Accident Review The Day the Music Died

[Music] today on flywire we're going to talk about a famous accident that most folks don't know was airplane related so stick with the sun flywire [Music] hi i'm scott purdue and today on flywire we're going to talk about a bonanza mishap that occurred a long long time ago in 1971 don mclean released a song called american pie it was really popular when i was in high school and to be honest i've always loved the song i've been i've been known even the second off key every now and again but for years i never knew what it meant or what it was about and you know like a lot of songs there's a lot of symbolism and the allegory frankly was lost on me at the time but fundamentally it's about a loss of innocence a traditional story theme of course that runs throughout there's only a few basic topics that run throughout human stories but that's one of them but this video isn't about the song let me tell you about the back story on 2 february 1959 buddy holly was at clear lake iowa on day 11 of a winter tour from frozen hell holly's band and two supporting acts had been booked on a 24 on 24 gigs every night for 24 days straight in the midwest bouncing back and forth wasn't well planned they'd be passing places they were going and who knows but it was cold it was below freezing and after a show they typically slept on the bus on the way to another reportedly the temperatures varied from 20 degrees fahrenheit to minus 36 f and you know for a texas boy frankly that's on the cold side these are not the nice rock and roll buses of today they were old worn out school buses and by day 11 the tour was actually on its fifth bus after many many breakdowns several of the group had come down with colds and flu and one of holly's band members even had frostbite on his feet from riding on the bus or being stuck while it's broken so not it was not a good time so at this point halfway through the tour holly wanted to get some rest and get off that dang bus so he charted an airplane from jerry dewire at madison mason city iowa the charter cost almost a thousand bucks in today's money really not bad for a charter but the next gig was moorhead minnesota 360 files 365 miles away makes total sense right get a head start and maybe sleep in a warm bed before the bus gets there and you know there are all kinds of stories about how the passengers ended up on the airplane and i'm not going to get into any of that but to put it simply the pilot was roger peterson the passengers were buddy holly richie valens and jp the big bopper richardson two of those folks were from texas the airplane was a 1947 straight 35 bonanza november 3794 november here's an interesting twist my dad who had been a pilot marine corps in world war ii was in college in the late 40s in oklahoma and he earned extra money by flying charters first in a staggering beach and then a straight 35 bonanza just like this one it was brand new at the time he did not have an instrument rating in that doing all that the military issued instrument cards and he had not qualified for one before he mustered out oh and uh you know back in those days they did not landings using flares that they dropped to eliminate the runway uh pretty amazing anyway roger peterson the pilot had recently married his high school sweetheart at least that's what i understand she was his high school sweetheart and he was only 21 years old and he wanted to fly professionally he had a total of 711 hours and a commercial license and back in those days you did not need to have an instrument rating to pilot a flight like this one today if you do not possess an instrument rating your commercial is restricted to a 50 mile radius daytime only peterson had 128 hours in bonanzas and was reportedly anxious to fly as much as possible so he could move up to the airlines that was his goal he had 52 hours of instrument training but not in the mishap airplane interestingly peterson had failed a check ride for his instrument rating nine months previously i don't know how much training he'd done in that intervening time and i don't know why he failed there are many reasons that could have happened we just don't know to make this flight peterson had to have vfr conditions in fact the dwyer flying service was only approved for vfr operations and the weather on 2 february was 3 000 overcast about the time of takeoff six miles visibility in light snow and the winds were from the south at 20 gusts 30. there are reports that the weather briefing peterson received were incomplete and he did not know of deteriorating conditions along his planned route but frankly i'm not sure that was a significant threat to this flight as it happened you'll see what i mean i mean here in just a second but one thing is for sure that the clouds were low and this was going to be a very dark and turbulent night 20 gusts 30 is pretty high don't forget that this was in 1959 that this was 1959 and about the only lights at night were on the ground around big cities and those are rare a kilowatt of electricity cost over 17 bucks in today's money in 59. i think that's that's at least that's what i worked out and ready kilowatt had not fully electrified 98 of rural america until the mid 70s the bottom line is there were no lights in the country for this flight with low clouds no moon no stars no lights on the ground it must have been like flying into a sock but to be sure the clouds and the visibility met the vfr minimums and with some very high profile passengers in a hurry to get going i imagine the pressure would have been enormous on roger peterson the plane took off at 12 55 a.m on three february real early in the morning and jerry dwyer reported that he watched the takeoff from runway 17. the airplane turned 180 degrees to the left and flying just east of the mason city airport and at approximately 100 feet or so he turned to the northwest and set course for fargo north north dakota which was the nearest airport to the holly's destination dwyer reported that he observed the tail light throughout the flight and then it started to gradually descend until he could no longer see it and then attempted to contact the flight on the radio to no avail after daylight dwyer used another airplane to trace the route and at 9 35 in the morning he found the wreckage six miles northwest of the airport in a frozen cornfield hadn't gotten very far pretty much just after he saw the light disappeared is probably when it hit the ground investigators at the time determined that the airplane impacted the terrain about 170 miles an hour and a steep bank to the right it struck the ground right wingtip first and then cartwheeled across 540 feet coming to rest against a fence holley and valens were found near the wreckage and had been thrown from the records and richardson had been thrown into the next cornfield just where it was going uh peterson was found inside what remained of the cockpit so how how did this mishap occur what happened to the pilot that he lost control of the airplane so quickly to begin with he had not stacked the deck in his favor a takeoff at 1 am into what amounted to 0-0 conditions was not good judgment it's very likely that the pilot was fatigued and pressed with a lot of that the righteous got to do it got to get it done and this particular bonanza was not the one that he has he had his instrument training in so there's a familiarity factor here as well when the pressure's on and there's no way to know what his night flying currency is there's no record of that now one thing that strikes me is the similarities between this accident and the kobe bryant helicopter mishap in both cases a non-current one had administered rating and on the the other one had training but they were both non-current uh pressed into instrument conditions and they both lost control due to spatial disorientation you know lots of weird things can happen to your body when you degrade your visual references and then experience 3d accelerations with a balance system you know it's pretty amazing our inner ear but it only works reliably when you're connected to the ground after that we need help to stay oriented we're human we can overcome some of our shortcomings by strict adherence to protocol flyer instruments believe your instruments have a good cross check all that kind of stuff but also in this protocol protocol for this fateful flight would have been the get on the instruments immediately prior to the first turn to prevent disorientation or ameliorated this pilot made two disorienting turns in a very dark conditions and very turbulent air he was not exactly prepared for success and we'll never know whether the pilot you know of kobe's helicopter tried to get on instruments but he could not ignore the sensations in his brain but in peterson's case we know the same situation faced him we know that some we also know something else that is critical uh and a good lesson learned for all of us going forward and i'm sure that he used it here as part of this problem the door to spatial orientation is open when we do something different and we try to rush through it that was the case in this 35 bonanza peterson had taken his training with a new style of attitude indicator and that was to become standard for deck it was become standard for decades and this is let me get one real quick and i'll show you okay so that's what i get for not preflighting my visual aids so this is not exactly like the horizon the artificial horizon that peterson had in his instrument training but was very close this is a little bit of an updated version of it but you can see that there's color brown down here where the ground is and there's blue up here where the sky is kind of matches our interpretation of that and then a white horizon line it's got little pitch markers and it's got bank markers all the way around so it actually does a pretty good job of telling you where you are okay of course this isn't turned on so it's not going to be a super but the gyroscope is showing us what's happening so you can see here's a bank to the right and we can see what a decent would it look like that little little dot would be the nose of the airplane and the yellow lines there would be the wings and um so there he is this is the unusual attitude he finds himself in there's the sky there's the ground the air speed should have been increasing okay so and the altimeter is decreasing course he didn't have a lot of time because he wasn't much more than 800 feet above the ground so what he should have done was got on the gauges and rolled out and then pulled back up to uh level flight okay that's more like the uh the device that he trained with but what happened was is that airplane was actually equipped with this this is a spirey sperry f3 j attitude gyro it's enormous it's very heavy and this this thing was actually developed through jimmy doolittle and you know basically invented and then developed the early uh flying uh and non-reference you know by instruments and sperry was the company that did all that but as you can see this is the same kind of display there's a little airplane and there's the bank pointer and see if i get it here that as you can see is the horizon uh the horizon line but there's no nothing to tell you that this is the ground and that's the sky major problem i pulled this out of an old vintage airplane and frankly i would not fly instruments on this because i'm a wimp i like just like a turn coordinator i don't have any confidence in my ability to fly that as a as a reference you know for an emergency situation i don't want to fly this is a primary reference either because uh man it takes an awful lot of concentration to say what's direct what what's up and what's down okay nothing's really helping you out here this is minimal but this is what he transitioned to so try to you learn on this and you try to transition to the sperry all in a matter of a few seconds that is a recipe for disaster but you know real pilots in the old days they used to fly by needle ball and air speed you know better than me which is like trying to balance on the head of a blunt pen okay it appears to me and i'm sorry to say it but this pilot suffered from overconfidence and a hacker mentality and i'd be willing to bet that each and every one of you including me has suffered from these same things but we're lucky enough not to have to pay to the price okay we're watching this we haven't paid the price some folks have even recently he broke my important rule this isn't rule number one someday i'll tell you what rule number one is but you know you've heard this one before it's uh it's close to the top it's don't do anything dumb different or dangerous okay and then here's here's another saying for you as long as we're on this is time to spare go by air that's the situation here for peterson what he should have faced is don't be afraid to cancel or delay if the conditions aren't right he's not up to the conditions they're bad even for an expert a well-qualified experienced one he's not ready judge every flight by the inherent risks in the operation and try to mitigate every risk you can before you commit aviation for peterson the best course of action probably would have been should have been to wait until daybreak and then see how things are and press then remember how the music made you smile okay i had to throw that in a little bit of a pun there and max of mize your chances for a successful flight i hope you enjoyed this video for me it was an interesting journey to trying to put myself in peterson's place with that dang f3 gyro crazy this mishap occurred 61 years ago but the proximate cause is as fresh as yesterday for one i plan on avoiding situations like this and i hope you do too i appreciate you watching this video and i'd like you to subscribe and hit like those things really help me out it's the whole youtube algorithm all that kind of crap the subscribe and notification bell look like this i'll put it right over here and if you don't like it well i'm sorry but you know this is my take on a serious problem that faces each of us as pilots and i think it's important that we talk about things like this i'd love to hear your comments too there but for the grace of god any one of us could go so write me and tell me we've been having some really good stories from folks on uh on the comments on the video so i appreciate that if you'd like to support the channel on patreon i'll leave a link in the description below and i'd like to thank my supporters i really appreciate that it helps me do all these videos 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: 294,739

Rating: 4.9372816 out of 5

Keywords: Accident Review The Day the Music Died, Flying, Flywire, accident, air crash investigation, airplane crash investigation, beechcraft bonanza, blancolirio, buddy holly, buddy holly crash, buddy holly documentary, buddy holly plane crash, buddy holly plane crash documentary, buddy holly plane crash simulation, commercial pilot, flight training, flying an airplane, flying at night, flywire online, flywire youtube, general aviation, music, music died, spatial disorientation crash

Id: QX555dxBQz0

Length: 17min 13sec (1033 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 15 2020