Ouch. A crash at 4am immediately brings to mind questions of fatigue and / or intoxication. A C550 is at least potentially an owner-flown aircraft.
My first thought is this being flown with just 1 pilot.
I just checked, and some variants of the C550 = Citation II* can be flown by single pilot. But not all variants; the others require two pilots.
And even for the single-pilot variants, they aren’t necessarily flown that way. Many insurance companies have taken the perspective that just because FAA says something is legal doesn’t mean they’re willing to underwrite the consequences of FAA’s dereliction of duty.
Whether it’s requiring type-specific initial training, repetitive simulator refresher training, or requiring two-pilot ops, many policies require the policyholder / owner / pilot to jump through extra hoops beyond the FAA minimums to keep their insurance for whatever type they fly. Of course practically speaking, someone is free to operate uninsured. They’ll just be stuck with some real bad financial consequences if things go awry.
It’s uncertain to me which actual variant was in use here. I know the initial article says “C550” but that could well be just a generic label, not the fully specific one. News reporters cannot be trusted to get the fine details correct the first time. So far NTSB doesn’t have anything in their database, not even a placeholder.
In other news, the A380 rides flies again:
The whole worldwide fleet was never grounded. But other than the Gulf carriers, most other A380 users had parked all of theirs after COVID shut everything down. Most had also expected they’d never fly them again.
How times have changed.
* See:
If you’re the owner of the plane, maybe you figure that you’ll be killed in any crash, so the financial hit isn’t going to mean anything to you.
I’m still hoping to fly on an A380 before they go away. I was thinking of taking a trip to London this year, but after getting laid off I can’t really justify the expense. With the upturn in passenger numbers, I suspect they’ll be around for a few more years, at least.
More on that Citation accident: All Six Victims Identified in Plane Crash Near Murrieta’s French Valley Airport (msn.com).
The airport is pretty minimal. There’s no control tower, but there is a 24 hour radar approach control covering all of southern California, including this airport AirNav: F70 - French Valley Airport. There is a straight-in RNAV GPS approach to one end 06941R18 (faa.gov).
Per the article they attempted an approach into low clouds, then announced an intention to miss the approach. The published miss is a climb straight ahead to about 1000 AFE, then a right ~180 degree turn. The aircraft impacted ~1/4mi short of the runway and a similar distance to the right of centerline.
Seems they failed at the climbing part of the missed approach. I’d bet on spatial disorientation, or simply inadequate mental prep to execute a missed approach. It’s not that hard, but a lot of small steps need to happen in the correct order and quickly. While there’s lots going on subjectively with your seat-of-pants & inner ear sensations. And yes this does appear to be an owner-flown single pilot situation. Sigh.
IME it works far better to miss the approach, do all the clean-up and nav stuff, then tell ATC. Talking first is a recipe for a screw-up nearly every time. Sigh again.
ANC - Aviate, Navigate, Communicate. In that order.
Agree completely. A fundamental truth of aviation co-equal with gravity.
In complicated airplanes I’ve invented my own variation:
Aviate, navigate, flight engineer-ate, communicate.
Meaning
- Stick, rudder, and throttle(s) fly the plane.
- Decide on, set up for, and control where you’re going.
- Deal with the systems problems and their immediate checklists however .complex
- Then and only then, when everything else is done, talk to the goofs on the ground.
They can wait; the jet won’t wait.
The time to do a go-around is before you do the go-around.
Zactly.
Any time we think we might have that need, it’s something rehearsed out loud earlier in the approach, either just before or after the FAF. It only takes a few seconds to prime everybody’s mind for the critical 5-10 seconds involved.
If you want to fly a complex plane in bad weather by yourself then at least set it up for obstacle/ground alerts. it’s such a marginal cost when ordering subscriptions for your GPS.
Incorrect. This was a small air charter company.
Lenders received his commercial pilot certificate in April, records from the Federal Aviation Administration show. He was piloting the Cessna C550 business jet along with co-pilot Manuel Vargas-Regalado at the time of the crash, said Michael Morris, the plane’s owner. Lenders’ 31-year-old girlfriend, Huntington Beach resident Lindsey Gleiche, also died in the accident. “We lost six wonderful souls (who) unfortunately left behind 11 kids,” Morris said. They range in age, he added, from a newborn to 11 years old.
Morris said he had received a call from Vargas-Regalado, manager and lead pilot of his flight company, who told him he wanted to take a few people to Las Vegas and asked if he could use one of his planes. The company owner agreed and said he didn’t ask questions because he knew the 32-year-old pilot, who had flown for him for two years, was responsible.
The planes registered to Morris’ company, Prestige Worldwide Flights LLC, are based in Temecula.
http://prestigeaviationworldwide.com/
Apparently a fog problem:
That won’t help you with spatial disorientation. It’d be just one more alarm going off that you can’t process.
They said they were flying the published missed approach. Yet they did not follow that clearly defined 3D path that would clear all obstacles. Instead they flew a path that hit the ground almost within a stones’ throw of the runway threshold. Terrain was not their challenge. Control and / or navigation was.
@PastTense.
Your MSN link is dead. Here’s the actual article MSN had aggregated for you:
The Prestige aviation you linked is not the correct one. Whole lotta outfits in the air charter biz with “prestige” or other ego-boosting words in their names, so that’s a very easy mistake to make.
The actual owning outfit doesn’t seem to have a website. It’s not uncommon for fat cats with jets to create an LLC to own it, then lease the airplane to somebody else to operate.
Here is a bit more possibly factual news. According to this source Prestige Worldwide Flights | Bureau of Aircraft Accidents Archives (baaa-acro.com), it seems they flew one approach, flew the missed approach successfully, came around a second time, then crashed just short & right of the runway.
That is a very common failing where you miss the approach, come around, and on the second attempt you press into the weather farther than you should, or with not-quite-good-enough sight of the runway to safely continue. Meanwhile the power of wishful thinking, perhaps plus some rapidly increasing fuel supply concerns, leads you to keep going until you crunch. Perhaps they started one last go-around just before impact. Perhaps not. Punchline: second approaches have a much higher crash rate than do first ones.
A detail coming from the article @PastTense cited was that the right seater was an experienced pilot with the charter operator, but the left seater had only gotten his commercial license in April. So apparently the right seater was training the left seater who was new to jets. That invites a whole host of additional issues at 4am in very marginal conditions.
I was just at Heathrow yesterday. There was a BA A380 at the gate next to ours, so they are evidentially flying them again as well. Then at the other end of the flight at LAX we taxied past an Asiana A380 as well. And also a Lufthansa 747-8.
I was at JFK twice last week and saw a couple of them each time. Not recalling which carrier(s). I don’t mean to imply they’re absent, just that they’re increasingly coming back from what had been a very low ebb.
Deer Park is near Spokane, on the other side of the state from me.
A Supermarine 361 Spitfire LF.IXe vintage airplane, registration N633VS, sustained substantial damage following a runway excursion and ensuing nose over during a landing attempt at Deer Park Airport (KDEW), Deer Park, Washington.
The sole pilot onboard the tailwheel equipped WWII fighter was not injured.
Here’s a photo from the Deer Park Gazette Twitter feed.
https://pbs.twimg.com/card_img/1677365430011273216/ChdRp5p7?format=jpg&name=medium
This was a couple weeks ago, but it’s been a tough season for warbirds:
Surprisingly, none of the usual databases have much to say on this.
It’s also a bit surprising to me the pilot was killed while the airplane seems relatively intact. Although from the small amount we can see, perhaps the engine was pushed up and aft through the cockpit. Which was a pretty common failure mode back in the day. Something certainly peeled the front and top off the cockpit, and probably off of him too.
I didn’t mean to imply that you implied they were absent, just adding additional evidence that they are coming back.
I saw a Lufthansa A380 in Lisbon on Friday. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one up close on the ground before. We were in a TAP Embraer 190, heading to Florence. Impressive for it’s size, but not it’s looks.
Yeah. It’s much more of a BUFF than the original B-52 BUFF ever thought about being.
Arrghh! I can’t believe I let autofill insert “it’s” twice when it should have been “its.”