Nitpick: Chico and Chino are both places in California. But not the same place. Chico is ~80mi north of Sacramento while Chino is ~60mi east of Los Angeles. So 450-500 miles apart. Spellcheck is rarely anyone’s friend where place names are involved.
Chino is one of the few surviving warbird meccas in the USA. I spent a lot of time there as a teen and college kid. Saw a lot of cool planes, touched a few, and saw some severe close calls. Never watched a fatality there. Which is good.
The Queenstown departure is sort of user friendly in that the decision point is several waypoints ahead of the branch point. So if your engine has failed before LEMAK (decision waypoint) then you follow the engine out SID which doesn’t diverge until a few waypoints later. It gives you a bit of time to make sure the EOSID is the active plan.
My my. How … gentlemanly … of them. 
We dealt with a number of beastly examples of divergent EOSIDs both Stateside and in Latin America. At least it’s a hell of a lot better than in Ye Olden Dayes of 1 NBD, 1 VOR, and a stopwatch for terrain avoidance.
It sounds like they lost an engine.
I saw part of a video this morning (only part, because I dislike watching videos for information) where a guy familiar with the aircraft said it looked like a stall-spin accident on take-off, at about 300 feet. No multi-engine rating, but I imagine the asymmetric thrust might cause that.
Not disputing you, but where’d your impression come from?
The plane basically rolls into a flat spin. They would have checked all the control surfaces before taking off and they’re not likely to fail. Engines not so much.
Here’s a video that says (shown) there is a picture of the flaps extended and according to the person in the video the plane will not climb out in this configuration.
Thanks for that cite.
Notably, the speaker, clearly a man with relevant direct experience, does not say “the airplane won’t climb out single engine with gear up and flaps full down”. He says “the airplane won’t climb out with gear up and flaps full down”, period. I find that fully believable for an airplane of that era with low power, high drag, and the relatively primitive split flap design.
Which suggests to me that the problem was not an engine failure. Or at least not necessarily an engine failure. But rather a takeoff with unplanned partial flaps, or a control error which led to deploying the flaps in flight inadvertently and unnoticed (perhaps while trying to retract the gear as is normally done after takeoff). Then the airspeed decayed past the critical value while they were focused on that performance decay with no understanding of why performance sucked.
As always, when your mental model is internally consistent but doesn’t match reality, that’s where shit gets real dangerous. The time required to realize your model is wrong, figure out what’s right, and rebuild your model can exceed the time available until loss of control or ground impact is inevitable.
[aside]
In big jet airline ops, go-arounds are rehearsed a lot in the sim and performed only rarely out on the line. The record for textbook-perfect takeoffs and approaches and landings is quite good; well over 98% are procedurally flawless and the others are close. For go-arounds the corresponding number is in the low 30s and some are downright shambles.
There are about 10 steps to do in about 20 seconds involving both pilots. If you succeed in sticking to the script and not hurrying it’s easy enough. If somebody muffs a step, the whole situation is so dynamic that dumb shit is almost guaranteed to follow. Not necessarily fatal dumb shit, but unstylish dumb shit. Plus the occasional close call saved by the automation, the stall warning system, or the non-flying pilot while the other guy is tunnel-visioned on the wrong thing.
[/aside]
I suggest a similar scenario here. They did not understand what was wrong and ran out of time trying to reassemble an accurate model of aircraft config and state.
Does anyone have a link to a vid of the actual stall/spin? The reason I ask is that a two engines running stall from lack of airspeed and excess drag look very different from a Vmc roll with an engine out even if the outcome (nose first impact with the ground) is identical.
I’d replace “would” with “should”. Accidents happen when shoulds are skipped.
I expect they can see the ailerons from the cockpit. Some people just check that they move, not that both of them move in the correct direction both ways. Big difference.
Based on the cockpit design IMO it is/was impossible for them to have seen the rudders and elevators moving, be that right wrong, or not at all. Surface position indicators are almost certainly not fitted, being 50 years and 150K lbs in the future versus when that airplane was built.
Absent evidence of immediately prior maintenance, I’d be inclined to discount control surface rigging screwups completely, and control surface failures to a low probability. As you say, engine failures are more likely by a big margin.
But what of control lock still engaged? Back in the day the ergonomics of many of those was equally a trap, where the lock control is well out of sight and out of mind. And often rudder and yoke locks were separate.
Unlike a nosegear airplane, a taildragger with locked yoke controls will take off at more or less the normal speed in a normal manner that attracts no alarm early on. Only after liftoff does the plane go apeshit. I’m not pushing this theory, but it has yet to be discounted either.
Curtis SB2C Helldiver - In the Battle of the Philippine Sea, 45 Helldivers, most of which had been launched from extreme range, were lost when they ran out of fuel while returning to their carriers.[15]
I got to see one today in it’s natural environment, 60’+ underwater!
Now that is cool! Thanks for sharing.
That’s pretty wild. Am I looking at the picture correctly? Are the props feathered?
I’m not sure how the UK does it but I’d think doing this in the US would be a federal crime (breaking in to the airport) and come with some quite serious criminal penalties. Not to mention the now-painted plane(s).
If I were going to commit a crime & vandalize property of people who could definitely afford to sue me into oblivion I sure wouldn’t pose for pictures afterwards.
Death penalty! Impressive.
Due to this action, the aircraft in question will almost certainly perform one more flight than otherwise planned to a suitable paint shop and possibly to other locations for inspection or overhaul of affected components (paint in the engine…even if swapped out, parts will get shipped around on more flights …). So much for REDUCING that carbon footprint!
Southwest flying a little low into Oklahoma City - Will Rodgers airport. I checked and Tinker AFB has about the same layout several miles to the ENE of Will Rodgers but the descent to RW13 shouldn’t have been in the same area (Yukon) if they messed up the approach. They also had a close approach to the water out in Hawaii (Kauai) recently. Map here:Will Rogers World Airport (okc) - Map, Aerial Photo, Diagram
500 ft off the deck would rattle houses and scare the crap out of people. I think someone has some splainen to do.
Seems like it would need a pretty thorough inspection before flyiing at all. If paint got into the pitot tubes or angle-of-attack sensors, that could throw off the instrument readings. I don’t know how much bizjets rely on automation, but without reliable instruments it might not be going anywhere.