The wrong way 
. Beyond that there’s not much reliably known.
Into the water. The windsock was pointing down.
Yeah, Wikipedia says that he may have landed on water with the wheels down. That will end things real quick.
I heard that he hit a submerged log. Never heard anything about a gear-down water landing.
We were rafting towards Cataract Canyon S of Moab a few years ago and a couple of bush planes with the huge tires flew over and then lowered and each touched the water briefly with the tires. These posts make that sound a little risky!
IIRC helicopter pilots are trained to always be aware of nearby open spaces so they can land via autorotation if the engine fails at any time.
Yeah, it’s a game I played when I was flying.
Fixed-wing pilots are trained to look at emergency landing places too; but helicopter pilots have more options.
I would think that unlikely because that meant he’d been flying with the wheels extended the whole time.
He wouldn’t be the first, though. It seems like such a careless thing to do, but it happens.
People make all manner of mistakes but airplanes generally don’t let you do certain things. Flying at cruise with the flaps down would be an example. I think flying with the wheels down would be another. There should be a gear indicator light that stands out.
I am not a rated seaplane pilot.
I understand that there’s a bit of a standard litany taught. Someplace in your pre-landing checklist / litany say one of:
- This is a water landing; my landing gear is Up.
- This is a land landing; my landing gear is Down.
With the appropriate check of handle position, indicator lights, etc., per your particular aircraft type.
Those who don’t do this eventually have muscle memory override situational awareness and land w the wrong gear configuration. Oops.
That’s what I was going to say. You don’t necessarily fly a whole trip with the gear down; you do the landing checklist by force of habit and forget that this time the wheels are supposed to be up. Lots of flying errors come from complacency.
Pilots make a lot of mistakes. I’ve seen some serious ones from high-hour airline pilots. Many of the mistakes come from anticipation bias. We hear what we expect to hear. But on that same note the idea of a physical checklist was something that goes back in aviation to a crash of a B-17 prototype in 1935.
Landing a Catalina is something that would have needed a physical checklist and then some. I still remember the 1st time I experienced anticipation bias. I took off on a heading of 260 and was given instructions to turn left to a heading of 360. I was about to turn right but questioned the tower. They wanted me to circle around to create spacing. I was a student at the time and could have done without the lecture that followed but at least I questioned the call.
Slight amendment if I may …
Landing a Catalina by the book is something that would have needed a physical checklist and then some.
Did he routinely use the book? I don’t know. There are plenty of NTSB reports about bizjet and biz-turboprop aircraft where checklists were required by POH, but crew culture at that operator blew that shit off. Until finally the odds caught up with them and the Feds came a-lookin’.
Did the Catalina crew use their checklist but still do the wrong thing anyway? In my airplane we have 5 possible takeoff flap settings (two very common, three rather rare) and two normal landing flap settings. And plenty of checklists and crosschecks. Occasionally somebody still gets the flaps wrong on takeoff or landing. Oops. Usually nothing worse than wounded pride ensues. Usually.
Did the PBY crew goof the gear, hit a log, dig a wingtip, have a structural failure, misjudge height above glassy water and stall at 50 feet, have ??? happen? As the wiki says, the actual cause is unknown for lack of physical evidence. Nobody knows or will ever know. Maybe not even Phillipe in the couple seconds of surprise before it all got bloody & sinky.
he ate one of the engines so that sounds like he dug a wing in.
Or it just folded just before or after after a routine touchdown. Lotsa corrosion in old airplanes. Many competing theories all consistent with the tiny physical evidence.
Not that it has any bearing on the crash but I wonder if this particular Catalina still had the remote Engineer station in the middle of the plane. This was one of the first, if not the first plane to dedicate a such a position.
I got this on my news feed and found it interesting.
Cessna CH-1 Skyhook helicopter.
Quite an impressive helicopter and doubly so coming from a fixed-wing company. It still holds the Altitude record for piston powered helicopters at 29,777 ft from 1957. Video
I’ve always thought that was a cool-looking bird.
It sorta looks like it was cobbled together from standard parts for a C-120 or -140. Just grab a box-stock tail cone, windshield, and engine cowling, skip the wings, landing gear, stabilizer, elevator, and rudder, then cobble together a bubble-top cabin for it. Add rotary running gear and some skids and away we go!
I like the driveshaft running up through the center of the cabin. I hope they thought to put it inside a protective shroud. ISTM the cabin roof is non-structural. if so, the lift load of the rotor is borne on the ~90 degree gearbox that’s evidently under the floorboards between the pilots. Might make for some interesting dynamic behavior.
In all an interesting little flivver.
I was about to suggest that had the CH-1 met with more success versus the contemporary Bell Model 47, nowadays Cessna might be a major force in helos instead of Bell. Who in turn might have disappeared entirely given their poor record in fixed-wing aviation, or they might have instead flourished in fixed wing when they had no alternative. In any case that alternative history would be quite different from our own.
But then I looked it up to check before posting. Turns out the Bell Model 47 predated the CH-1 by roughly a decade! Which is an eternity in post-WW-II aviation. So the 47 was well entrenched when the CH-1 came along into a very similar niche. Not greatly surprising it met with little success.