, straight down.

Another witness mistook the drop of the left wing for a deliberate maneuver and said, “He doesn’t have enough space to do whatever he’s doing.” Moments later, he heard the thud of the impact.

All of the witnesses hurried to the site of the crash, 100 yards from the end of Runway 9. They found both pilots dead in the wreckage.

The National Transportation Safety Board investigators performed the usual checks of control continuity and engine functions, and they found nothing amiss. It was difficult to escape the obvious diagnosis: Jack had stalled out of the zoom climb and had not had enough height to recover from the ensuing spin.

Read More from Peter Garrison: Aftermath

While NTSB “probable causes” are seldom, if ever, models of elegant English prose, they do contain some nuances. This one blamed “the pilot’s decision to conduct low-altitude aerobatic maneuvers which resulted in an exceedance of the airplane’s critical angle of attack while maneuvering at a low altitude, which resulted in an aerodynamic stall.”

Clearly, the airplane had stalled, and the low altitude had not permitted a recovery. The steep climb was by definition an aerobatic maneuver because it exceeded the parameters of “normal flight,” which are understood to be 60 degrees of bank and 30 of pitch. The statement could have begun, “The pilot inadvertently exceeded the airplane’s critical angle of attack while maneuvering at low altitude…” The nuance was in the word “decision,” which made the basic error one of judgment rather than ship handling.

What the probable cause surprisingly failed to mention was the pilot’s lack of familiarity with the airplane. He had flown it only once before, briefly, just around the patch. He was not used to its light-stick forces. He had not stalled it at all. He had not assessed its recovery characteristics, its behavior when spinning, or its propensity for, or resistance to, secondary accelerated stalls. Critically, he had not ascertained the rate at which it would lose airspeed in a steep climb. He had certainly not rehearsed the zoom climb at a safe altitude—in order to be sure that he knew when to pitch over and what would happen if he were late doing so. He did not know how the addition of a passenger in the front cockpit would affect the airplane’s behavior and performance. In just about every sense you could think of, he and the airplane were strangers to one another.

I have not flown one myself, but I asked a friend who built an Acro Sport II and flew it for a number of years what he thought of the airplane. “Not for the fainthearted” was his reply. But Jack’s first flight had gone off without a hitch, and he evidently felt comfortable in his new ride. Why should he expect trouble on a second flight?

Somewhere between faintheartedness and bravado, there is a region where joyful abandon meets rational discretion, and they fall in love and get married. It is there that pilots ought to dwell. Not all will; the hero in us clamors to be let out. But if time could be rewound like a tape, and Jack could replay the decision that cost him and his friend their lives, he would most certainly say this time: “Yes, I’ll be happy to take you up, but first let me get a couple of hours in the airplane. We barely know each other.”

Too Much Zoom

Among the pleasures of low passes and zoom climbs is that of putting on an impressive performance. In March 2015, the pilot of an American Champion Decathlon made a low pass over a lake while friends watched from a nearby beach. The pilot was grinning from ear to ear, one witness reported, and the passenger was waving. At the end of the lake was a stand of 50-foot trees which the Decathlon should have had no problem clearing; but either because the distracted pilot waited too long to begin his climb or because he climbed too steeply or pitched over too late, the Decathlon stalled, rolled left and crashed.

It may be that Jack’s accident and that one have in common not only a desire to entertain and impress watchers on the ground—a common and harmless enough impulse in itself—but also an unconscious reluctance to appear timid by ending the maneuver too soon. To be impressive, the zoom must not appear too cautious, but to end well, the low pass must not go on too long. In the pleasurable excitement of the moment, a pilot may cross the line where fun turns to folly.

This story appeared in the August 2021 issue of Flying Magazine

The post The Danger of Irrational Exuberance appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

In May 2019, two men took off from Tipton Airport (KFME) in Fort Meade, Maryland, for a pleasure flight. They were in a Guimbal Cabri G2 helicopter, and had hoped to find and photograph a relative of the passenger who was fishing from a boat in the Chesapeake Bay.

The morning was foggy; when the pilot called to file the flight plan required by the Washington, D.C., special-flight-rules area, the briefer reported that an airmet for possible IFR conditions was active until evening, and VFR was not recommended. When asked if he would like a weather briefing, the pilot replied that he did not need any other information.

The helicopter crossed the Chesapeake Bay alongside the Highway 50 Bay Bridge. The passenger snapped pictures from the western side. The opposite shore, less than 3 miles away, was barely discernible through the fog, but the tops of the 400-foot pylons were visible, and conditions—though below fixed-wing VFR minimums—were easily flyable for a helicopter.

Reaching Maryland’s Kent Island on the east end of the bridge, they turned southward. The passenger texted his relative to ask where he and his friends were fishing and received a “pin” showing the boat’s GPS location. The passenger texted back that the boat was “too far west. We are hitting the wall that we can’t fly through.” The “wall” was the 30 nm veil surrounding Washington’s Class Bravo airspace.

The helicopter maneuvered south of Kent Island for 10 minutes without seeing the boat. A man who was fishing with his son in the waters between Kent and Putnam Island, 4 miles to the south, described seeing the yellow copter “very low to [the] water in dense fog,” then moments later hearing a loud boom. Learning by radio that a helicopter had crashed, they hurried toward the scene of the accident, hoping to be of assistance. They found only debris scattered on the water.

The pilot, 38, had 104 hours total time, all logged in the accident helicopter, which he rented frequently from the flight school at which he had trained. He did not have an instrument rating, and the helicopter was not instrument-qualified—facts which figured largely in newspaper reports but whose bearing on the accident was uncertain. Despite the witness report of the helicopter being “very low,” ATC recordings indicated that it remained 175 feet or more above the water until radar contact was lost.

The NTSB identified “the non-instrument-rated pilot’s continued visual flight into instrument meteorological conditions, which resulted in an inadvertent descent into the water,” as the probable cause of the accident. The diagnosis was somewhat circular because the only evidence of the helicopter straying into IMC—unless you construe IMC to mean any condition, including darkness, haze or whiteout, that obscures the horizon—was the crash itself. Contributory, the Board said, was “the pilot’s decision to conduct the flight at a low altitude without sufficient cues to aid in the perception of attitude and altitude.”

The pilot’s decision-making, both before and during the flight, can certainly be seen as a cause of the fatal crash, but it was not a direct or “proximate” cause. It merely set the stage for what would later happen. The pilot’s lack of an instrument rating is neither here nor there; he did not intend to fly into cloud, and there were no clouds, as such, for him to fly into. The weather conditions—an indefinite ceiling above 500 feet and visibility greater than 2 miles in fog—were within the boundaries of routine VFR helicopter flying.

Still, the pilot was a comparative novice. The flight-service briefer had recommended against VFR, and the flight school’s rental agreement, which the pilot had signed, required 6 miles visibility and a 3,000-foot ceiling for cross-country flights unaccompanied by a CFI. So, his decision to fly on that particular day, in those conditions, was frankly insubordinate. But he was a confident pilot. He had already made a round-trip to Tennessee in the helicopter; a quick sortie over the bay should be no problem at all.

• READ MORE: Previous editions of “Aftermath”

The convoluted path of the flight’s final minutes, recorded by ATC radar, and the fact that the occupants were looking for a boat on the water suggest one scenario: the “moose-spotting” kind of accident in which the pilot becomes fixated on an object below and either stalls or spirals into the ground while circling it. But the details of the radar track do not support that hypothesis. The helicopter was neither extremely low nor was it circling tightly. In fact, the transponder’s final Mode C return indicated that the helicopter may have gained, not lost, altitude before crashing.

Possibly the pilot had climbed a little, found himself without a discernible horizon, and lost control of the helicopter while trying to recover. Unlike the fixed-wing private license, the helicopter private does not require any hood time, and so a low-time helicopter pilot is probably even less likely than a low-time fixed-wing pilot to make good use of an attitude indicator in an upset were one installed.

“The ability of the pilot to detect any loss of control or a trajectory toward the water,” the NTSB wrote, “was significantly reduced as a result of the extremely low altitude in which the flight over water was conducted, the low visibility, the lack of instruments on board to allow for instrument flight, and his lack of instrument training and experience.”

One of the photographs taken by the passenger as the helicopter flew alongside Bay Bridge perhaps contains the key to understanding the accident. The sky is gray, the water is gray—no line separates them. With the bridge alongside, orientation is easy. But in the final moments of the flight, the helicopter had turned westward and apparently gained altitude, and there were no distinct vertical or horizontal objects in the environment. The bridge was miles away, and the western shore was probably invisible. It is not hard to imagine the pilot losing the horizon, becoming disoriented, rolling over into a steeply banked dive, and recognizing the situation only when it was too late to recover.

Each element of the situation seems innocuous in itself. The ceiling is not that low. The visibility is good enough. There are no obstacles over the water. Turns, descents, climbs—they are routine maneuvers. But put them together and stir, and the results may be unexpected.

I wonder—without evidence—whether the helicopter’s clear windscreen, which surrounds the occupants with an almost unobstructed panorama, makes it easier for a pilot to become disoriented, by introducing a greater number of potentially confusing elements into the field of view. As instrument pilots know, it is sometimes a relief—when weather is dim and murky and the world is reduced to a few shades of gray—to stop peering out the windows and turn your gaze to the simple, circumscribed and crisply defined artificial horizon. For the pilot of the Cabri, no such safe harbor was to be found.

Another Lost Horizon

A classic, unforgettable instance of inexplicable disorientation in a helicopter was the January 26, 2020, accident that took the lives of Kobe Bryant, his daughter and their friends. The 8,000-hour-pilot elected to punch up through a thin overcast. The maneuver wasn’t legal, but it must have seemed easy and safe. However, in the space of a few seconds, the helicopter, rather than climb straight ahead, turned left, descended and flew into a hillside. The NTSB’s exhaustive analysis of the accident shed no new light on the central question of how and why it could happen, but it did reinforce the important lesson that when you’re close to the ground—or water—a few seconds are all it takes to become disoriented. Once disoriented, a pilot may need more than a few seconds to reorient, and that may not be enough.

This story appeared in the June/July 2021 issue of Flying Magazine

The post Lost Horizons Lead to Tragedy appeared first on FLYING Magazine.