3 stalls--2 on turns from base to final and 1 from downwind to base. Apparently no turning problems from upwind to crosswind or crosswind to downwind where you might believe a stall was more likely to occur(banking/climbing). Mystifying. Perhaps the banks to final were too steep with inattention to airspeed?
Might have been a strong tailwind on base. Gives the unwary pilot an allusion of excess speed that he is not accustomed to. ( pilot sees high ground speed and pulls stick to slow down)
When stalls occur in the pattern, it's usually on the base-to-final turn. It's the only place where the pilot is trying to precisely align with a ground feature. Upwind-to-crosswind, crosswind-to-downwind, you're basically following an invisible track. But turning from base to final, you're converting from the virtual path to a fixed ground reference, and that's usually where the stalls occur.Originally Posted by Floatsflyer
Wind conditions can throw off pilots even more. As Bill mentioned, a tailwind on base tends to make pilot suck that base-to-final turn a bit tighter.
Pilots have by dying from stalls on base-to-final for a hundred years. That's not what bothers me about this one.
Like many of us, I've made some dumb mistakes flying but managed to live through them. When they have happened, I become a bit paranoid and do everything I can to keep it from happening again.
For some reason...this pilot didn't.
Think about it. You accidentally stall on base-to-final. You ram on the throttle, get the wings flying again, pull up and go around.
On your next approach, are you going to do everything *exactly* like the first one?
Hey-el no. After you re-cage your heart, you are going to fly a wide-damn pattern. You're going to extend downwind to make sure you have a long final to help you get on centerline. You are going to watch the airspeed like a hawk through the turns.
But that's not what happened. The pilot apparently flew the same kind of approach, stalled again, went around again, then had what was apparently the same kind of stall on the third try. After the second stall, I would have been well and truly freaked, and flew off somewhere for 15 minutes or so to cool down (and fly a long, long, straight-in approach afterwards). But no, quickly around for a third (and fatal) try.
There may be some other factors at work here, either mechanical, physiological, or psychological.
Ron Wanttaja
Well, to stir the pot, I will throw out the suggestion that too much of our training is repetition of "politically correct" formulas and emphasis on approved procedures. What I mean by that statement is that I see too many instructors teach, and pilots with many hours insist that there is only one procedure appropriate for a situation when in fact common sense says that is not true.
In this case what I see is that the pilot had the full length of the runway in front of him and he went around because he had a problem with the turn to final. All he had to do after stabilizing the airplane was get lined up and land. Someone taught that pilot that no matter what, if you have a problem in the pattern, do not land! I see that at at my local 6000' runway airport. A student who could land 3 times in the length of the runway gets some turbulence on final and aborts the landing. I suggest that student is being taught poor judgement.
An extreme case of this was the KLM crash where the airplane had a fire on board but the captain would not land at the nearest airports because they were not listed in the airline's ops spec (approved airports). For that deceased captain the procedure was more important than saving the airplane and his and his passengers lives. What's up with that?!
Food for thought.
Wes
N78PS
5000 & 4700' runways, should be plenty to work with. If it did transpire as written you would think one could try something different, like widen the pattern with more speed. I'd think some answers may be evident once recent experience & training of the accident pilot are looked into.
It sounds like this guy was stuck on flying a tight pattern and determined to make it work. Everyday is different regarding wind direction and speed as noted, THINK and ADJUST, the objective is a stabilized approach. Ron is right, there is no shame in extending the pattern and cutting the corner to keep the bank angle low. I'm guessing this aircraft doesn't have a stall warning horn system so compensate by scanning the airspeed indicator every few seconds while flying the pattern. We've all been told to practice slow flight and learn how your aircraft handles at low airspeed. This was so avoidable!!
Joe
This pilot had some basic competency in order to become a pilot. If I believe that, I've also got to believe he was dealing with some kind of situation that was confusing to him. Three stalls in the pattern indicates that all was not normal during this flight. My best guess would be that he was likely flying a plane with a plugged pitot or static port and had always flown the airspeed indicator for approaches.
At some point in most of our flying careers, things like airspeed indicators will fail or worse yet, fail to indicate correctly. If you don't practice landings without it, how are you going to deal with it when it does fail? How many of us are comfortable landing without a functioning airspeed indicator? I don't think I would be so quick to assume the accident pilot was an idiot and that you wouldn't ever do the same.
-CubBuilder
Wes, I have tremendous respect for you, but I disagree with you, here. It wasn't just a problem, it was loss of control of the aircraft at a relatively low altitude. We do have rote training for stall recovery...break the stall, full power, pitch up and get a positive rate of climb...and I think it would have been the right choice here.
Besides, we don't know the aircraft heading at recovery...it might have been 45 degrees off the runway heading. Better to power up, get out of Dodge, and try it again.
You really have to imagine what's going through the pilot's mind just after recovery. I've got an oft-told story how, when carrying my first passenger after getting my Private, I got into an accidental stall-spin (you can tell how many times I've told it, since I increment the number of spin turns every time I tell the story. I'm up to 473 turns :-). For the first 15 seconds after recovery, I was good for little more than climbing straight and speaking four-letter words. From 15-30 seconds, I graduated to adjectives (****er ****ing S**-of-a-*****). Andrenaline was shooting through my system, sweat was drenching my back. I was in no condition to immediately land the aircraft, and don't fault the accident pilot for not doing so.
Something else occurred to me, as I was reviewing this accident: All the current evidence would match a case of pilot incapacitation with a non-pilot passenger trying to land the plane. Two other aircraft of the same type had landed normally. A temporary tower was in operation, but the NTSB Preliminary doesn't say that the accident airplane was in contact (the other two RANS had been). No PTT switch on the pax side? Three apparently identical approaches were flown, like a non-pilot trying to reproduce what he'd seen in the past. Three stalls occurred, where a pilot would have understood the cause of the first one and worked to avoid a repeat.
On the other hand, the passenger was the pilot/builder's middle-aged son. Likely he would have had some stick time, quite possibly a license.
The autopsy should settle this...there are characteristic injuries to the hand of the person holding the stick at impact.
Ron Wanttaja
I think Cub builder and perhaps Ron have something here. It is unlikely that this was just a normal pilot flying in normal conditions and continuing to make the same mistake.
The report as I read in does not say if there were any radio call or what the weather was.
And in most cases, depending on how far off normal you are, if there is a problem in the pattern, especially on final approach, best practice is not to try to force the landing with some type of large, last minute correction and make the landing despite it, better to go around and do it again and do it right.
This is especially true if something is really out of the ordinary.
I read a story about a famous test pilot who trains civilian warbird pilots these days at Duxford, England. Now some trainers like a Tiger Moth or T-6/ Harvard are two seat and dual control.
But when the day comes to fly the fighters, Hurricane or Spitfire or P-38, stc, they are single seat. Your are there by yourself and need to do it right. And some of these planes are historic types and like national treasures ,not to mention worth several million dollars. Duxford is pretty much hallowed ground from WWII and it is considered very bad form to bend one of these planes on the same runway where people like Douglas Bader used to land.
I read about one man on his first solo in the Spitfire Mk V. The tolerance on final approach was 5 mphfast, 0 mph slow on short final. He did a go around the first approach, just as he had been taught siince he was about 10 mph fast and went out and reentered the pattern and made a good landing.
Last edited by Bill Greenwood; 05-16-2013 at 10:46 AM.
Ron,
Thanks for the excellent insight. And it will be interesting to look at the data that has not been released yet.
And please know that I believe that all internet opinions, including mine, may be worth exactly what you pay for them.
One thing that this accident appears to reinforce is that crashes seem to occur on the third attempt to do something - instrument approach, ribbon cut, whatever. The stress level seems to go up exponentially with each miss. Food for thought.
Fly safe,
Wes
N78PS
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