The Great Ongoing Aviation Thread (general and other)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
3703

As to the medical flight and the earlier charter flight in Little Rock …

Pressing into untenable weather is a lot more prevalent in charter and in medical ops than it should be. And given the sorts of aircraft involved, the worst weather they can deal with is a lot less than the airliners can handle. But the pressure to go anyhow is much greater. Pressure self-imposed by the pilot and outsider-imposed by the customer, the boss, or both.

No assurance yet that weather was a cause, much less the cause of these accidents. But if I had to throw a dart at the cause board, I’d aim at the part labeled “weather”.

3704

See this Youtube ATC audio with flight path showing later in the video. One comment: " All that to say, it looks like they descended 5,500 feet in 23 seconds and were nearly vertical on impact." So I think it safe to say everyone died on impact.

3705

That makes it look like the plane rolled into a steep turn and descended with reduced power and then at then end pulled up (loss of air speed). If the map of the flight path is accurate then ground level was 4,400 ft per Google Earth.

3706

That airplane is one of the safest turboprops in the sky. I had a look at the accident record, and it’s pretty awesome. Five fatal,crashes in 10 years, out of a fleet of 1300 aircraft. Since the aircraft came out 28 years ago, there have only been 22 fatal accidents in over 9 million flight hours, including military use.

None were engine failures, and all appear to be pilot error, although there may be autopilot issues in two to four of them. That’s a great record for an aircraft that is flown by owner-pilots, charters and maybe small regionals.

In a plane like this, a single pilot can get behind the curve really fast. In one crash, ATC asked the pilot to reset his transponder while climbing through 3,000 ft, and the plane went out of control shortly thereafter. Another incident was similar - ATC asked the pilot to reset the transponder while the plane was climbing through 700 ft, and the plane began flying erratically then crashed.

Another one involved a pilot making a right turn at 25,000 ft to avoid weather when the autopilot tripped off, and he failed to fly the plane while futzing with the autopilot and entered a spiral dive.

Other than those five, nothing serious. None were engine failures or structural failures or pressurization failures, apparently. Well, the spiral dive was followed by ripping the wings off when the pilot recovered aggressively. But the structure wasn’t the primary cause.

It’s a fast, slippery, complex aircraft for one pilot to manage if something goes wrong in IMC. If I had to guess, I’d say it was a loss of control accident, perhaps caused by the autopilot disengaging, as that seems to be the only common thread between previous accidents.

3707

True but the use of auto pilot frees up the pilot to monitor what is going on.

3708

All true. but …

Single pilot IFR in turbulence is hard. Very hard. There are many pilots who can “fly” in those conditions as long as the autopilot is sweating the details. If it drops offline, or worse yet does something stupid then drops offline, that may be a few more balls than they can juggle.

Paradoxically, the better the autopilot is, the worse the human pilot can be. In my biz we all joke that we used to be able to hand-fly well on more primitive airplanes, but not so much anymore.

Automation can greatly lower your workload, freeing your mind to attend to the more strategic concerns that lead to a sucessful flight. But your skill at managing the nitty gritty tactical details that keep you alive for the next 2 minutes get little to no practice and atrophy much more quickly than one might expect.

The pilot of the Nevada accident was old, so what follows isn’t applicable to him. But an issue coming up now is that for the younger folks who’ve literally never flown unsophisticated airplanes, their old fashioned skills can’t atrophy because they were never developed in the first place.

3709

I’ve used a passenger as an auto pilot before. It’s not as weird or complicated as it sounds. It’s pretty easy to keep the wings level and the plane on course. You trim for air speed and set power for altitude. It got me got out of a bad situation once in marginal VFR and loss of GPS navigation. It just looked like it was going south quickly and it did.

It doesn’t take much to overwhelm a pilot when problems start to stack up.

3710

An interesting question is why was that medical flight made at all? Either it was a non-emergency flight or it was an emergency flight. If it was a non-emergency flight why take off in bad weather? If it was an emergency Reno has a half million population and has adequate hospital facilities for most emergencies. But if it didn’t why would you fly 500 miles to Salt Lake City instead of 200 miles to San Francisco and its world class hospitals?

3711

Many times these flights are a way to take someone who was injured / fell ill while traveling back to a hospital near their home. Typically it’s someone who’s in rough enough shape to need continuous hospitalization / care, and would suffer excessively from a 12-hour long ambulance ride.

That’s the usual “why”.
As to “why now”, that’s a tougher question in really craptacular weather.

Sometimes it’s a real medical emergency.

Sometimes the weather is expected to be OK-ish now and craptacular later, but “later” arrives sooner than the patient is released from the hospital and is ready to transport. So now you either go as planned or cancel the flight and bring them back to wherever they were before. And hope there’s still room at the inn.

I suspect other times it’s a matter of the patient needs a surgery or something with a significant recovery time. If you have the surgery here, you’re buying into another week or two in the hospital here. If you move them to there before the surgery, the recovery is also there. Meantime, every day of delay the patient is getting worse, not better.

I/we did something similar after my now-deceased first wife’s big diagnosis of the metastatic cancer that later killed her.

This happened just after we’d moved out of state but still had all her medical care centered in the old state. We had to decide where to begin treatment because we’d be stuck there for 2 months doing the treatment and recovery. And it was urgent, albeit not emergent, that we begin in just a few days before the shit really hit her fan. We elected to fly by conventional airliner back to our new home and establish treatment there.

Turned out to have been an excellent decision that probably prolonged her life by several years. And a decision implemented not a moment too soon. Had we dawdled another 1 or 2 days she’d have tipped over and we’d have been stuck in our old state renting accommodations while paying for an unoccupied residence in the new state. And with probably a worse medical outcome a lot sooner due to different staff in different facilities with different approaches.


Bottom line:
Nobody launches expecting to crash. But the cognitive bias that mission success is guaranteed is strong and hard to overcome. These can be difficult tradeoffs between certain problems on one hand if you abort and uncertain probabilities on the other hand if you go.

Maybe if they got to try this 100 times they’d arrive 99 of them. Or 999 out of 1000 tries. Or maybe not. We’ll never know since we can’t repeat the experiment. We only know how this one particular trial came out.

3712

The NTSB has a brief press conference [link in article below]. This is the third fatal crash by this operator (Guardian Flight) which has about 60 planes–which seems pretty high.

3713

The airplane coming apart is totally consistent with the pilot developing spatial disorientation. That usually develops into a spiral dive then the confused pilot pulls too many Gs in a misguided attempt to recover and either the tail or part of a wing
fails in overload. The rest of the parts duly flutter or plummet to the ground.

Or perhaps he (it was an older he) was incapacitated and whoever was in the right front seat tried to fly instruments without adequate training.

3714

The world’s oldest Lear Jet is on its way to its birthplace where a group of enthusiasts hopes to restore it to flying condition. The Classic Lear Jet Foundation found the first aircraft delivered by Bill Lear’s upstart company. It was found intact but in need of restoration in Bartow, Florida.

3715

Parts were found 1/2 mile to 3/4 from main wreckage site. I understand that a person can be spatially disorientated but the deviation from the flight path should be obvious on a moving map display.

If there is snow on the ground it’s going to take a long time to find all the parts.

3716

Spatial disorientation had proven to be a killer many times over for pilots with all the instrumentation in front of them showing the reality of what’s happening.the illusion can be strong enough that all the data in the world can’t override instinct and panic-driven reactions. And the moving map is probably the worst instrument to fixate on to understand what to correct. Well, the clock or the engine temp instrumentation, but you know what I mean.

3717

Agree w @Pork_Rind; once someone has significant spatial-D, they are hosed. The recovery time for their internal equilibrium is longer than the ground arrival time of their aircraft. Or the structural breakup time of their aircraft.

Once disoriented badly, one can no more read instruments, whether simple or advanced, than someone thoroughly dizzy can stand perfectly still and thread a needle.

The only way to win the Spatial-D game is to avoid getting it. For a two-pilot operation you have the ability to hand off to the other pilot unless they’re tumbled too. Which is possible but a bit less likely.

The big gotcha systemically for GA as a whole remains the number of nominally IFR-capable pilots who can’t reliably fly hard IFR without an autopilot while some extra distraction occurs in addition to all the ball-juggling already inherent in single-pilot IFR. Whether that extra distraction is an aircraft malfunction, they dropped something on the floor, a passenger distraction, fiddling w knobs in response to ATC, or an autopilot disconnect unnoticed (or not) in the middle of any of the above.

We do not know that this is related to the NV crash, and may never know for sure. But it smells highly likely.


In potentially-related news, these folks Skyryse have gotten the FAA approval for the next step in their quest for a bolt-on “EZ-mode” flight system for first helos, then airplanes. Their system is deliberately aircraft type-agnostic. Once approved, it could be bolted to anything from a Robinson to a Cessna to a Boeing.

They are not the only company building towards such things, but they happened to be in the trade news this morning so I thought I’d share.

If something like this did become the common UI for aircraft, then spatial disorientation would cease to be a problem. The “pilot” of the machine would hardly deserve the title, but the future is like that.

3718

Isn’t that the purpose of flying under instruments? I was taught to fly by my friends and maybe they were a little more aggressive than was necessary to train for disorientation. You put the plane back in a safe configuration and step back until you get your head straight. .

I think this is the truest statement for all aspects of flight. Put another way, you have to fly ahead of the plane.

3719

I always get bugs in my teeth when I do that.

3720

If it were that simple, spatial-d wouldn’t be a regular killer of well-trained and well-equipped pilots.

The difference is that in unusual attitude training, you’re expecting to be given orientation problems to solve with a skilled pilot observing/assisting. It can be stressful, to be sure, but you are aware that you are on not on your own and are expected to not always succeed.

When things go wrong in the real world in a high workload, single pilot IFR situation, a moment’s inattention, a simple mistake, or a problem with a piece of equipment can quickly overwhelm even a skilled pilot. Uncertainty becomes confusion and confusion becomes panic. You may only have seconds to recognize and fix your mistakes and under stress, sometimes the brain just doesn’t move that quickly.

At the range, I’m a reasonably good marksman. I can comfortably hit the target at good ranges with both a rifle and a pistol. I am told by a friend with direct personal experience in Iraq that things are all different in the real world when your targets are shooting back. Same thing.

3721

Nevada medical crash site:

3722

Another close call:

Anyone know how many people could have been injured/killed?