From the article:
‘A few hundred metres’ sounds like the aircraft was on short final, so it would have been very low and pretty slow. Not a good time for a sudden pitch change.
Last year my Wife and I took an in country flight in Costa Rica. A short hop on an Dehavilland twin Otter. Hell of a plane IMHO.
Any who, we were in Costa Rica for 2 weeks, and had more than the allowed 25lbs per person for luggage. So, before hand, we booked an empty seat to make up for it. 3 seats for the two of us.
It worked out well. But my Wife is not a very good flyer. She is just a little nervous. We got grounded due to weather and needed to divert to another airport close to our destination. It was quite interesting when a ground crew member gave the pilot a GPS and proceeded to RUBBER BAND IT TO THE CONTROL WHEEL. My Wife could see this from her seat. I could not. She did not point it out to me until we landed. She seemed a little bit more nervous than usual on the flight. I accounted that to the small plane. She said nothing about what looked like a basic Garmin GPS rubber banded to the control wheel (stick whatever).
Sure enough, after we landed I took a peak and there was a GPS rubber banded on the wheel. Perhaps the nav system on the plane went out? Don’t know.
No alligators though.
That doesn’t mean the croc had just escaped, though. At cruising speed, the elevator may have produced enough downforce to compensate for the passengers crowding at the front of the cabin. As the plane slowed for landing, you’d lose that downforce until even full back pressure on the stick couldn’t keep the nose from dropping.
Or maybe the pilot was using it as a supplement to the on board nav system. Would you have been disturbed if you had seen a map sitting next to the pilot? When I fly I take a back up hand held radio that also can be used for navigation via beacons - would you find it alarming I had something like that in my gear? I don’t expect airplane systems to fail but I want to be absolutely sure I can deal with any problem that arises.
And rubber banding it to the control wheel - a.k.a. “yoke” - isn’t a bad idea, as it reduces the chance of it being misplaced, bounced around, etc. during flight. There’s quite a bit of supplementary doo-dads for the cockpit designed to be stuck to yoke, actually - it’s a convenient place for the the pilot to look while in flight, after all.
As for the “basic Garmin GPS” - Garmin has been making portable GPS units for airplanes for… well, decades now, I suppose. You’re just not used to seeing them.
Yes, an airplane out of CG limits may be fully controllable given enough airspeed. As you say, even full deflection on the elevators (or stabilators) may not yield enough authority at low speeds. I don’t know when the croc escaped, nor when the passengers crowded forward. I’ll have to make assumptions. (And everyone know that making assumptions makes an ass out of You and Umption!) If the croc escaped in cruise or descent, I think the pilots would have had the time to accelerate to a safe speed and possibly sort out the passengers. Since they didn’t, and since the article said they were close to landing, I assume that the event happened very quickly right at the end of the flight. I’ll bet that a cabinload of panicked passengers could be out of their seats and at the opposite end of the aircraft from the croc in under a minute.
My fixed-wing experience is limited to four-seaters. But one thing my instructor drilled into me was ‘Flaps down, nose down!’ I mostly flew dad’s 172K, which had 40º flaps. I’d have to roll on a lot of down-trim on landing. If, as I assume, the aircraft was in landing configuration with full flaps, flying slowly, and low to the ground, then the pilots probably had a lot of trim cranked in. If the passengers suddenly moved en masse to the forward part of the cabin, there would be little or no time to recover by increasing speed, and they’d be pulling yokes that are heavy because of the trim.
This.
I suspect the plane stalled in the attempt to maintain altitude and spun in. It could have happened so fast that the pilot didn’t realize it was a stall situation and applied aileron to control the roll instead of the rudder which accelerates the process.
I’m thinking of placarding my plane with a red circle with a line drawn through it and the words: snakes, alligators, musicians.
I’d expect a stall/spin accident if the passengers had gone aft.
If the weight is shifted forward on a plane trimmed for a lower approach speed then it will take more elevator to bring the nose up and this is done against a nose heavy CG (thus raising the stall speed). The plane needed to be moving faster to create additional lift.
Many more questions like this and you should request a name change to PlaneJain.
About 15 years ago, I flew from Saskatoon to Regina on 5 seat twin Cessna. The pilot arranged the four passengers so that the two lightest were in the two seats behind him, the heaviest (me) rode shotgun (there was no copilot) and the second heaviest behind me. Our luggage, not very much, was behind him in a separate compartment. I can see how this balanced the left/right and I guess he figured it was ok fore/aft as well.
Was it tough getting it through customs?
As someone noted upthread, airplanes don’t have much trouble with left-right balance. My fixed-wing flying has been limited to Cessnas, a Grumman, and a Piper. None of them had graphs for lateral W&B. The helicopters I’ve flown (Robinson R22s and Schweizer CB300s) did require calculating lateral balance (and longitudinal balance) for the beginning and end of the flight.
My reasoning was this: With flaps down, the nose needs to be lowered to maintain speed. If the weight shifts aft, then it would tend to raise the nose, which would cause the speed to drop, resulting in a stall. You’re the CFI though, and I stopped flying fixed-wings when I took up helis.
I’m sure you’ve heard the story of the Polish airliner that crashed while flying into Warsaw? The investigation found that the airplane lost stability when the passengers all looked out the starboard side windows.
That’s right, the Poles were all in the right side of the plane.
If you understood that joke, you might be a geek.
Actually, the worst part was that just off that airport in Warsaw was a big old cemetary. It was a 100 seater that crashed into that cemetary. At the end of the first day the authorities reported they’re recovered 800 bodies from the crash with no end in sight.
Truly a baaad old pilot joke from the bad old days.
The way I heard it:
Reporter: A Cessna 150 crashed into the local cemetery today. So far, one hundred eighty-seven bodies have been recovered…
I have learned (but not experienced) that an out-of-limits forward C of G can become apparent only when the plane is about to land and the pilot attempts to flare, but discovers that the elevators do not have sufficient control authority at low airspeed to raise the nose. This results in a nose-first landing, which can severely damage the aircraft and its contents.
Yes, hopefully you’d figure something was wrong during the approach and have time to come up with a plan. On a single engine propeller aeroplane you may be able to save the situation by adding power, that would increase airflow over the elevator increasing its effectiveness, and on most aeroplanes the thrust/drag couple is such that adding power raises the nose.
Flesh eating REPTILES are indeed rare on airplanes. Glad you qualified that. 