PA-28 Fatal Peg

[Colonel]

[url=http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/ ... -1.3661457]http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/ ... -1.3661457[/url]

I really don't understand how it is possible
to have such a terrible accident with such a
docile aircraft in perfect wx (blue sky in photo).

Flight training in Canada is abysmal.

[Walter Sobchak]

Both employed at 17 wing.


http://www.cjob.com/2016/07/02/update-i ... l-unknown/

[mcrit]

Let's at least get a preliminary report before we start throwing people under the bus.

[Colonel]

The TSB might produce a (naturally bilingual) report
in what, 10 years?

The PA-28 is not what most people would think of as
a fire-breathing dragon.  It was designed by Fred Weick,
amongst others, as a trainer.

Short of catastrophic structural failure, one might
suspect that if the pilot had let go of the yoke and
simply kept the wings level with the rudders, the
outcome would have been survivable.

This is not just a PPL thing.  AF447 and Colgan 3407
involved the highly experienced, qualified and trained
pilots (in comparison to a 100TT ppl) holding the flight
controls all the way back and keeping them there with
enormous force and G.

That is abysmal.

Maybe I keep thinking that Canada is better than most.
Perhaps I am wrong.

[Colonel]

[quote]Short of catastrophic structural failure[/quote]

I should mention ... I know plenty of people that
have died after their aircraft came to pieces in flight:

1) Joe Broeders.  Homebuilt wing came off.

2) Bob Sterling and his wife.  C210 came to pieces
in flight.  TSB curiously uninterested.

3) Andrew Wright.  G202 tail fell off (composite
fuselage)

4) Andy Philips.  Exceeded Vne with a load of
bondo aft the hinge line on his rudder.  It exploded
from flutter.

Without a 0/0 ejection seat, some of the above
can be pretty tough to survive.  But there are
guys that have done it:

5) Floyd Brown.  Lost a metal prop blade, engine
was ripped from his Christen Eagle and he started
to tumble, out of control.  Had a parachute, somehow
got out and survived.  At around 1000 feet.

All of the above, you have to question their
maintenance and/or engineering.  Something was
rotten in Denmark and wasn't noticed.  Or, it
was covered up.

Other times, you explode into flame and again,
without a parachute or ejection seat, pretty
tough to survive. 

6) George Beurling.  Objectively Canada's greatest
fighter pilot of the last 98 years, completely forgotten
despite being from Quebec, probably because he didn't
have a french name.  Died after WWII during a Norseman
maintenance flight and a fuel leak after faulty re-assembly
resulting in in-flight fire.

I shall be interested to see, after a 10 year bilingual
accident report, if this PA-28 lost a big part or flamed.

Note that flight control failure is not always a good
excuse to die.  Many examples.  UA232.  2003 A300 DHL.

Heck, I'm not much of a pilot and I've had the stick jam
in a vertical downline, and had to land with a jammed
elevator.  Happened twice to Freddy - once it was keys
that fell out of the pax pocket, and the other time it
was a 10-32 truss head machine screw - I took the tail
apart and dug that one out myself.  For me, it was a
BNC T-connector.  Last time that happened to Sean
Tucker, he climbed over the side, but he's jumped out
of at least 3 Pitts (that I know of).

If anyone cares, I can tell the old Tale of Two Comanches.

[Colonel]

Ok.  Here's my Tale of Two Comanches.

This is a true story (honest) of two crashed
single-engine comanches, with very different
outcomes.

Years back, there was an FTU at Carp, Ontario
(not Westair - on the EAA side) that rented out
Wayne Rostad's old single-engine comanche.  I
think it was a 250 or 260 hp.

I met a nice old fellow - actually a neighbour
of an old boss of mine - who was renting it.
But he never got the hang of the fuel totalizer,
and he ran it out of gas, which is annoying.
Maneuvering as hard as he could, he stalled
and spun and killed himself and his grandson.

You might conclude that airplanes are dangerous
from the above paragraph.  Let's look at another
comanche crash.

This crash was a 400hp single comanche, but
that's really not important.  What is important
is that it had an exhaust leak, and the pilot
went to sleep.  After a while, it ran out of gas
and the auto-pilot slowly dialled in full nose-up
trim in a vain attempt to maintain altitude.

It descended, wings level, entered ground effect
and landed very nicely, all with the pilot asleep
from the CO.

He woke up with a hell of a headache, and a
broken wrist.

Now for my question: which pilot had a better
outcome?  The one that worked hard and stalled
and spun and killed himself and his grandson, or
the guy that did absolutely fucking nothing?

Of course, pilots have ignored this lesson for
decades, giving us AF447 and Colgan 3407.

Valuable lesson here:  often a pilot's inputs
make a situation much, much worse.  The plane
will fly much better without you fucking it up.

Couple years ago, my friend Spencer did some
spin recovery testing.  Best technique was
Beggs-Mueller - hand off the stick - which
yielded minimum altitude loss.

Time after time I see airshow pilots spin in,
with the stick held all the way back.  If they
had let go of the stick, it would have come out
of the spin.

But oddly pilots refuse to learn this lesson,
and think that an airplane will fly better with
the flight controls in some randomly-chosen
max deflection position.

I do not understand why pilots refuse to learn
this lesson, and prefer to die instead.

The above has been blindingly, painfully true
for decades.  Not that anyone is interested.
They just want paper, to make TC happy.

Airplanes aren't dangerous.  Pilots are dangerous.

[Colonel]

Back when I was instructing, I used to check out
new Pitts owners.

One guy was no beginner.  1000TT, jumper dumping,
float time, instructor, tailwheel.

After he was done in the two seater, he went solo
in his single seater which is actually a completely
different airplane.

Told me it had trouble coming out of a spin.  He
could stop the yaw, but it would not unstalled.

So I said, what the hell, show me what you're
doing in the two-seater.

At the end of the maneuver, when the aircraft
would not unstall, I noticed he was holding the
stick back ...

[b]AND HE DIDN'T EVEN KNOW IT[/b]

So I yelled at him, "Let go of the stick, motherfucker!"
and magically it unstalled.

So many lessons here, that no one wants to learn,
because they are presumably happy dying in an airplane.

I simply don't understand young people.

[img width=500 height=288][/img]

[Colonel]

[img width=500 height=307][/img]

BD4, stalled after takeoff, Stoney Creek, Sept 2015.