Originally Posted by
rwanttaja
We had a set of posts cross. As I mentioned there, I'm not really interested in pre-analyzing this early, but: The amount of damage to an aircraft (and its occupants) is exponentially related to the speed at which it hits. The amount of energy involved is related to the square of the speed...hit twice as fast, the airplane and occupants suffer four times as much.
Conversely, all things being equal, the less damage the airplane exhibits, the slower it was going. A lot of things affect this...a glancing first impact to slow the plane down, the nature of what it hits, etc. You can be killed on a bicycle; Frank Tallman had to have a leg amputated from tripping off a curb.
In all probability, the plane was travelling slowly when it hit. They may have had bad luck with the first thing they hit...but I think, typically, you see more tail cone damage in these cases as the plane tumbles. But, of course, the OTHER way it could hit slowly is vertically...deep stall or incipient spin.
We had a Fly Baby accident last year after an engine failure. It went down in a grove of trees. The NTSB report comments that the trees were damaged in a hole only slightly larger than the aircraft...in other words, it went straight in, probably stalled. In the pictures in the docket, the Fly Baby's fuselage is broken off just behind the cockpit and is remarkably intact. So are the wings, for that matter...but the forward fuselage is shattered. No fire, despite a fuel tank located above the pilot's legs right behind the engine.
So the NTSB investigators will be examining the debris trail, attempting to piece together how, exactly, the Sonex was travelling at the time of impact. With all that equipment around, it should have left a pretty obvious trail as it disintegrated.
Ron Wanttaja
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