I used to own a PA-30 and have maybe 200 hours in type. I still have the operating manual. After some review …
Like most light twins, performance is not good single engine. But not horrible either. Single engine go-arounds are dicey, but not impossible. At least under favorable weather / altitude conditions. Which they had. In more detail …
90F is roughly the high temp around here in recent days. Since Florida is at sea level, and the ocean is at sea level MSL & AGL are equivalent. At 90F, sea level = 0MSL corresponds to a density altitude (DA) of ~2000 and 2000MSL corresponds to ~4000 DA.
With an engine failure up near max gross weight the book says the service ceiling would be ~4000-5000 DA. So 2000-3000 MSL = AGL.
If they suffered the engine failure on climb-out, getting up to that altitude would take a long time and distance. But if the engine failed in cruise at a presumably higher altitude, they should have had no real difficulty maintaining a comfortable altitude versus the ground and any obstacles as they maneuvered towards wherever they decided to land.
The landing gear is electric with a manual backup. The manual procedure free-falls the gear to down, then a small crank is used to engage the downlocks. The cranking part of that would be difficult to perform solo while also flying with asymmetric thrust. If you just free-fall the gear and don’t / can’t do the cranking, one or another main gear will almost certainly fold at or shortly after touchdown.
If you did have to manually lower the gear, there is no way to retract it later. And the airplane cannot maintain level flight at any altitude with the gear down while single engine. So any manual gear lowering would have to be done while established on the approach descent and even then you have no idea whether once the gear is down you have sufficient performance to maintain that needed glide path.
Compound failures are rather rare in any airplane.
That’s the end of the facts. I really wonder what problem(s) the pilot was really dealing with and why they chose as they did.
I’ve been in a PA30 with an engine failure on rotation. It had the 200 hp conversion engines. The PIC did not attempt to circle back. Even with the extra 40 hp on 1 engine it took a 1/2 mile of flying in a straight line to clear trees.
There are not that many airlines that go wild with the paint these days. I always liked that look. Condor being a cheapo mass-market junket carrier where everybody aboard is heading to/from a vacation just adds to the fun / whimsy.
I was at the top of One Financial Center in Boston a few months ago, 46 stories up; got some cool photos of planes taxiing & taking off from Logan with appropriate photo equipment.
They were taking off from 15R, with one building blocking my view of most of the takeoff roll. But then there was one plane taxiing around 4R or 9 as I remember. Will try to remember to look at them again tonight as it was a couple of months ago.
This time of year they’re sure to be caught in the rain.
Apropos of that song I just got back from a 2-week cruise w my GF. People we know often tell us we seem like a long-married couple; we work together very smoothly. So on the cruise there were several occasions where some stranger or other commented to me about my wife or commented to her about her husband. Meaning the other of us two.
With that backdrop we developed the comeback: “Oh, no, that’s not my wife. Vacations are a lot more fun if we leave her husband and my wife back home and it’s just the two of us.” Followed by a big leer.
About as good as can be done w gray light. You get an A in timing. That’s a landing.
That looks … scary.
I’m also reminded of that recent 2-day scandal about some now-former CEO & his now-former VP of HR who was also his secret now-former GF who were caught on the kiss cam at a sporting event. Without their actual spouses in attendance. Oops.
Thanks for filling in / correcting the specifics. That was who I was thinking of. The news cite is from last December (2025), so not new news, despite the headline that makes it sound fresh.
I never followed the story beyond the headlines when it was fresh. That article says both people were separated from their spouses at the time. Which, by my lights, converts this from an illicit affair harming two marriages, to simple boss/underling canoodling that’s harmful at work and only at work.
Had these folks never reacted to being on camera, the world would probably be none the wiser and they’d still have their jobs.
Pilots, Flight Attendants Have Greater Risk of Radiation-Related Cancer Death Than Other Professions
Of more than 500 occupations in the United States, flight attendants and pilots have the highest and second-highest proportion of radiation-related cancer deaths, a new study has found… It’s been known that aircrew members receive the largest annual effective dose of ionizing radiation of any workforce in the United States, largely due to exposure to cosmic radiation at high altitudes.
This has been a festering sore among the labor groups for decades.
If OSHA applied to aircrew, there would be strict annual and shorter term exposure limits and active monitoring with everyone wearing a dosimeter at work. And would have been for the last 40-50 years.
But FAA claims exclusive jurisdiction over everything aviation-related. So OSHA is just butted out. And FAA simply declines to address this issue. Claiming that it’s totally within their prerogative to simply ignore. Congress could force FAA to do something, but has not.
My father died of a rare cancer that was almost certainly caused by his career as a pilot. I’m older now than he was when he died, and he lived ~15 years after initial diagnosis. So far so good for me. We’ll see.
Exposure per unit time increases non-linearly with both altitude and latitude. Flights which spend hours traversing the polar regions are have much larger exposures than the same hours spent banging around the middle latitudes in e.g. the USA or Southern Europe. As well, an e.g. 10 hour non-polar flight has a larger fraction of time flown at cruise altitudes than do 10 one-hour flights between a domestic hub and nearby spoke cities. And the shorter flights will (generally) have lower cruise altitudes to boot.
The bottom line being that the routine exposure level of long-haul polar crews is far, far above that of domestic RJ crews.
MSL & AGL are equivalent. At 90F, sea level = 0MSL corresponds to a density altitude (DA) of ~2000 and 2000MSL corresponds to ~4000 DA.
