Gulfstream G650 Accident Report
It’s been a year and a half since the tragic crash of Gulfstream Aerospace Corp’s G650 test aircraft at Roswell claimed four lives. Ironically, the aircraft recently received its FAA type certificate at almost the exact same time that the National Transportation Safety Board issued their final report on the accident. I’ve been following the online NTSB docket for months — in fact, I’ve read the entire thing. It comprises thousands of pages of interviews, telemetry, analysis, company records, flight test cards, and transcripts. If you’ve got the time and are enough of an airplane nerd to stay awake while reading it, the accident docket provides a fascinating and detailed look into how a modern test flight program is conducted....
Read MoreVmc 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 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 out...
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 glider...
Read MoreThunderbird Crash
Last September a Thunderbird F-16C crashed just after takeoff during an airshow performance in Idaho. The pilot managed to eject 0.8 seconds before impact and walked away with only minor injuries. As one might expect at an airshow, there were many cameras trained on Thunderbird #6 when the accident occurred. Even so, this photo showing the $21 million jet just before impact is quite remarkable. Even more remarkable is this video clip from an on-board camera showing the split-S maneuver and subsequent ejection from inside the cockpit. It’s a 4.1 megabyte mpeg, but if you can swing the bandwidth I highly recommend watching it. As a side note, the accident investigation report was issued this week. It concluded that the accident was caused by pilot error. The...
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