How Many Lockheed 12s were Airworthy Last Week?

[Slick Goodlin]

Could all be moot in this accident anyways, for all we know the locking mechanism seized and they’d done everything right with no indication it was all about to go sideways.

[Nark]

From the idiot himself:

The owner was life flighted out first as his blood loss and respiratory damage was critical. There was a passenger on the flight
Sitting directly behind me but his foot was pinned in. My left foot was equally pinned in and there was nothing we could do. Your leg has two bones in it and I knew mine was badly broken because my foot was still connected but just dangled like a piece of jello. Local EMS used cutting and jaw devices to make enough space to free the passengers foot and they pulled him out. I was last to get out and one more piece of metal had to be moved in order to do that. Once it was cleared, the EMS guy grabbed me by the armpits and said “on 3. This is gonna hurt.”
The leg had to be bent further backwards to get it out but I knew it would work. I came out backwards and upside down using his body as a sliding board, but alive…and we didn’t burn alive! From impact to me getting out was one hour and 40 minutes.

All I can say is that the pilot/owner is a great guy and our flight path, and mission was perfect and unrelated to the bizarre left pull at low speed at the very end. Amazingly it was a very low speed collision and occurred after the actual landing had long been completed.

I will include more info on Sunday nights video with pictures and the landing video shot from outside.

I am totally fine - able to respond to texts and messages on here. All my vitals are perfect and appetite is normal.

Thank you again everyone, some super important takeaways from this one
that I intend to go into detail on soon.

Leave a message here! I’m in this bed and bored! At this point, even insults are gladly accepted! We’re all alive. That’s all that matters. -Dan

[Colonel]

From impact to me getting out was one hour and 40 minutes.

The good news is that should have given him plenty of time to lock the tailwheel after the accident.

[Eric Janson]

These older aircraft require some actual piloting skills to operate safely.

They were built when Aviation knowledge was not at the level it is today. This is reflected in the systems which can work very differently (push pull knobs...) than what you are used to.

There may be no indications if a generator/hydraulic pump/vacuum pump fails.

Then there's the limited performance - even though it's a twin there may be flight regimes where you treat it like a single if an engine fails.

Radials require knowledge and good practices to operate correctly - that includes warming them up slowly as a lot of moving parts need to get to the correct operating temperature.

Training is obviously an issue as there are simply few or no people capable of doing this.

Just reading a manual then jumping into the aircraft is a good way to hurt yourself and damage the aircraft.

[Colonel]

The guy in the right seat of the groundlooped 12A is an internet deity, ATP/CFI/DPE that retired from Delta and owns a DC-3 that he gives type ratings on. Instructs people in many other types including Beech 18.

After the accident he stated that locking the tailwheel was optional and irrelevant to this accident. Uh huh. Good luck selling that to the FAA.

If this hero, with all of his airline bullshit, can’t land a 12A and keep it straight I guess no on can?

Just reading a manual then jumping into the aircraft is a good way to hurt yourself and damage the aircraft.

Funny, that’s exactly what I did with the Beech 18 and I never even wrecked it. The guy that delivered it said I didn’t need a checkout, just a left brake and lock the tailwheel. And he was right. It’s not like the R-985 was unknown to me. I wasn’t exactly a stranger to taildraggers or piston twins, either.

I actually tried to find someone to give me dual but all the big talking blowhards scattered like cockroaches when the lights came on, when they encountered an actual airplane.

So I jumped it it and taught myself to fly it. Over the decades I taught myself to fly many weird types that no one would check me out in, but had plenty of advice for.

Like the Piaggio Royal Gull. Jumped in and taught myself to fly it. No FBO instructors or gold bars knew a damned thing about it.

I remember when I started to fly the C421. People refused to help when I asked, so I had to teach myself. What assholes.

I remember learning to fly inverted formation aerobatics. No one would help, had to teach myself. Found out later, so did the Snowbirds.

So when some internet blowhard admonishes me to get dual that simply isn’t available, maybe they should just fuck right off with their holier-than-though bullshit?

I get the feeling no one on the internet has even seen a single seat aircraft. Every RCAF pilots first flight in an F-86 was solo. Are they all careless and reckless? Where were you guys when the Vintage Wings guys in Ottawa were recently doing self-checkouts on their single-seat Sabre? Were all the airline pilots chaining themselves to the fence at Gatineau like a bunch of goddamned hippies at Litton?

I don't have the luxury in life of attending some stupid class somewhere and getting spoon fed everything I need to know, like an infant. You either learn to teach yourself, or you fail.

No one taught me to lane split on my motorcycle, or how to survive in really dangerous Bay Area traffic. Is there some stupid fucking airline pilot school I can go to, to learn that stuff too?

Jesus. If you guys only had a clue what I do every day for a living, it would blow your fucking minds. Minimum IQ of 140 to get in the door, 160+ helps. And you'd better have the work ethic of an Alaskan sled dog.

I used to think a Canadian billion dollars was a lot of money. A company that had a CAD$BILLION revenue pet year was a monster. No, it’s puny. Try US$1B per day. Every day of the fucking year. That’s a monster revenue stream. If there’s a problem, no pressure. None at all. And rest assured, you can't go to some stupid fucking class somewhere to solve those problems, where you're fed information like an infant.

[Eric Janson]

Funny, that’s exactly what I did with the Beech 18 and I never even wrecked it. The guy that delivered it said I didn’t need a checkout, just a left brake and lock the tailwheel. And he was right. It’s not like the R-985 was unknown to me. I wasn’t exactly a stranger to taildraggers or piston twins, either.

He probably should have mentioned the P-factor - that's something that can catch you out if you're not aware of it.

You have the background to be able to do this - how many others have this background?

I'm thinking not too many - the accident rates on these vintage aircraft speaks for itself.

[Slick Goodlin]

You have the background to be able to do this - how many others have this background?

I'm thinking not too many - the accident rates on these vintage aircraft speaks for itself.

That’s the Catch 22 here - if you need experience to do it at all but don’t have any, how do you start?

In a few years we ought to see a P-61 take to the air for the first time in what, seventy years? How’s that pilot going to prep for what’s essentially a one of a kind with just a single pilot seat? If it were me I’d approach with a little B-25 time, a lot of reading, and a mountain of humility. What else can you really do?

[Colonel]

We can learn from the lessons of history.

Decades ago, Steve Wolf and Delmar Benjamin decided to build a Gee Bee Racer replica. Two incredible guys. Did you ever meet them in person and talk to them? Compared to Steve Wolf, I have the engineering and pilot skill of a carrot.

Now, everyone including Jimmy Doolittle said that they were "death traps" and couldn't be flown safely. Do you know who Jimmy Doolittle was? PhD at MIT. Invented instrument flying and high octane gasoline. General. Medal of FUCKING HONOR. You know, the little light blue one, with the white stars? And he said to stay away, it couldn't be done.

They were wrong. Weren't they? Delmar checked himself out in the single-seat Gee Bee and flew it for many years on the airshow circuit, much to the enormous hatred and envy of the FAA, but that's another familiar story.



He wheel lands it. Hope that doesn't hurt anyone's feelings ....

Smell the Venn diagrams. This is not a subject change. Hang in there, ok? One (tiny) circle represents the population of the earth that can afford a Gee Bee Racer. Another (tiny) circle represents the population of the earth that is capable of checking themselves out safely in a Gee Bee Racer.

What is the overlap of those two tiny circles? Those are the people who can safely check themselves out and fly challenging (single seat) airplanes.

Apologies if anyone's egalitarianism was offended by this factual post. There is this nasty fast-talking little fellow (Harvard Law if memory serves, played a mean fiddle when he was a kid) that says, "Facts don't care about your feelings". I think he's funny as hell. I suspect he's not allowed to visit Canada.

[Slick Goodlin]

Jimmy Doolittle said that they were "death traps" and couldn't be flown safely. Do you know who Jimmy Doolittle was?

Bit of a self-promoter too, I reckon. I don’t blame him, he lost literally everything when he put it all into the Travel Air he redesigned that subsequently came apart on its first test flight.

We get to write our own autobiographies and his said the Gee Bee was a death trap. Period comments from him were about how great it was. Personally, I think it was probably fantastic with a few huge compromises and put in a world of fifteen hundred foot lumpy dirt strips that couldn’t handle it. I bet anyone on this forum could fly it with the right prep. There’s an arc to getting there that we’re all at different points on, that’s all.

Oh, and the replica Gee Bee had the CG moved. At first they split the difference between where the original was and where Curtis Pitts said it should be. Later they moved it all the way to where Pitts said and kept it there.

[Colonel]

I bet anyone on this forum could fly it

Um. Not sure I can let that whopper slide by.

In a single seat aircraft, if your learning curve doesn’t keep up with events, you certainly crash and likely die.

My experience is that 99% of Canadian pilots would struggle mightily with a single seat Pitts, which is at least 10x easier to fly than a Gee Bee Racer.

It is important not to indulge in historical revisionism. Before Delmar, the overwhelming and accepted narrative was that the Gee Bee Racer was a certain death trap for the best pilot in the world.

After Delmar flew it, the narrative has now literally changed to, Oh anyone could fly that.

I don’t think so. Do you recall what happened on Delmar’s first approach in the Gee Bee? Do you actually think you are that good? I am not sure I am - or ever was.

I guarantee you that 99.999% of today’s pilots are not. Pilots in the 21st century are dreadful.