Oddly, the pilot was apparently carrying a fake police badge.
I didn’t see a wing come off in any of the videos. If that happened it would have snap rolled. It looked like the plane nosed over and pulled into a stall. There is no way you could overspeed an engine like that without loosing the prop entirely so my guess is a loss of the prop hub at the crank. It was a 3 blade hub. If just one of the blades came off you would have heard the engine shred itself at lower rpms. Instead you hear it go from maybe 2200 RPM to probably 6 to 10,000 RPM in seconds. The props, regardless of setting, cannot rev that high so I believe the entire 3 bladed hub came off. Honestly it sounded like a dremel tool wide open with no load.
I think we’re seeing the plane and a propeller hub hitting the ground separately and the flames in the air are the props tearing into the wing.
It seems like the plane was at a very low altitude to start with so I would guess there was a problem prior to the start of all the videos.
So obviously I can’t find it right now because that would be useful, but I saw a photo of the prop and spinner assembly from one of the engines sitting on somebody’s porch a good way from the crash site.
What do you think about this comment from pprune after fuselage photos became available?
I’m pretty sure the entire prop sheered at the crank because of the sound. I’m not sure what to make of the picture of the fuselage since it tore into a house.
About the only thing I feel strongly about is loss of the prop hub. You literally can’t rev a propeller plane engine like that because of the props. Maybe one of them came off and the imbalance immediately sheered the assembly off. It would be an unbelievable amount of stress on the crank.
while it does kind of look like a prop sheered into the cabin it also looks like a telephone pole or tree trunk sticking out of the plane at the cut line.
The security video showing something falling along with flames doesn’t look like the fuselage. If that’s the case then maybe it did break apart in the air and it is the starboard wing that came off. The ground picture looks like the engine firewall is still there. If the wing came off it was past the engine.
Here’s a link that shows the prop hub intact and what looks like an engine close by. It also shows the fuselage. I guess it was a video of the plane I saw and not pieces of it because there was no tail. eyewitnesses said it came out of the clouds at high speeds and the tail came off.
Sounds like he hit VNE descending and pulled the plane apart. Total mid-air structural failure.
The pilot sounds… interesting
So we could speculate endlessly by looking at photos scrounged up online, but essentially the cause of the crash was probably just assholery.
So it was a REAL police badge. “interesting” is right.
It’s no wonder he pulled the plane apart with a history of ignoring flight training.
I would like to know what he did for a living that payed for a 414 and required 2 name changes.
paid, not payed.
The name changes and pretending to be a retired cop do suggest a less-than-stellar person. Flying IFR without clearance or (presumably) the rating is reckless. Operating an un-airworthy aircraft is more concerning to me, even it it happened 38 years ago. It makes me wonder how well he maintained his aircraft. I haven’t attempted to find out how long he owned it, but used twins can be bought fairly cheaply. It’s the maintenance that’s expensive.
[Not to hijack, but this is a perfectly reasonable typo, since the verb pay is unusual in English as it is irregular only in its spelling*. Otherwise (i.e., in pronunciation), it’s a regular verb, like stay, play, etc…]
*There is a rare nautical meaning in which even in spelling it’s regular, which might be why a spell check would allow for it.
While all this is true he must have done something pretty bad to pull the tail and wings off. I wouldn’t discount the possibility he had a medical event and just nosed over through Vne. It doesn’t take much at 75% power to over-speed the plane. Normally a plane like that is flown on auto-pilot. He could have flown it manually, fallen asleep and nosed down 1 degree. it would take less than a minute to destroy the plane.
Turns out I ‘knew’ this guy. He owned the sushi place I used to eat at all the time, and he was there sometimes, and generally came off as a loud-mouth blow-hard.
And he was thought to be an ex-cop.
Missed this: Owned a couple restaurants up in Carson City and G-ville. Kim Lee’s was very successful. Ate there many, many times.
Could have been pilot error, as you suggest. Could have been poor maintenance. Could have been a medical problem (he was 75, after all). Could have been a microburst or he flew into a thundercloud or another weather issue. We just don’t know.
But he did seem to be ‘interesting’.
It may be a “reasonable typo” but it is a misspelling and it’s very common here and elsewhere on the internet. And it bothers me every time I see it.
Carson City? If I remember correctly that airport is quite the playground for pilots. If they all have their hanger doors open it looks like Oshkosh.
That’s where the sushi bar he owned is. The airport there is kinda weird. You see some Warbirds now and then (I think a place called Weaver’s does some restorations) and there are always kooky Sea-planes, too. I’ve heard someone converts them to Palatial Flying RV’s for Rich Middle Easterners. Look like these: Grumman Seaplanes - Search
I’ would guess this guy was based out of Minden, however. Closer to his home. But I don’t know nothin’ 'bout his plane stuff.
Be that as it may, I’ve been given to understand that he had taken off from Fullerton Airport about fifteen minutes before the crash.
Down on the ground at that particular time, the rain was no more than a light drizzle. I had just arrived at work and was parking my car when I noticed the plume of heavy black smoke rising from the house. Two of my co-workers who had also been driving in actually saw the plane breaking up in the air and going down. One said that his attention was caught by the weird sound of the overspeeding engine, which abruptly stopped.