This all day....once she had a problem landing twice it was obvious there was an issue here that could turn serious at any moment.

Most low time pilots probably don't have too much experience with being told to keep their approach speed well above their normal approach speed (jet traffic behind them), then having to get the plane on the ground at the end of that faster than normal approach.

Most turbine aircraft are flown with two pilots also. Turbine I meant corporate aircraft not turbine Air Tractors, though you probably be
safe crashing in one roll cage, helmet and all.  

My point is that when you operate explicitly out of airports with precision approaches and more than adequate runways you've added a comfortable margin of safety right there.  

I'd almost be willing to say that if you could compare "apples to apples" you would find a similar accident rate across the board, regardless of the equipment used.

The normal GA accident statistics are like grouping 4 wheelers and tractors in with cars.

I had roommates who were pilots at Riddle, and they always said the most nerve wracking days were
those bringing a 172 into Sky Harbor.

The plane was stalled and spinning. You can see the shadow turn and if there was a pole, it would also cast a shadow.

You can also see that the elevator is fully deflected - pointed all the way down. She was trying to recover from the spin.

Looks like maybe she was making her turn trying to line of with runway #12? Ran out fuel, stalled into the turn?



 

Wouldn't something in that fancy glass cockpit be flashing, boinging or dinging if she was out of fuel?

I would like to know how critical the weight and balance of the Cirrus aircraft is.
If it's anything like a Mooney, it's very critical.
Unlike a garden variety Cessna, you can practically throw the bags in the back seat and go flying.
Not so much with a high performance SE aircraft.

3 souls onboard on a cross country flight with baggage can really change the flight characteristics of that type of aircraft.

There was an airport right behind where I lived in New Jersey. We had two planes crack up there. No fires. Both of them hit trees at final approach speeds. Neither were fuel related.

Picking up bits and pieces of information from searches...  The glass cockpit apparently warns the pilot if the difference in fuel quantity between the left and right tank exceeds 9.5 gallons.  There's even a page in the emergency procedures section of the manual for what to do if the fuel imbalance exceeds 9.5 gallons (switch to the tank that has more fuel, duh).

Seems to have an adverse impact on flight characteristics, if one wing has 10 gallons more than the other wing.  So it's not just the front to back loading that you have to worry about.

Or Baytown.

 

Thanks for that.
IIRC they same principal is applied to Mooney aircraft (it's been a long time since I've flown that airframe).

RIP. Very sad. Will probably take a year for the NTSB full report to come out.

This is Literally 10 miles south of Hobby Airport.



My guess is they picked Hobby because there are several businesses that cater to more wealthy people with private planes. I would guess they arranged for a car to take them to the hospital where their family member was receiving treatment.

On the fist page looking at the CCTV video when you first see the shadow of the stalled plane coming down if you freeze the frame it looks like the propeller is not spinning at all?

 

A spin in a full scale (non-aerobatic) plane usually isn't exactly fast.







and in some types it doesn't look like you'd expect a spin to look, either.





 

What I left out and what I meant was it looked like the propeller was not spinning.



 

Any pictures of the prop, taken at the crash site, should give an indication of whether or not the engine was running.

If the prop was not spinning at impact, the damage to the prop blades will be completely different from blade to blade.

If the engine was running, and running hard enough to make thrust (not idling), the blades should all be curled in the same direction (or all broken off, if it's not a metal blade prop).

Some more info.




http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/NTSB-to-announce-more-details-in-deadly-plane-7975097.php




 

To be fair a spin in a 152 is probably the most benign spin you can do.
When I got my Mooney I was advised not to spin it as it would lose 1K feet per turn.

oops. wrong tab.

Pilot error, very sad.

Seems she was in over her head there at HOU.

I always suspect fuel starvation when the aircraft does not
explode or burn after an impact such as that one.

It's possible that the aircraft was not topped off when refueled at Norman.

Or, she ordered fuel and it was never delivered and she did not check.

Believe it or not but pilots have done that. I know two Citation pilots
who did just that and had to divert due to low fuel on the next leg.
They were too busy trying to figure out where to have lunch to go monitor the fueling.
The fact that they were not fired over it still amazes me.
I would have fired there asses on the spot.

Regardless....The plane did not crash itself, ATC did not crash it. She crashed it.

Flying can be very safe if risks are managed.

However, it's a very unforgiving enterprise if one is careless!

I've heard of an incident where the lineman fueled the plane without the pilot present (my experience is that the majority don't bother to stay and watch), then placed the caps back on the tanks but left the locking levers sticking up (supposedly so the pilot could later check the tanks without having to fight with pulling the levers up), and the plane took off with the levers still up.  Caps blew off.  Fuel started siphoning out.  Pilot noticed the problem and diverted.  I heard the pilot blamed the lineman.


Corporate plane parked in front of the shop I used to work at.  The pilot wanted the tail nav and right wing nav bulbs replaced.  His company was a regular customer, and it was normal for little things like that to be a quick fix on our ramp and off he'd go (paperwork handled without the pilot having to do anything).  I pulled the bulbs out and confirmed they were blown, then called parts and told them what I needed.  Since I had been working on something else, and it would probably be a bit before parts brought me the bulbs, I went back to working on the other plane.  A few minutes later, I saw the pilot getting in the plane.  Didn't think much about it, until I saw him pull the cabin door up.

Walked out to the tail of the plane, reached up and grabbed the tail nav parts off of the horizonatal stab.  Then I walked over to the right wing tip and grabbed the wingtip nav parts off of the wing (we had a box of used wingtip navs in the sheetmetal shop, from doing upgrades, but used tail navs were scarce, so I grabbed the tail nav parts first).  By the time I got to the right wingtip, he had one engine running and was going through the process of starting the other one.  He noticed me grabbing parts off his wing, and shut down, then got out of the plane.

"I thought you were done."

"Nope.  I was waiting for somebody to bring me the new bulbs and didn't see any point in standing out in the sun."

"Well, I was so used to things like this being a quick fix, that I didn't ask."

"If you had done a pre-flight, you would have probably noticed the loose parts laying on the plane."

"I did a pre-flight, this morning."




ETA:  Same shop.  I was picking up my tools after putting a 172 back together in front of the same hangar.  The 172 was a rental, owned by the company I worked for.  While I was grabbing the last of my tools out of the cabin, three guys walk up.  Turned out to be an instructor (older guy, not one of our pilots) and two students.  They started putting their stuff in the plane, so I said "Oh? You guys are going to be the test pilots?"  The instructor chuckled, then continued talking to the two students, making no other indication that he had noticed I was present.  Looked like he wasn't taking the hint, so I raised my voice a bit and stated "I just finished rigging the flight controls on this plane.  If you are taking it, you are the test pilots."

The instructor started pulling his stuff back out of the plane, indicated to his students that they should do the same, and said "we'll make other plans."

So off I go to the maintenance office, winding myself up to chew out the shop manager for turning the plane back over to the flight department before I was done working on it.  He didn't know what I was talking about, and said it was still down for maintenance.

Then I walk over to the flight desk, to find out what the hell was going on.  When I get there, an old, long-time company instructor started asking me what I was doing chasing off paying customers.  The plane was still down on their board, but he had rented it out and told them it was over in front of the maintenance hangar.  During the argument that followed, one of the King Air right seat guys was just standing there with his mouth open, staring at the old instructor.  When the old instructor walked off (probably to tell the higher ups what I had done), the King Air guy said "I can't believe he did that."  I asked him if he would mind doing a test flight on a 172, he asked what I had done to the plane, what needed to be checked, if there was anything specific I wanted him to do, etc, then he did the test flight.

The old instructor was not well thought of by the company mechanics or even the avionics techs.  The head of the company's flight department was retired military aviation.  I didn't have anything to worry about, but the old instructor had worked for the company owner "since almost the beginning", so they probably listened to his rant and told him they would take care of it (by doing nothing).

ETA2:  To make the situation even more stupid, the instructor that rented out the plane while I was working on it, then argued with me about it, was the guy that wrote up that plane for having a problem with the flight controls.

The only one responsible for her fuel situation was her.  If she had declared an emergency, they would have cleared everyone out of here way and given her the runway of her choice.  She didn't do that.

Furthermore, and engine quitting doesn't result in a stall or a spin unless you keep fucking things up.

And she'd only been flying a couple of years.  I'm going to guess only a couple hundred hours and that's pretty inexperienced combined with a lot of plane.

I watched a guy take off and we noticed what looked like a vapor trail coming off the wings.

It was fuel. We told him and he came back quickly and went back to the fbo to grab his fuel caps and top off.

Way back around 1987, when I was at my first aviation job, there was a 421 that the pilot would call the FBO and give his fuel order so the plane would be out front and fueled when he got to the airport.

One day, when I had just finished fueling that plane, the owner of the FBO commented that he had never seen that pilot do a preflight, then told me to sump his tanks and check the oil.  As I recall, I had to sample each tank a few times, before I started getting a little fuel out of the drains.  One engine was five quarts low, the other was six quarts low (12 quart capacity on each engine, as I recall).  Somebody told me the pilot had years of experience as a crop duster, before he started flying twins as a part-time job.

Well, I did mean the rotation rate



My dad had a Mooney. I miss that thing



 

Wasn't it the Yankee or the Cougar that one way to break a spin was to slide the canopy back and stand up ?

Remember the kit planes Velocity iirc had a series of flat spins. One pilot rode it down into the Indian river and survived.
Supposedly it would set up a 200 fpm flat spin.

Yeah, 200fpm should be very survivable. That's not far from a normal landing descent rate. Do you mean 2000fpm?

Oh jeez

I bet you've seen a lot of pilots hop in their airplane after an annual without doing a preflight too right?

This is probably a stupid question, but has is someone is delayed from landing to their annoyance, can they declare an "emergency" and get right of way for landing? Is their shit reviewed afterward, and if it's found out they lied, they get a ticket akin to a traffic ticket, or get their pilot license suspended for XXX amount of time?

First mechanic job I had, was working on flight school planes, in the early 1990s.

Female instructor walked into the maintenance hangar, with a student in tow, and asked me to look at something.  They had found a missing access panel under the horizontal stabilizer of a 152.  I looked at it, and one screw was still there, with a small piece of the panel still attached.  I apologized, told her it was our screwup, since we had obviously forgotten to close that one panel and left it hanging by one screw (quickest way to deal with the panels, was to pull all but one screw, loosen that screw, then rotate the panel out of the way and leave it hanging during the inspection), and the airflow during flight had torn the flapping panel off.

Then I noticed which plane it was, thought for a moment, and told her that it was really strange that it had only been found then, since we had finished the 100 hour inspection on that plane 3 days earlier.  She got a bit of a shocked expression, said the plane had flown several times since then, then her face shifted to a devilish grin, and she said she knew exactly which instructors had been using it for those three days.

We had a 150 in pieces in the back of the hangar.  I pulled the access panel off of it's tail and put it on the 152, and the instructor and student continued with their lesson.  Then I went into the hangar office and told my boss what happened (including the devilish grin part).  He commented that she was probably going to give a couple male instructors some well-deserved hell over that.


I couldn't even guess how many times I've told pilots that the time they should be doing their most thorough pre-flight inspection, is when the plane just left the maintenance hangar.  Mechanics are human and occasionally make mistakes, just like pilots, but our asses are staying on the ground, while their asses are climbing in the plane and going flying.  Had at least one say that he was worried that we might get offended, if we saw him going over the plane with a fine-toothed comb.  

The mechanic I worked with wouldnt let me do that because he thought it scratched the paint if a gust of wind would come in the hangar and rattle all the hanging panels.

Good story, although none of it surprises me.

The owner of the shop I currently work at, is a pilot (no maintenance experience other than owning that shop) and is the type of pilot that gets OCD over little cosmetic stuff.  We are NOT allowed to leave any panels hanging.  We have roll-around shelves that are labeled with the tail number of the plane they are currently being used for, and which section of the plane a particular shelf is for (left wing, right wing, tail...).  Each panel is marked by putting a piece of painter's masking tape on the panel, then writing on it to identify where it came from (another piece of tape goes on the plane, next to the opening that the panel came from, with identical writing on it).  Hardware is bagged and place on the shelf with the panels.

So when a gust of wind comes through the hangar (or the owner of the company fires up a plane and spins it around in front of the hangar), the panels get blown off the shelves and go flying across the hangar floor.  Then we get to pick them up and put them back on the shelves.


Nobody cared about a few paint scratches on the flight school planes.

Yes,  yes there is.

It's easier to be honest and work with people than to be deceptive.

Without a union, private pilots are hosed with it comes to the FAA.  Use to work at Palomar airport many decades ago and seen it all the time. Commercial pilots and military get much slack compared to private pilots.

Examples I've seen include two harriers came on the airport just south of the runaway while a Grumman (American iirc) was on approach with clearance.  The harriers released they were not at Camp Pendleton, and took off across the runway.  The private pilot came in to file a compliant while a controller was trying to convince him not to.  He said fuck to that and pointed out if he made that kind of a mistake, he would lose his license.

,
I have never had to fill out any type of ATC paperwork for declaring an emergency.  (except once the local airport security guard needed a "what happened" form)

Always, thoroughly inspect an aircraft after maintenance.  I flew a learjet a few months ago that was fresh out of maintenance, enroute we kept hearing a funny whooshing noise.  I always do a post flight walk around and noticed a puddle of hydraulic fluid under the aft bay.  when I opened it, here is the picture I took.  My fo had inspected the aft bay, he was a sharp guy who I trusted.  We had to have a come to Jesus meeting that evening.  (That is the cap to the hydraulic resevoir, there was no fluid left it was amazing that we had brakes.  A brand new mechanic almost lost his job over that also)

Not the way it works

I don't blame ATC. They are not the final authority. This was a mismatch of money, skill and mission, and now a plantiffs attorney is looking for a living pocketbook.

All the information in the world but no SA. Imagine teaching someone steam gauges who has only flown that.