Posted: 10/25/2008 12:48:48 PM EDT
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My ex-wife started taking flying lessons about the time our divorce started and she got her license shortly before our divorce was final, later that same year. Yesterday afternoon, she narrowly escaped injury in the aircraft she was piloting when she was forced to make an emergency landing in Southern Tennessee because of bad weather. Thank God our kids were with me at the Beach House this weekend. The NTSB issued a preliminary report, citing pilot error: Annie was flying a single engine aircraft in IFR (instrument flight rating) conditions while only having obtained a VFR (visual flight rating). The absence of a post-crash fire was likely due to insufficient fuel on board. No one on the ground was injured. Photographs below were taken at the scene, show the extent of damage to her aircraft. She was very lucky.   |
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Judging from the photo that appears to be a Nimbus-666. There is an AD against them regarding flight in known icing. IIRC, the AD states the -666 rapidly becomes unstable with the accumulation of any amount of ice. Most of the NTSB reports indicate that once the aircraft becomes unstable the boom fails about midlength (where the flight deck is located). The aircraft appears to be intact. Unusual. I'd say you were pretty unlucky.  |
then i was like 
everyone is ok, then i got to the pic and 
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Quoted:
Judging from the photo that appears to be a Nimbus-666. There is an AD against them regarding flight in known icing. IIRC, the AD states the -666 rapidly becomes unstable with the accumulation of any amount of ice. Most of the NTSB reports indicate that once the aircraft becomes unstable the boom fails about midlength (where the flight deck is located). The aircraft appears to be intact. Unusual. I'd say you were pretty unlucky.
If we took a cross section of the mid-boom region, I would hazard a guess that it was cryogenically stabilized and possibly hyper cooled by intimate contact to some surface significantly colder than the surrounding air / ice. Cursory examination of the boom material may lead to assumptions that it is in "normal" condition, but it may be tempered to a state of unexpected brittleness. Alternatively, if the flight orientation was near vertical (using the aft cabin straddle insertion position), the operator may have taken the brunt of the atmospheric cooling, leaving the aircraft in undamaged but unsavory condition. 
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