I only have one former friend or acquaintance who has died while skydiving. It was the jump plane crashing that killed him, not parachuting. Apparently the dangerous part of that sport is the plane ride up, and avoiding the plane on the way back down.
And yes that was bloody stupid flying by the pilot and a bloody stupid thing for him to say in court.
It’s also bloody stupid that in France they involve criminal courts in routine mishaps. This may well be a matter of negligence, but how about we first have an NTSB-style safety investigation then an FAA-style pilot competency / regulatory compliance review / hearing? The next of kin can sue civilly if they so choose. But police and prosecutors should have no role in any of this.
Each country certainly has the right to arrange their bureaucratic and legal systems however they want. But the way they have chosen pretty well precludes the modern safety culture that delivers good results in the rest of the world.
How does a Pilatus turbine pilot maneuver a plane in 20 seconds to intersect with a sky diver? I think a Stuka diver bomber pilot would find that difficult.
TBF 20 seconds is longer than one may think at these speeds. But, yeah, my layman’s take would be that if you’re dropping skydivers, especially the kind that don’t just drop in freefall, you would NOT immediately turn tight descending, but instead stay at original altitude and give some time to create separation before swinging wide from original course.
I never flew jump planes, nor towed gliders. I’ve never jumped. I have flown gliders.
From the POV of the glider tow plane or the jump plane, every second it takes to get back on the ground is wasted time. The boss wants max flights per day as fast as you can make’ em. Which might encourage unseemly haste in some pilots some times.
The best way to avoid any collision potential in the air is to not be at the same altitude as the stuff you might hit. Avoiding stuff laterally requires see and avoid. Avoiding stuff vertically is potentially much more predictable.
Parachutists in established freefall descend at a higher vertical speed than most any plausible jump plane can manage. Parachutists under open chutes descend at much lower vertical speed than most any plausible jump plane can manage. Which says that right after a parachutist jumps out, he will beat the airplane to a lower altitude. If it’s a long freefall to a low opening the airplane will never catch up. But if it’s a long ride down under the canopy, the airplane will pass the parachutists’ altitude(s) on the way down somewhere, then be below them all the way to any traffic pattern.
Wingsuits are probably pretty close to the free-fall case. The airplane would be hard pressed to descend fast / steep enough to catch a wingsuiter until they deploy their parachute. Which is typically something done fairly low.
So I could see the pilot totally expecting that once wingsuit jumpers are away, it was simply impossible for him to catch them. So an aggressive descent could be begun immediately and safely. I have no idea if there is any sort of industry standard in the US, in France, or everywhere, on how jump planes maneuver to get separation from jumpers before starting down after them. There is for gliders and tow-planes, but that’s not relevant here.
The article doesn’t say what sort of Pilatus, but the PC-6 is the only single with a wing strut. It’s also a common enough jump plane.
I suspect that if you drag that prop back into beta range that thing will plummet like a rock. Poke the nose down to obtain close to Vne of 150 kts and you may well get a steep Stuka-like dive. Enough to catch a wingsuiter.
That sounds about right. Probably trying to get back for more jumpers. Time is money.
When I was learning to fly I was bouncing around various local airports in the area and decided to practice short/soft field landings. That’s when I learned to check for NOTAMS even if you’re flying to local grass strips. Yep, it turned out to be a favorite airport for parachutists. I was on short final and it started raining people. I really didn’t know what to do at that point so I landed with the assumption that I could see what was in front of me better than if I turned out of it. The people with parachutes could see what’s below them and stay out of the general flight pattern.
I was sooo not happy with the situation but it worked out OK.
The gliderport I flew out of also had parachute jumping. So we had gliders, tow planes, jump planes, and falling parachutes all aiming for pretty much the same spot on the ground. Everybody had a different aimpoint by local agreement, but lots of overlapping paths to get there. Anyone unfamiliar flying in might easily upset the whole applecart.
Up outside KCLT there are two major parachute jumping fields. One is about 5 miles offset from one of our arrival routes. We come whistling through there at 10-12000 doing 280 indicated, about 330 true. The jump plane tips the jumpers out at 14,000, so a couple-few thousand feet above us and they fall invisibly through our altitude to deploy their chutes far below. One of these days a jump pilot is gonna dump those folks a few miles from where they belong net of the winds and it won’t be pretty.
DFW has a similar situation but at least the jumpers’ desired fall path there is about 10 miles offset from the arrival track. As long as nobody is vectored off the route or avoiding weather while the jump plane tries to get one last sortie in before the storm hits, it’ll work.
Ryanair was also a big buyer of AOG Technics bogus parts.
These sorts of events occur rather regularly. Few escape the trade press into the public consciousness. The total number of parts (so far) isn’t so huge, maybe 100 or 200. But the cost involved to remove and disassemble a couple hundred engines to dig the one fake part out of the middle is staggering.
Much like when vandals steal the wiring out of an unoccupied building: they make $10 while doing $100K of damage. The exchange rate is terrible.
Or a skydiver, falling head-to-earth: short video.
I saw this a good while ago, while flying gliders in Gap (southeastern France). It was a regular thing for the jump plane - a Pilatus Porter - to catch up to & fly loose formation with jumpers in freefall. It was viewed as somewhat shameful if the jump pilot allowed any jumper to beat the plane to the ground.
Only a turbine jump plane could do this - piston engines would lack prop beta (necessary to control descent rate) and would suffer unacceptable shock cooling.
That pilot and jumper did that deliberately. You can sure see how that same sort of maneuvering happening when neither saw or expected the other could end very badly.
Quoting myself for context:
The latest article I just found suggests that AOG in fact has sold many thousands of counterfeit parts. Most are for 737 engines but some percentage are for 767 & DC-10 engines.
Finding and quarantining all the parts will be quite a job.
Funny, the reason they got caught was they did a sloppy job of faking the paperwork. They created fake certificates saying used parts were brand new from the factory. Which they then sold at factory-new prices for $$$. But they did a shitty job of copying actual factory-new paperwork. Somebody noticed the discrepancy and the jig was up.
The damage will be long-lasting and very expensive though.
Wiki suggests that USAF’s 59 KC-10s are the vast majority of DC-10s still in use:
Wiki sez FedEx, UPS, and Western Global are the only current MD-11 users with roughly 110 jets. As always with wiki, it’s hard to tell how fresh is "“current”.
All that adds up to on the order of 170 jets and 500-odd engines when you include spares and engines in the shop beyond those flying.