Vmc Rollover
Last month a Beech Queen Air experienced a low-altitude failure of the left engine shortly after takeoff. The aircraft crashed into a densely populated area of Parañaque City in the Philippines and resulted in 14 fatalities. The Queen Air was a precursor to the King Air 90 — essentially a large cabin-class twin with supercharged reciprocating engines. I’ve logged more than 2,000 hours of flight time in a military derivative of the King Air known as the U-21A, so the accident certainly piqued my interest. During my years flying that aircraft, quite a bit of time was spent talking, thinking, training, and otherwise preparing for just the kind of scenario encountered by the pilots in this accident: a sudden engine failure while low on altitude and...
Read MoreAir France Flight 447 Analysis
Popular Mechanics recently posted a relatively solid analysis of the 2009 Air France flight 447 accident. It has the rare virtue of being a good read for professional aviators and non-pilots alike. The article indicates that the pilots — and there were what, three or four of them involved on the flight deck? — were seemingly unaware that the aircraft was aerodynamically stalled. It sounds impossible for a crew with ten thousand hours of flight experience to be so oblivious, but almost the exact same thing happened in the Colgan Air 3407 accident. The aircraft was stalled, the captain didn’t understand what was going on, and he physically held the plane in a deep stall all the way into the ground. However, in this case, perhaps the problem...
Read MoreThe Emergency You Get
Ever wonder what goes on in the cockpit of an aircraft during an emergency? Yeah, me too — and I’ve had a few of them in my flying career. Emergencies are like snowflakes and fingerprints: no two are exactly the same. Perhaps that’s why even experienced aviators find them as interesting to rehash as the general public. The only constant between them seems to be that they never quite match the experience received during flight training. That shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone who flies because there’s no way to simulate every possible scenario, especially when one of the tenets of emergency training is to avoid creating a real one in the process. Yes, simulators are one answer. But they are not a complete or perfect solution...
Read MoreAn Accident Waiting to Happen. Again.
Air Facts contributor John Zimmerman recently wrote about watching a pilot massively overload an aircraft and then proceed to takeoff from a short runway on a hot day, barely avoiding disaster. He then asks how we should respond when an aviator is witnessed performing a Stupid Pilot Trick. Do we confront them? Call the FAA? Shrug and walk away? What is our responsibility, and when are we morally obligated to get involved? It’s a difficult question to answer, especially for those of us who are not confrontational by nature. It’s something I’ve been struggling with lately, as Zimmerman’s article brought to mind a mind-blowing encounter I had with a Darwin Award candidate while conducing some commercial checkride prep with a student at a...
Read MoreSelective Attention
You’ve probably heard this one a million times: “Things aren’t always as they seem”. Magicians, artists, philosophers, advertisers, and many others base their whole lives on that aphorism. And why shouldn’t they? It’s demonstrably true. Despite our ability to discern up to 20 million individual colors and an unbelievable 50,000 distinct scents, what’s most impressive is often what we don’t detect. Our auditory capability is so advanced that it can function as a biological sonar much as it does for dolphins and bats. The human brain is capable of things even the most advanced computers cannot hope to replicate, yet our ability to process the full range of stimuli in a busy environment can be extremely poor. Check...
Read MoreReno Air Race Crash
Some remarkable photographs have emerged from last Friday’s tragedy at National Championship Air Races. Several friends of mine were at the event, some as competitors (though none in the Unlimited category) and others as spectators. Between phone calls, texts, Facebook posts, tweets, photos, and video, I’ve received so many accounts of the crash that I almost feel like I was there. I wasn’t, of course, and I’m glad of that now. I’d imagine there’s going to be some post-traumatic stress for the air race community to deal with once things settle down. Let me start off by saying that I don’t know what caused the accident, nor does anyone else with absolute certainty. The good news is that the NTSB will puzzle this thing...
Read MoreBird Strike
As I mentioned in my last post, some captain upgrades and new hires are finally appearing at Dynamic. For the past year and a half, things had been completely static. I was one of the last people to upgrade to the left seat, and those who were stuck as first officers eventually started to get discouraged. It’s hard to blame them. They work extremely hard for $11 an hour (yeah, you read that right) day in and day out. Thankfully, for those who stuck around, their patience has begun to pay off. And for those who haven’t upgraded yet, at least they see some light at the end of the tunnel. The down side to this is that I have lost some of my favorite first officers. I’m glad they’ve upgraded, but today I started to realize how much...
Read MoreUS Airways 1549 Damage Photos
These photos were taken by the crane operator during salvage of the US Airways Flight 1549 aircraft. It’s remarkable how little damage there was to the fuselage of this Airbus A320. Obviously the aircraft will never fly again — even minor damage incidents can cost millions of dollars to repair — but I think these images are important for us to examine. They illustrate not just how skillful the pilots were during the landing, but also just how much punishment these aircraft are built to take. Airliners are tough. They endure year after year of constant use, often 16 hours a day or more. They travail the -60 degree flight levels, then bake in 110 degree summer heat. They are pressurized and de-pressurized tens of thousands of times. They...
Read MoreUS Airways Flight 1549
So, the plane-in-the-Hudson thing. At the risk of tempting fate — because as more than one person has noted, many a captain has been hailed as a hero on Sunday only to be hung out to dry on Monday — it looks like Cactus 1549 was one of those rare cases where an airliner gets totaled and the flight crew’s careers don’t. Hundreds of articles have already been written about this incident — some by people who actually know what they’re talking about. So I’d like to focus on two things which really piqued my curiosity. Glider Training: Did It Make a Difference? Much has been made of the Captain Chesley Sullenberger’s years of experience in the cockpit, but one thing on his resume stands out: he holds a commercial...
Read MoreMOA Flying
There are many types of “special use” airspace out there. One of the most prevalent is a Military Operations Area, or MOA. According to the Aeronautical Information Manual (Sec. 3-4-5): a. MOAs consist of airspace of defined vertical and lateral limits established for the purpose of separating certain military training activities from IFR traffic. Whenever a MOA is being used, nonparticipating IFR traffic may be cleared through a MOA if IFR separation can be provided by ATC. Otherwise, ATC will reroute or restrict nonparticipating IFR traffic. b. Examples of activities conducted in MOAs include, but are not limited to: air combat tactics, air intercepts, aerobatics, formation training, and low-altitude tactics. Military pilots flying in an active MOA...
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