The Great Ongoing Aviation Thread (general and other)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
9343

Not a pretty picture.

Taking off VFR into weather conditions that are legal to fly a jet in, but not practical to, and especially not in hilly terrain. With the legit legal intent to pick up IFR in the air. But if that effort isn’t instantly successful, you’ve painted yourself pretty thoroughly into a corner. Far smarter / safer to be IFR from takeoff.

I know nothing of that particular airplane’s electrical system. But this sorta smells like a dying battery and somehow at least one of the engine generators were misconfigured or failed. Which leads to all sorts of electrical / electronic gremlins.

Anyhow, real soon they’re dealing with Captain-side instrument failure, what they believe to be a wonky engine, trying to stay VMC below the overcast while dodging the hills and clouds and making an emergency return to the airport with a copilot who’s not legally or practically qualified for the demands placed on him.

For reference, here’s an ILS approach they were probably trying to execute or at least mimic. It also includes a small airfield diagram for the very simple airport with one 7000’ runway: KSVH ILS Y Rwy 28. Knowing the runway length helps us scale the flight reconstruction diagram in the NTSB prelim.

They make a scary-tight turn to a 3 mile VFR final. Which totally sounds like task saturation and rush to land. The good news is it seems they had a reasonable descent path going, not too high or too low for their distance out. But they did set up a very short approach with everything coming together at the last moment. Again smells like rushing.

Then they slowly lose airspeed and seemingly fall out of the bottom of the visual approach hitting the ground ~1/4mi short of the runway and sliding / bouncing onto the airport ending up just onto the runway’s displaced threshold. Evidently unaware of their ever more critical loss of airspeed until the surprise big sink at the end.

Did they have any reliable airspeed indications? Did they trust a reading they should not have? Or not trust a reading they should have? It’s very hard to fly an integrated EFIS airplane that’s displaying bad data.

Me not knowing the details of appropriate speeds, another possibility is they had a decent descent path but were fast & hence descending in idle all the way down. Finally they get down close to the ground and simultaneously close to correct approach speed. Then added power and the spool up delay leaves them slow and dropping out the bottom.

The PIC was a very high time former (or maaaybe current) airline pilot. Not the sort to be surprised about the risks of an idle descent to near touchdown. No info on how much time, and how recently, he has in this model bizjet. The report also doesn’t mention his age. He seems to have been the pilot flying during the actual approach & impact phase.

9344

The electrical issues may have been caused simply them simply forgetting to turn the generator on:

All of that was because the generator wasn’t on. Battery was struggling to provide enough juice for the engines and electronics. Once Biffle brought up the “alternator,” the pilot turned the generator on and all the electrical bugs in the recording stopped and they didn’t say another word about the pilot’s instruments not working right.

“At 1014:05 the rear passenger made a query to the pilot regarding power to the “alternator” (NOTE: the CE-550 airplane is not equipped with an alternator). About 4 seconds later audio quality returned to previous levels on all recorded CVR audio channels. After the audio quality returned, the pilot made a comment indicating that was the “problem”, however, did not specify what the “problem” was or what actions were taken to correct it. There were no additional discussions regarding the pilot’s flight instrumentation for the remainder of the CVR recording.”

From the Reddit thread:

9345

'Zactly. Oops.

Plenty of pressurization “failures” happen the same way. Fail to turn something on, think you did, read the checklist without really seeing as opposed to aiming your face at it, and the next thing you know there are mysterious failures that don’t match the emergency checklist(s).

9346

Everything about that report is totally infuriating to read. Even before they made the decision to take off into deteriorating conditions with the hope* of picking up their IFR clearance in air, they already chose to gloss over at least two unusual to bad indications from their instrument panel and decided that they were collectively ok with an unqualified, not-legal pilot in the right seat.

*a past boss, a fair but very tough manager shouted me out of his office when I told him my proposed solution to a client issue, a solution that started with “I hope…” He got red and yelled, “Hope is not a fucking plan!”

9347

Obtaining an IFR clearance is not something that you have reason to doubt will occur. But there’s huge doubt about whether it’ll take 30 seconds or 5 minutes. The problem is that 5 minutes trying to maintain VMC in a jet under a low ceiling in hilly terrain is about 25 flight miles. Close to the ground and in maybe flaky visibility in spots. Good luck w that; you’re gonna need it.

That’s buying into huge risk only to avoid some delay before takeoff.

The entire rest is totally amateur hour, regardless of the experience of the PIC. @Llama_Llogophile could say better than I can, but overall this smells to me exactly like a lot of bizjet accidents and close calls. Everybody is half-assing stuff that just can’t be safely half-assed.

There is nothing slower or simpler about a bizjet than a Boeing or Airbus. If the airline industry operated like that at our volume we’d be dropping a jet a day. But ISTM that in much of bizav, this is business as usual. Which usually works out. And when it doesn’t, some semi-fatcat & family are dead.

9348

I just read the NTSB prelim and my initial take is that, like nearly all accidents, it’s a combination of factors plus some bad luck. First the flat out malfeasance:

The right-seater had no business being there. He was not qualified in the jet, nor even qualified in multi-engine aircraft of any kind. He was a new private pilot and his dad apparently let him co-pilot. Completely inappropriate. Certain versions of the Cessna 550 can be flown single-pilot, but I don’t see anything indicating that here. Even if it were, the actual pilot (the left-seater) was not qualified to do that, hence the limitation on his type rating that said he had to have a co-pilot.

Not the first time I’ve heard of this sort of thing. As it happens, I have been in nearly the same situation: I once right-seated a trip in this same aircraft type, for which I was not rated. The difference was, the left-seater WAS qualified for single-pilot ops, which meant my presence was not required and I could legally ride along to work radios and swing the gear.

Then there’s the VFR takeoff with the intent of picking up an IFR clearance in the air. Not unusual and as LSL said, not normally problematic, though it can become so. As it did in this event. It created the type of problem I really despise - there’s an incentive to do something hazardous (remain at low altitude and out of IMC in this case) rather than violate a regulation. Which is to say, pick your poison.

On top of this, it seems clear there were system issues. I’d say we don’t have enough info to discern whether those issues were pilot induced or something was actually wrong with the plane. But that created a big distraction.

It’s true, bizjet aviation does not have the stellar safety record the airlines do. A lot of that is because of the on-demand nature of the typical operations. However, what happened on Biffle’s aircraft would be very unlikely in the Part 135 (charter) world. The charter companies I’ve worked for would never permit an unqualified right-seater and usually have rules preventing airborne IFR clearances except under very specific circumstances.

Purely private aviation under Part 91, which prevailed here, is the wild west for most intents and purposes. The Biffle case seems a perfect example of the “accident chain” in motion and another (bad) example for when I teach CRM.

9349

Yeah, I don’t mean to suggest that I think picking up a clearance in air is inherently a bad idea; and I know it’s done all the time. But even to a total layman student pilot, taking off into deteriorating conditions with a 2000 foot ceiling and hilly terrain to save a few minutes of getting that clearance on the ground seems like a bad trade.

9350

'Zactly. It could only occur in these conditions if they’re clueless, utterly complacent, or just brain-off. Or in some all-fired hurry for some reason we can’t see. Which itself is a separate risk factor.

As @Llama_Llogophile wisely said, any one oversight, mistake, or bad luck item could almost certainly be shrugged off uneventfully. Stack enough of them and the situation can, and did, become overwhelming.

9351

I’m still pissed off at the Kobe Bryant flight.

9352

Many serious aviation accidents start with pilots who are not flying ahead of the plane. In this case the pilot was flying behind the plane. This works if the weather is fine, the plane is fine and both continue to be so for the duration of the flight.

9353

This is pretty much “The most interesting plane I saw today”.

I was working from home today like I always do on Fridays, when I heard a low flying jet fly over my house. Out of curiosity I pulled up the FlightAware app on my phone, and it turns out it was a not-yet-in-service 777-9, flying from Boeing Field to Sacramento Mather on what I assume was a test flight. I went out to the backyard and watched it fly off into the distance. My house is just about in line with MHR’s runway 22L, about 10 miles out. (ETA: Actually looking at Google Maps it’s a bit north of being in line with the runway, but I’m guessing flights from the north might fly over my house before making a slight right turn to line up with the runway)

9354

That’s really cool.
We went from the Wright Brothers to landing on the moon faster than it’s taken to develop that damned thing to transporting passengers. And it’s not even a clean-sheet design!

9355

Huh? Wright brothers was 1903. Apollo 11 was 1969. That’s 66 years. 66 years ago today was 1960.

The original 777 project started in 1990. That’s 36 years ago. And first flew in late 1994, 31 years ago.

The 777-X project started in 2013 and first flew a prototype in 2020, 7 years later.

Yes, the darn thing has had no end of bad luck and problems with engines (not their fault) and airframes (yes their fault).

9356

I was exaggerating a little, :slight_smile:

9357

Whoosh! Oh look, a 777-9 just flew over! :man_facepalming:

9358

Just had a couple of B-1s and their fighter escorts fly right over the top of my place en route to the Superbowl flyover. It’s the first time I’ve seen the bombers in flight, very cool!

9359

did you notice the 2nd one spread it’s wings?

9360

No, they appeared to be more in the swept back mode (I didn’t manage to get a pic, by the time I heard them and went outside they were already out of sight)

9361

Here’s a video taken under their approach path confirming.

Second BONE was swept and afterburning to make a fast pass and a zoom climbout.

9362

The day I joined the B-1 team at the defence contractor I worked for, B-1A #159 crashed. It was haunting seeing test pilot Doug Benefield’s tan Porsche 924 parked outside of the hangar, and knowing he’d never drive it again.