Your SOB?
Perhaps the pilot misunderstood what was meant by “hold” (too soon?)
Holding in freezing rain is borderline suicidal even in a big jet. My former employer has a formal prohibition against taking off into moderate or heavy freezing rain in any of our jets. The only reason there’s no prohibition on landing in those conditions is that sometimes you have no choice.
Any holding in icing conditions is risky, and can get out of hand quickly. Freezing rain turns that knob up past eleventy to more like eleventy thousand.
The Philippine Mars is airworthy again. Still no details on when the flight down to San Francisco will be. I’d really like to get a look at it but I’m afraid it won’t hit the news until after it’s already happened.
Coulson Aviation instagram post
Vintage Aviation News instagram post
Speaking of ‘Philippine’, a King Air crashed in The Philippines. One marine and three civilian contractors were killed.
I wonder what the forecast was for the area. There’s no plan-B for landing.
As to weather forecast for Nome, I know I haven’t read of it in detail. But doubtless cold, snowy, & cloudy. That’s kinda like the forecast for Phoenix in July: hot and clear. The only forecasting tool anyone needs is a calendar.
Which is its own problem. When the weather is always crappy, then extra-crappy conditions that are extra-crappy enough to really matter often don’t stand out as they should. E.g. big difference between 1/2 mile vis in fog, and 1/16th mile vis in fog. But when every day has fog, that can slip by
As to plan-B, the plan B is go somewhere else.
The good news with a Caravan is that the somewhere else can be a pretty darn limited field as long as VMC prevails there. Plenty of straight gravel roads with nil vehicles on them nearby. Heck, even the beach either side of Nome itself would work fine. So running out of fuel with nowhere to safely touch down seems not to have been an immediate concern. Again assuming VMC-enough conditions to not descend blindly into a hill or the sea. In their case the issue seemingly wasn’t limited fuel / endurance.
But rather bad luck in arriving during a plowing event at the same time as freezing precip was going on. And not thinking to move out of it, or being unable to guess where to go to move out of it. Freezing rain is far more likely out of stratiform clouds that might extend for many miles around Nome. Even if they can’t top the clouds or precip, they could probably have gotten above the liquid water phase if they’d chosen to climb hard early. Or better yet, not descended into it until the runways were ready for traffic.
But they may not have known that early enough. I’ve certainly been suckered more than once into getting a lot farther down into the arrival and low altitude regime than I would have preferred only then to be told of holding for plowing or turning the airport around. Had I gotten that info a few minutes ago while 50 miles farther away and 20,000 feet higher I’d have been a lot happier.
Unrelated to all the above …
Spatial disorientation is also always a possibility. We don’t know for sure that it was simple icing → stall that did them in. I agree that sounds probable, but it’s not always the closest most obvious snake that bites you.
Alaskan airplane crash:
The Frankenplane.
Despite my earlier comments I find the seeming lack of fire at the Alaskan crash site a bit unexpected and potentially a new cause for their falling out of the sky. But it’s also clear they came down in a low speed mostly controlled fashion. That was (probably) not a spiral dive or uncontrolled nose-over.
Ice that formed on the airplane in flight will have a very different look than ice or snow that fell on the wreckage later. I wonder if it’s been cold enough (probably) and quick enough (no clue) that there’s any of that evidence still remaining that they can photograph now?
As to the F-35 …
The article mentions folks calling it the “franken-panther”. Which suggests “panther” is a nickname for F-35s. Which was news to me. A little digging reveals this bit in wiki, with each of those names sourced from a cite.
(links broken by me.)
I think Battle Penguin is a great name. 
layman’s q: regarding freezing rain in GA:
what are the risk-vectors here?
- add. weight you are taking on?
- diminished control surface action? … or limitations (e.g. travel) of c.s.?
- diminished aerodynamics and lift?
- reduction of clear sight?
- all of the above? — any other and any strategies to mitigate those risks?
As always, thx for sharing your knowlege
All of the above. But the increased drag and decreased lift very quickly place a lightplane into an untenable situation. Full power cannot maintain a speed at which the messed up wing will produce enough lift to stay in the air.
A Caravan with a 750SHP turboprop and deice gear is less immediately screwed, but the trajectory of the unfolding disaster is the same shape, if not the same slope.
The answer to significant icing, whether due to freezing rain or anything else, is to fly to where the icing isn’t. There are icing intensities that no airplane of any type can withstand for long.
Icing not associated with freezing rain usually occurs in an altitude band 5-8000 feet thick. Get above or below and you’ll be fine. Of course that presupposes there’s air, not rock or ocean, below the icing band and / or that you have climb performance to get above the band. Which climb performance is deteriorating every second you’re in the icing.
The cure for sudden onset icing beyond your aircraft’s equippage to cope is simple. Prompt, but non-panicked, 180 degree turn to get back out. Then reconsider your options.
Freezing rain is typically falling as heavy snow at altitude, melts as it falls into a warmer layer, but remains very close to 0C/32F. Then lower down closer to the ground the temps are again below freezing, so the very cold water lands on very cold ground, trees, cars, etc., and freezes to it nearly instantly.
An airplane with a cold-soaked structure and the pressure reductions caused by the dynamic airflow around it that enters that warm layer of falling supercooled rain will quickly find itself encased in a sorta airplane-shaped layer of very heavy, and not very aerodynamic, ice. The difference between ordinary icing and freezing rain is like the difference on the ground between a thunderstorm and a tornado.
My only experiences (that I know of) have been in helicopters–climbing out of a cold well/inversion into warm and wet. For one the windscreen snots up instantly. I was impressed both times with how quickly a 205 could 180 and drop… Obviously all ended well.
You’ve certainly flown through icing in airliners. It’s usually a non-event. The windshields are heated & remain clear. We have plenty of heat for engines and wings. And on some models, tails. Sometimes conditions are bad enough the crew is working on avoidance / escape. But in 30+ years banging around the USA I was only really worried about it maybe 5 times.
The Caravan is a small plane that pilots would use to gain turbine time. It’s possible it was a lower-time crew.
Somebody always graduated last in his class. And somebody also has to be on their first week or month on that job. Could be, but that’s usually not the way to bet, just from odds. Anyone is only a noob in their current role once.
Sometimes it’s the veterans who become blasé about the hazards they deal with regularly who discount them excessively once too often and the luck that had been the only thing protecting them the previous umpteen times finally runs out.
All that may be true but I can’t imagine anyone not wanting to double and triple their salary. It’s an up-and-out job.
Everyone would want to. But all they need is a skeleton in their closet and they may get stuck there.
Eons ago after right after I left USAF and before I started at the big airlines I was flying air tours in the Grand Canyon while making the rounds of airline interviews. For me it was keeping landing currency in something, and just plain fun. For the other guys (no gals) there it was a serious part of their career.
My co-workers there were mostly young former CFIs building time towards the next rung in the ladder in that era: flying a turboprop like a Metroliner, Beech 1900, or J31 for a commuter / regional carrier. But there were several middle-aged guys who were stuck at that level. Earning subsistence wages but for whatever reason unable to move up. Maybe they’d had an FAA violation. Maybe no education. Maybe jail time. Maybe they couldn’t pass a first class medical. But there they were, VFR-only piston part 135 pilots. They said it beat being a CFI. I never did that job so I can’t say.
Footage of the crash in Brazil a couple of days ago.
I had not noticed that we’d cited that accident before this vid. Here’s one cite:
You can see in the vid Darren posted that the airplane was intact as it entered the frame then hit wires which really tore it apart and the fire trailing from both wings & engines had started before the hurtling cluster of now-wreckage finished falling to the ground. But for the wires, that might have been a survivable forced landing. Absent the wires they’d probably have been uninjured a couple seconds after touchdown, although getting from there to stopped while being still undamaged is real unlikely on a busy boulevard.