Accident Review Las Vegas C310R

[Music] today on flywire we're going to review the recent crash of a twin cessna 310 r model it departed north las vegas and was trying to divert to henderson airport after an engine failure i don't think it's as simple as you might think on the surface so stick with us on flywire [Music] hi i'm scott purdue and today on flywire we're going to review the crash of a twin cessna 310r in southwest las vegas in late october 2020. when i originally heard of this accident of course there wasn't much accurate data out there but now that the ntsb preliminary report is out uh there's also footage from a security camera that is significant i think and really changes the character of this particular accident data is important vast aviation vas aviation on youtube has done a really nice job at tracing the atc radar and radio exchanges of the event they did a video on it and i'm going to use some of their video on this video and i'll put a link below to the video and i suggest you go there and watch it and watch other stuff on their channel they do a really great job and you should check them out so this pilot was from san diego and he operated two businesses one was a real estate firm and the other was a part 135 air taxi business called air charter express apparently he had been operating the air taxi business since approximately 1993 and he appears to have flown that 310 pretty much the whole time so he was an experienced pilot he had flown to north las vegas airport the day before the mishap and on 29 october he departed kvgt that's north las vegas at zero uh 929 ish intending to return to k-s-e-e gillespie field in san diego the airplane departed from north las vegas on one-two right at about 928 local time so a little bit earlier uh the takeoff and subsequent handoff to departure did not highlight anything abnormal until the pilot checked in with departure so let's watch a little of that video right here one zero one golf las vegas departure twin cessna one zero one golf two thousand eight hundred and having a two two zero we'd now like to go to henderson one zero one golf loss thanks to prototypes mccarran altimeter three zero two one three zero two one pulling off your radar contact one mile south of north las vegas you're slightly broken did you say something about henderson a perimeter like to change our destination to henderson remember zero and golf roger so the tower directs one-on-one golf to switch to departure at 29-28 and at 29-32 the pilot checks in with departure and requests a diversion to henderson in his first sentence what's important to note is is the pilot makes no mention of the engine problem presumably the left engine had failed at this point prompting the pilot to decide to divert to henderson he changed his plan he wouldn't go to san diego and what is unknown is just when that engine failed i'm hoping that ntsb nails that down but it's not actually important to the accident itself but given that only four seconds pass between acknowledging the switch from tower and checking on departure with his diversion plan it is highly unlikely that the engine failed engine it is highly likely that the engine failed before the radio switch and frankly within about a half mile the runway the first red flag that goes this is the first red flag goes up for me this in my view is a serious mistake the second red flag is the pilot did not declare an emergency with the departure controller his tone and his demeanor on the radio was that everything was copacetic and he just wanted to fly to south las vegas instead of san diego frankly this is a serious problem and we're going to talk about it in more detail in a minute but from the radio exchange it does not appear that the flight was conducted as an ifr flight kind of important here the controller didn't issue headings and altitudes and he directed the pilot to stay clear of class bravo airspace and avoid mccarran airspace that's class delta it's five mile circle around the airport itself for toward airport the issue is that if the flight was ifr then the controller would have been very directive about headings and altitudes and things like that and he would have been tuned into this unusual request that was different from the flight plan november is there one golf i need you to remain outside of bravo air space you can't turn that way that's uh right in the karen's traps area okay 1-0 for a vfr flight he just wanted the airplane to stay out of conflict with his ifr traffic stay out of it stay out of the controlled airspace so totally understandable from the controller's point of view he did not know there was an emergency he can't define what the pilot's thinking you can tell by the flight path that the airplane did avoid mccarran somewhat but he did not stay clear of class bravo surprisingly the airplane flew a five nautical mile arc around the mccarran class delta and it was until almost six minutes into the flight that the pilot first mentions that he had to shut an engine down it sounded a little like he was getting nervous at this point departure twin cessna one zero one golf with a chance to direct to henderson we have to shut down one engine zero in golf uh yeah you can see direct tennis in your discretion and uh contact tower now one two five point one twenty five one four one zero one dollars at this point but he still did not declare an emergency after asking permission from the controller to turn direct to henderson he did that and then the airplane but here's the thing the airplane never climbed above 2900 feet and as it turned south southeast it began a gradual decent presumably the pilot didn't intended to stay below mccarran outbound traffic by staying at 700 foot agl that's above ground level on a slide around las vegas to me that's another red flag at 9 30 1 30 the pilot turned towards henderson during the portion of the flight around mccarran he had held his airspeed very close to 117 knots within a couple either way and when he turned uh south his speed dropped off to 91 knots when he started descending the winds were 2-1-0 at three knots and frankly the winds were not a large factor in this accident or in changing his ground speed the airplane uh descended an average of 185 feet per minute for the next two minutes and 45 seconds it also slowed from 115 knots to 86 knots in the time just prior to the crash and 15 seconds before the crash the airplane was approximately 100 feet above the ground and the last hit was at 80 knots this is another red flag take a look at this video this video is from a bystander and it shows the airplane passed very close passed by very close to the ground and you can clearly see the left prop stopped it's undetermined that video is not clear enough to see whether it's feathered or not from the sound as the airplane sounded the good engine as the airplane passes by the observer it does not appear that the right engine the only one producing power was turning at a very high rpm at this point the airplane was it was at 86 knots it continued slowing and within eight seconds the airplane was 80 knots just as he was passing that that bystander the stall speed for this airplane for the 310 is 79 knots more importantly the vmc or minimum control speed for the cessna 310r is 80 knots and what this speed means is that it is the minimum speed at which the flight controls have enough authority to maintain directional control with one engine in operative and one at full power the last ads b hit was at 9 38 16 and just above ground level and he was at 80 knots the airplane was at 80 knots i want to show this video this this one here this is the security video that i mentioned before it's hard to see the airplane i'll admit that but you can see it and you can see it traveling easterly in a shallow descent you can see the airplane roll to the left and with an increasing rate continue to roll ending up nose low upside down before it disappears from view that's that intervening uh building and then the fireball appears right after the impact this was a vmc roll not a stall with the ending didn't land under control with the power on only one engine the airplane will roll into the dead engine below vmc and the only way to recover from a vmc role is to reduce power on the good engine lower the nose to gain gain air speed the vmc role in recovery is performed in training in the multi for the multi-engine certificate as a standalone event so everybody's done multi has done it but frankly without putting it into context and training to it regularly i think a pilot would be uh hard-pressed to correctly recover from a vmc departure and close to the ground all bets are off okay because you don't have that altitude to trade for airspeed it's gruesome to watch this video and know that two human beings just perished in that airplane but frankly we can't turn a blind eye we can't say that one of these days we'll know what happened and frankly without a cockpit recorder we'll never know what was going on in that cockpit we'll never be able to define what the pilot was actually thinking what is important is for us to find the lessons we can learn from this mishap why the engine failed is not important it did what's really important is what happens next okay i think we can learn some very important lessons from that and maybe just maybe it'll save a few lives so let's look at the red flags if you remember the first red flag for this mishap is the engine failure after takeoff when the pilot checked in with a departure controller he has to go directly to henderson this happened only seconds after vegas tower north las vegas tower switched them to departure the demeanor and radio calls again were calm and unhurried but if the that the engine failure had to have occurred within that mile mile half a mile of the vgt runway the prudent choice would have been to stay with tower and land immediately a simple right turn which is into the good engine and it would have been a downwind for one-two ride with another right turn to line up and he had been on the ground in seconds in seconds but from what i can tell about the speed and the altitude from the edsb data the airplane performance was did not appear to be severely degraded and therefore i think the left prop was probably feathered we don't know that ntsb will probably tell us that in their final when they examine the airplane so the straight-line distance between north las vegas and henderson is 15 miles right pretty much right over mccarran and the path 101 golf flu was approximately 20 miles and just over 12 minutes of flying device a little less than eight uh between if he went straight to henderson the issue is that the right engine failed within a mile of a perfectly good airport he already had dealt with the engine failure and had come up with a plan to divert to henderson when he talked to departure to the departure controller maybe he wasn't even thinking about mccarran airspace being in the way i don't know why he didn't just land at north las vegas i don't know the safest bet all around was to land at the nearest airport and if it ever happens to you and you're flying a multi and this happens land at the nearest airport uh the second red flag here possibly reveals what was going on going through the pilot's mind okay listen to that radio call again one zero one golf las vegas departure twin cessna 101 golf 2 800 and having a 2-2-0 we'd now like to go to henderson he's not excited okay it makes me wonder if he does regular engine out practice with the failed engine set at zero thrust i think he does because he's it's not a big deal he's done it a hundred times but we don't i don't know that but i'm speculating while the training is a good idea it can also lead to a false sense of what the reality will be with a real engine failure to the pilot's mind this was obviously not a problem handled before from my perspective this is a serious problem this pilot knew he had a problem but he decided not to declare an emergency okay what was the downside to declaring an emergency worst case you're gonna have to write a letter to the faa describing the event and that's it an engine failure easily rises to the level of a bona fide emergency definitely in a single but i think also in a multi the best thing about the declaration is is that it gives you priority and pretty much means you can do whatever you need to do to safely land the airplane i've got a b-25 emergency story that i was going to tell in this video right here but and it happened right here in las vegas but i realized that i'm going to go run long so i'm going to let that i'm going to tell that story in a video that i'm going to do right after this one so check back with flywear for that story shortly about a week as long as you don't act recklessly and endanger others you get cover when you declare an emergency no big deal and a twin engine airplane with only one it's one engine turning i'd say your marginally controllable position time is not on your side declare an emergency line as soon as possible this is not a hit on you as a pilot okay it's more of a kudos for judgment for taking care of a serious situation the next thing that stands out to me here is the altitude the mishap airplane flew here is where declaring an emergency would have happened would have helped okay he could have climbed to a good altitude call it 4000 feet or better 3000 feet above the ground that would have been my choice following the path the pilot shows of course i wouldn't have done that altitude equals options okay if the operating engine starts stacked up then you can trade altitude for time in the air to sort things out in this case the pilot began a descent when he turned to intercept a straight in course to the henderson runway perhaps in his mind he normally starts a decent when he does that i don't know he did start the decent but doing that when he was only 700 feet above the ground and four miles from the run runway that was a terribly bad idea in my experience with engine failures in twin engine airplanes is that once you are stabilized you can maintain altitude at a reduced air speed but once you begin to descend you cannot regain that altitude easily and you're going to put a lot of stress on the engine to try to get back up to that altitude always a problem always a risk so if the engine was acting up and he could not maintain altitude it speaks directly to bypassing two good airports first with north las vegas and the second was mccarran with emergency authority he could have landed at mccarran okay the controller didn't want you there i don't care it's the safest thing for me that's where i'm going by flying straight ahead and make if he flew straight ahead and made a slight right turn he'd been on short final round 1-9 right just a little bit longer of a flight time than if he landed in north las vegas he bypassed two perfectly good landing opportunities that would have involved minimal flying time all of this would have required the pilot to take command i want to put that in quotes command of the situation this is a footstopper here the emergency declaration would have given them the authority and the priority to execute a plan to land safely it would have communicated the dire situation to all involved no questions including the pilot's own mindset and that's the key here his perception of what's going on in the situation he was in the action the pilot took he actually took constituted danger to himself his passengers and all the pilots i mean all the people sorry that were below him on his flight path to the south southeast i guarantee you that chuck yeager and sully would have declared an emergency in this situation and most importantly they would not have given up the only energy they had to play with until they didn't need it anymore altitude was mismanaged in this mishap in my mind no question don't make that same mistake okay the last red flag in this mishap chain was the handling of the airplane itself put yourself in the pilot seat for the last few minutes of flight for whatever reason once the descent was started the pilot began slowing his airspeed perhaps this was an unconscious reaction to getting closer to the ground i don't want to go there so you keep pulling back uh perhaps it was a problem with the remaining operating engine you know it doesn't really matter and the first bystander video the engine does not seem to be making full power if it was capable of doing so the pilot was flying into the proverbial box canyon the slower he got the less power you could use remember vmc but at the same time the lower he got the more power he needed that's the square corner he was built himself so how do you like that for two two sayings here put that in my my vocab session there but what is apparent frankly is that the second security in that second security camera video as the pilot tried to stay in the air by training irrespective speed for altitude until the laws of physics caught up with them and resulted in a vmc role induced departure okay it's like likely that the pilot had not thought this problem through and if you were in that seat what would you have done commonly this is the vmc role and a realistic scenario is not done in training after you've gotten your ticket your multi-engine ticket but there's no way to add energy back into into this airplane and stay in the air there's no way to make that measly four miles to henderson you don't have altitude you can't use the power your only choice was to make i think your only choice was to make a forced landing and hope for the best one thing in the pilot's favor at this point uh as to earlier was that in front of him uh there he could have had a lot of areas he could you choose to do a landing spot it was the desert there's big roads you know stuff like that unlike the rest of the busy populated las vegas uh town that he had just flown over the problem here is that the pilot was not prepared to change his plan of action he had determined in his mind early boom i'm just going to fly to henderson without really thinking about the logistics of that and how long it would take and and other things like that and that in his mind that was his only option the energy bucket was rapidly running out and was not going to allow land to get henderson that's the reality of this accident very quickly he had to change the plan and land where he was his mind could not accept the reality he was faced with and he just kept pressing with his plan until he lost control and i already told you about the laws of physics so anyway the cardinal rule here is that the pilot violated the cardinal rule that the pilot violated was that he did not fly the airplane all the way to the ground he did not take command of the situation he did not come up with a viable plan communicate it and execute it land as soon as possible land in control don't give up your altitude until you have to declare an emergency take priority take command and do what is required to get safely back on the ground remember a previous video i talked about in line in the airplane in this situation it doesn't have to be reusable but the objective is to get you on the ground so you are i hope you enjoyed the video and you can incorporate some lessons learned so it doesn't happen to you fly safe stay ahead of the airplane and most importantly stay in command that's why you get paid the big bucks right so if you like the video give me a like hit the subscribe button you can find it down there it's there that's kind of what it looks like and hit the bell also if you like notifications the next video if you'd like to support the channel i'll put a link to flower patreon page down below i really appreciate that it helps me do these videos and i just want to say thank you to my patreon supporters here i appreciate your supporting me and uh watch for a couple other patreon only uh videos i'm going to put out just making the next video hang on to my b hang on for my b25 engine out las vegas story i think you're going to enjoy it it speaks exactly i think to what happened to this session 310. thanks for watching and we'll see you next time on flywire click this link for the latest upload click this link for whatever youtube thinks you ought to watch or you can click this link to subscribe thanks for watching

Channel: FlyWire- scott perdue

Views: 171,134

Keywords: ATP, Accident review las vegas, Acrobatics, Aerobatic Bonanza, Aerobatics, Aviation, C310R crash las vegas, F33 Bonanza, F33C, Flying, Flywire, V35 Bonanza, accident review, accident review C310R, airplane audio, atc, beechcraft bonanza, blancolirio, blancolirio latest, cessna 310, cessna 310 crash, cessna crash, cfi, commercial pilot, flying an airplane, flying vlog, flywire online, flywire youtube, general aviation, pilot, private pilot, scott perdue, travel, travel by plane

Id: upd21upoCk8

Length: 22min 52sec (1372 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 28 2020