I saw a DC-3 overhead in San Jose today, looked like it was headed for Mineta Airport. I couldn’t find anything online about it, maybe in town for a fleet week flyby?
Found it!
I can’t link to the N number lookup, but is indeed a DC3C-S1C3G serial number 14037
Brian
Yeah, looks like it’s owned by Cleveland Detroit Flying Services (in Solvang?). I was kind of hoping that maybe they were doing a tour and offering rides, but I couldn’t find anything.
Here is a video of a helicopter flying down a runway and a light plane following got flipped over and crashed likely due to turbulence from the helicopter (6.5 minute video but you can see what happened in the first 50 seconds):
Wow. I’ve never even thought about helicopter wake issues because I’ve never come across one at an airport.
How common is it for airplanes used for elementary flight instruction to have dual controls? I would have expected it to be standard–but ran across this article:
Not just common - dual controls are mandatory for initial flight instruction. So unless there’s another wrinkle to the situation, it sounds like it just got away from them before the plane could be recovered to normal flight.
Does the article say that the aircraft didn’t have dual controls? The pictures show a Cessna, and every one of those I’ve been in had flight controls for both front seats. It’s possible the instructor was just inattentive and didn’t notice the impending stall.
I was also struck by this in the article:
In all of my lessons, it was just the instructor and me without any passengers.
I’d bet the extra person was a friend of one of them getting an intro ride.
I also bet the passenger caused them to be heavier = less performant and more tail-heavy than the instructor was used to. As well, if the student was a big-ish dude and panicked, the much smaller lighter flight instructor may have been unable to overpower him yanking back on the yoke as the ground filled the windshield.
There are many examples in training aviation of students killing instructors through panic. Ailerons, rudder, and elevator respond to the net sum of both pilots’ inputs; IOW the stronger and/or more motivated person wins.
Misused brakes are another fertile source of panic accidents, since they respond to the greater of the two pilots’ inputs; there’s no way for the instructor to un-apply excessive student braking. At higher speeds it only takes a short injudicious stomp on brakes to blow a tire or send you careening off the side of the pavement, or both.
An alert quick-thinking instructor can override an engine to idle or off via another switch or knob while the student has a death grip on full power. But can’t add power if the student has a death grip on insufficient or idle power.
Lots of ways for panic or inexperienced fear to cause an accident.
My flight instructor was almost killed that way. She had a student panic and fight her on the controls, and he was stronger. So she put her face uo to his and said “Release the F*cking controls!” And the student did.
He later said her profanity startled him as she 'd never used that kind of language around him before. She said that was precisely why she said it.
Like so much in aviation, those are plans and decisions you need to make back at home sitting at a non-moving desk or lying awake at night in bed. Then (ideally) you’ll to be able to recall them and implement them when the going gets tough and a couple seconds are all you’ve got to work with.
Seems to me the exact same scenario took place in my area. Student pilot with passenger and instructor stalls plane.
The thing is, Cessna’s have that ingenious stall horn that tells you well in advance of a stall.
And I don’t think it’s legal to have a passenger in a plane while training is going on. Could be wrong.
Not necessarily a help unless it’s been drilled into you that to stop losing altitude in a stall, you need to stop pulling back on the stick. And at least for a beginner, that is not an easy thing to do (sometimes, not even for experienced pilots).
The instructor’s last words:
Air Traffic Control captured the young pilot’s final words, which were: ”Cleared for takeoff, 97883. Caution wake turbulence’
Would a prudent flight instructor facing a wake turbulence situation decide that he/she should take the controls?
That’s literally what the instructor is there for. they’re looking at airspeed and watching for stall events.
This changes things considerably. You can fly into wake turbulence that exceed the control inputs of the plane. If I was warned by the tower of wake turbulence I’d delay the takeoff.
I agree, but the point is that the stall horn is not necessarily a help for the student. It is a mystery why the instructor did not (or could not) take the controls.
I’m a relatively low time private pilot. I use to wonder if I would grab the controls away from another pilot. I found out once and the answer is yes. It was without a second thought. It’s survival instinct without thought.
The turbulence might have been in the form of a down draft. You hit the front end and it adds lift. You might pull up to maintain airspeed. Then you hit the back side and and it’s a tail wind with loss of lift. You can’t see it coming and if they were taking off there would not be enough altitude to recover.
It’s possible, at this point, that the instructor did have the controls, but the wake turbulence was so bad that even a practiced pilot could do nothing. Maybe a less likely scenario, but I don’t think it can be excluded.
The newsfeed link doesn’t work for me right now from where I am, so I can’t see what other details may be in the article. Speaking in generalities …
Wake turbulence warnings are a dime a dozen. ATC has written standards for when they need to say it, and controllers do a good job of saying the words per the regulations. Most times nothing happens, sometimes you get jostled, and very, very rarely you get whacked real hard, perhaps enough to do damage or lose control. This is true in large or small airplanes.
Wake turbulence is very real, but it’s also very capricious and poorly understood science-wise. Apparently identical circumstances can have very different outcomes based on who-knows-what. So the warning threshold is set pretty conservatively, which means the vast majority of warnings are false positives. Which leads to both pilots and controllers treating them as perfunctory boilerplate.
To be sure, a Cessna pilot needs to be thinking when given a wake warning, not just parrot the words back with no actual thought. The four factors you can observe are what aircraft type took off ahead, how long ago, what are the current surface winds, and (if possible) what winds can you discern above ground in the early climb-out phase.