AIRCRASH Investigation: LOC, MIDAIR, and Taxing

well guys sometimes things go wrong in airplanes and as we all know sometimes things go really really wrong in airplanes now also true to that is things don't always have to go this way typically it's not the airplane's problem it's our problem a problem with the pilot that causes this to happen in the first place so today we're going to have a not so fun discussion about some accidents that happened try to figure out what exactly happened and most importantly try to figure out a few different things that we can do as pilots to mitigate the risk of this ever happening to us or our friends so first up let's take a look at this accident that occurred in clearwater florida we have a piper arrow and a robinson r 22 helicopter it's pretty obvious what happened here the helicopter's landing and well the arrow wanted to land at the exact same time and that doesn't work out so well now what's the back story here well we have a flight instructor and a student pilot receiving a flight review in the helicopter and according to them they made all their radio calls as they were flying around the traffic pattern staying in the traffic pattern for runway 3-4 then you have the aeropilot who recalls hearing something about runway 3-4 kind of garbled kind of a not very clear radio transmission and then he went ahead and made a call for downwind on runway 34 quickly turned base and then proceeded to land now what about what actually happened it's hard to always know but there was another pilot on frequency that said they heard the radio calls coming from the helicopter announcing their position but never heard a radio call announcing the position or intentions from the aeropilot from the piper pilot in the fixed-wing airplane now what are our takeaways here how do we prevent this from happening to us well something is simple to start with as make sure that windshield is clean it's a rental airplane that this guy is using for the piper arrow so it's actually a pretty nice rental airplane i rented it a couple times when i was living in florida but that windshield lives outside the airplane lives outside on the ramp it's probably not super clean super crystal clear if it's not clear enough for you to see through and see other traffic well perhaps you don't want to fly it in the first place or maybe you need to spend a little extra time on your preflight cleaning that windshield simple little things like that clean your side windows inside and out clean your windshield or your windscreen inside and out make sure that your radio calls are actually going through to other pilots are they reacting to you at all when you make a radio call do you make a radio call and prompt somebody else to make one or do you make a radio call and then you let go of the mic and somebody else is making one at the same time you're like man they stepped on me did they step on you or did your call never go through in the first place so they just went ahead and jumped on the frequency when they thought it was open is it a little t on the radio actually lining up do you actually hear the side tone in your headset is that actually working when you press the push to talk maybe the push-to-talk's not working all those different things try to use that sixth sense to see if there's anything that could be impacting communication and determine is communication actually happening between you and the other pilots in the pattern or are you just talking out into space and no one's really listening to you and no one really knows where everyone's at another thing we can do is be aware that helicopters are very difficult to see they have a very small cross section relative to airplanes and their wings are not stationary they're spinning around real fast and they're pretty much invisible to us with our naked eye so we can't see their wings we can see this tiny little cross section of a kind of a fuselage or whatever you want to call the little bubble and canopy they're sitting in but it's tiny relative to us and they kind of blend in with all the other noise and busyness around the airport especially if we're coming in from above them so if you're flying around the traffic pattern in a piper arrow and there's a helicopter making all these radio calls and you're not 100 sure where exactly the helicopter's at well you probably should not approach the land until you know where exactly where they're at you might want to fly your airplane into a place you know they won't be at and you might want to establish clear communication with that helicopter or with whatever other traffic there is to figure out exactly where they are before you proceed any further this seems to be one of those cases where little things go a long way making sure you have a clean windshield making radio calls and ensuring communication is clear between all the pilots in the pattern and even little things like hey i haven't heard anyone talk in a while should i pull my squelch off really quick and see if my volume's actually turned to an appropriate level if the helicopter had actually made all those radio calls on the traffic pattern reporting crosswind and downwind and base and final well it's probably unlikely that anyone would miss four radio calls you might miss one but probably not four other little things like make sure you're not listening to music make sure your headset's plugged in all the way checking that volume and just doing basic things to ensure you have clear communication among you and all the other pilots and at the end of the day this is a scene avoid case be aware that it's difficult to see helicopters it's difficult to see any obstacles when you're approaching to land even if you do scan the entire area always remain vigilant and always assume that somebody could pull out at any moment or there could be other obstacles that you need to watch out for never be in a position where you get complacent and just assume i'm the only one out here it's all my runway i don't have to look for anything that might bite you one day now at the end of the day we're not placing blame on anyone here for this accident luckily it worked out pretty well and everyone went home just fine it could have been a lot worse certainly but at the end of the day just think about what you're going to do differently or possibly in addition to what you already do to ensure that something like this wouldn't happen to you that no one's going to run over you in the traffic pattern which has happened to me almost before when i've been flying slow airplanes and people don't hear my radio calls don't see me and seem to run right over me perhaps it's my fault for hearing them coming in and approaching the traffic pattern but not insuring and not watching them and making sure that they actually know where i am that they're hearing my reader calls and they're reacting to them if i call up and say i'm on final and somebody else calls up immediately after that and says they're going to depart the runway maybe they heard and saw me maybe they didn't maybe i need to make another radio call and ensure we're both on the same page and know that they're going to be taking off very quickly and out of my way or maybe they didn't hear me or see me and they're going to stop and hold short for me and wait for me to come in and land so establish that clear communication think about what you can do in addition to what you already do to make sure that you'll maintain situational awareness in the traffic pattern and at all phases of flight next up we have what looks like a beautiful day to go fly great weather birds are chirping and the only thing missing is enough gas in your tank to be legal for your vfr fuel reserves so as a responsible pilot you fire up complete that checklist and then taxi at 20 miles an hour down the ramp over to that fuel pump so you can quickly fuel up and go fly your airplane what are the problems with that well personally i like to recommend a taxi speed around five miles an hour that's slow enough that you can keep your eyes outside be aware of what's going on in front of you to the side of you perhaps even behind you and all around you to make sure that if something's about to run across the runway like a deer or an animal a car or another airplane or run out in front of you on the taxiway you can come to a stop pretty easily and have enough time and if you ever did impact anything well that's going to be a pretty benign impact you can see these guys coming right at each other and once on a tailwheel airplane with not great visibility taxing along at a decent clip 10 probably plus 10 miles per hour then you have the cessna coming along at again over 10 miles an hour and from his right where it's not super visible at the last moment he sees them tries to turn because you know he can't stop quick enough and they hit each other this could be really bad you have two big blenders spinning around and those blenders tend to chew up metal and human pieces too if they contact somebody so that would be a terrible thing luckily this one worked out all right it just meant metal metal can be fixed and replaced you can't replace people we have a separate video about this whole idea which is taxi slow taxi with your eyes outside the airplane maintain situational awareness at all times and if for any reason you ever have to look inside the airplane or take your attention from outside the aircraft and bring it inside well then come to a complete stop before doing so we put together this little video where we see what happens when somebody pays attention to the ipad too much and is looking inside the airplane messing with the squat code messing with the transponder and the radios getting the awos or the atis as they're taxing out looking inside and then not looking outside and seeing bob standing right in front of the airplane it didn't work out so well for bob or bob's family unfortunately bob got chewed up by the propeller and the pilot feels really really bad about it this is a simple thing to avoid you can say well nobody got hurt you know and this is common sense right you know don't run into each other on the taxiway it happens all too easy these guys that did this aren't beginner pilots these aren't student pilots these are experienced pilots it happens to the best of us slow down a little bit take a little extra time make sure you're maintaining situational awareness whose fault is it that this happened it's everyone's fault you can't take blame away now obviously somebody was already on the taxiway and had a tailwheel airplane and couldn't see that well over the nose and somebody else entered the taxiway in front of them doesn't matter always be alert for somebody cutting you off and always slow down take your time so you don't turn out being a big jerk and cutting someone off and causing damage to your airplane and theirs it's as simple as take your time slow things down if you're in a rush well forget about flying flying's not for you if you want to go somewhere fast then buy a ticket on the airlines if you want to fly your own machine through the air and be a safe professional pilot slow things down a little bit take advantage of this one phase of flight where we actually have a pause button there's no pause button when you're flying through the air you keep flying until you crash you have to fly the airplane when you're on the ground we have a pause button we can press on the brakes come to a stop get caught up maintain situational awareness there's no reason to ever be in a rush keep it slow safe and save yourself a lot of embarrassment now comes the way less fun part of this case study we're going to take a look at some video here of a few people dying when they hit the ground we're going to take a look at some video here of a few people walking away limping away getting hurt when they hit the ground and we're gonna look at the differences between the two two cases that were fatal two cases that weren't all four of them stall spin accidents stalls and spins have been happening ever since people first started flying airplanes every single one of them is avoidable it never has to happen but each one of them is caused by us as pilots it's not the airplane doing anything wrong here perhaps the airplane does something not quite right that might lead this or precipitate this from happening but ultimately we are the ones that pull back on the controls we are the ones that stop the wing from flying we're the ones that do so in an uncoordinated manner and we are the ones that first stall the wing and then cause the aircraft to start spinning and then we are the ones that don't put in the proper inputs to recover the aircraft before it's too late or at least cause a better outcome if the airplane is going to crash no matter what first let's look at azam flying his piper comanche 250 horsepower taking off a little over 100 feet over the ground getting slow stalling and spinning into the ground 150 hours total time about 20 hours in the airplane and then there's david and kimberly husband and wife they bought a new comanche not a new comanche a used one new to them nice comanche 250 horsepower high performance airplane and taking off rotate climb pretty steep and same thing 150 feet 200 feet stalls uncoordinated and spins into the ground kills both of them 700 hours total time about 15 hours in the airplane it was his second solo flight in that airplane since he had bought it second flight that he was making by himself after getting a good amount of dual from an instructor being safe learning about that new airplane why did both of these airplanes crash on takeoff right after takeoff was it a weight and balance problem was it a mechanical problem an engine problem the trim wasn't set right the ntsb looks at all those things and they didn't find anything that would point to any case like that they found the engine's working good and the trim set where it should be and weight and balance to be within limits so why climb like crazy install spin and hit the ground well first off we got to remember when you're taking off in a high performance airplane like that probably the nose is going to want to climb above the horizon once that nose is above the horizon you lose track of how high it is above the horizon really especially when it's a new airplane to you when it's a new airplane to you you probably hold the controls a little tighter maybe instead of flying with just two fingers you get your whole hand on there maybe a little more tense not as relaxed and as that nose comes up above the horizon what's the difference between being two degrees above the horizon or 10 degrees above the horizon or 20 degrees above the horizon how can you really tell him and once that nose is coming up and perhaps you let it get a little too high above the horizon and the airplane starts slowing and initially you were taking off like a rocket and you felt all that acceleration going up and now you're not going up anymore and so you perhaps pull a little harder because that's just a natural reaction and you're holding the controls back and you realize you're not climbing you're getting closer to the ground you keep pulling back and you stall and once you stall you see a windscreen full of ground and the airplane starts rotating and you're close to the ground that's not a time where you're going to push forward or let go of the controls that's probably a time where you're going to tighten up on them even more and pull them back in your chest hoping to raise that nose but it is far too late so what really happened here we don't know the exact details we'll never know exactly what happened in these airplanes there's no video camera inside there but what we do know is competent pilots good pilots good people they're not brand new student pilots they're flying high performance airplanes and those airplanes are a little higher wing loading than your average 172 about the same wing area same size wing as a 172 a lot more horsepower and a lot heavier which means they don't like to get slow when they do get slow the back side of the power curve is a lot more vicious than your average 172. it's harder to get them to accelerate and they start to mush a lot easier as they're mushing more likely to stall the airplane but all it would have taken at 100 feet is to level the nose let the airplane accelerate and climb away right after they rotated even though they rotated perhaps aggressively it was recoverable at 50 feet at 100 feet even just the moment before the airplane stalled they could have pretty much just let go and the nose would have fallen set to level or perhaps below that accelerated and they likely would have never hit the ground even after the airplane did stall that instant installed well they likely could have let go or pushed forward relaxed the back pressure anyways let the nose come down and likely likely could have avoided hitting the ground it's a difficult thing to do though it's emotionally difficult and my opinion for what it's worth is that in the 20 hours and 15 hours they both respectively had in these airplanes that were new to them i doubt that either of them spent an hour flying the airplane slow hanging it on the prop i doubt that either of them spent 30 minutes doing that with their instructors they likely spent a few minutes doing some slow flight that's what i used to do with students when i was a new cfi take them out do a render checkout an hour flight that would consist of a few minutes of slow flight some stalls steep turns 30 degree turns 45 degree turns maybe some landings no flap landing 1.0 on the hobs sends you out and you're good to go but that's not really enough especially when you're in an airplane that's new to you i can tell you from personal experience after flying an airplane for 100 hours i thought i was pretty good in it i had 5 000 hours of total time and 100 hours in the airplane i should be pretty confident but i can also tell you after just going out and doing 30 minutes of hanging that airplane on this prop flying super slow with an instructor in the back seat kind of guiding me through it flying nice and slow and maneuvering the airplane very slow i was a lot better and safer in that airplane it made a huge difference and of course you do have to watch the engine temps and how hard you're pushing the airplane when you're flying in slow flight for a prolonged period of time but you get very used to the clues that the airplane is approaching a stall constantly playing with that angle of attack playing with that critical angle of attack dancing right on the edge of a stall periodically stalling the airplane recovering quickly doing that practice with an experienced cfi in that airplane that you're going to be flying showing you right where the demons are right where that edge is so that you can recognize the signs of it and correct appropriately automatically when you see those signs you don't want to stall the airplane at 150 feet and think okay i need to push forward and recover there's no thinking there's no time for that i wouldn't be able to do that no one can but your hands and your feet can react a lot faster than your brain can actually think about if you're trained to do the right thing when you detect those signs of hey the airplane's getting slow i need to make it not stall when they climbed up to 150 feet they either got some sort of stall warning maybe a horn a buzzer a light a buffet even if none of those things happened the noise in the airplane was changing the nose was incredibly high and there was pressure in their fingertips they were pulling the nose up it is impossible and this is a blanket statement that's not 100 true but pretty darn true it's about impossible in any of our 172 cessnas pipers out there to set take off power be within weight and balance limits within cg limits have the trim set appropriately it's impossible to stall them on takeoff unless there's back pressure in your fingertips if you let go of the controls when the airplane's going down the runway or shortly after takeoff it is going to fly somewhere between vx and vy if the airplane is configured properly it's a blanket statement and yeah there's some ways you could twist that and say it's not totally true but as a general rule of thumb you can't stall the airplane unless you're pulling back recognize that there's back pressure in your fingertips it's hard to recognize when you've got a lot of meat on there and you're squeezing like crazy realize that on takeoff on really any airplane fingertips work that's all that's really required and that will tell you if you're pulling back too hard realize that regardless how many hours you have in the airplane or total time until you fly it slow for a while with an instructor on board and explore that danger zone of the airplane it's hard to learn it it's hard to learn something in a few minutes of slow flight or a few seconds of it it's a lot easier and a lot more permanent a lot more valuable to explore that area get some proper upset prevention and recovery training from someone who is certified and do it in your airplane the airplane that you're going to be flying in so that you know where those demons and devils are hiding and when they're going to come out now we've looked at two accidents that did not go over very well and understandably so these are high performance airplanes a lot of force on that propeller big propeller big engine when they do stall they're going to want to spin it's not very easy to recover it's possible it's not easy now we're going to look at two different accidents that were again stall spin accidents but people were able to walk away from them maybe a little hurt and banged up but they walked away now in the first video here the student on a solo flight does a touch and go and loses control on the takeoff roll the airplane weather veins into the wind along with all those left turning tendencies and the student understandably panicked is pulling back and stalls the airplane briefly and then that recovers and then again stalls uncoordinated the left wing drops the left wing drops right down to the pavement and then the airplane kind of bounces off the pavement hits in a relatively nose level attitude skims across the pavement and the student jumps out and remembers to put his hat on as he walks away if you're wondering why the hat is so important it's because this accident took place in clemson south carolina for a little bit of backstory now that's the one case to review that he had a momentary stall there as the airplane weather veined into the wind he has a nice steady six to eight knot breeze judging by that wind sock and the ground speed of the aircraft is pretty darn low and as he momentarily stalls and then recovers well the airplane loses a little bit of altitude and comes closer to the ground which of course makes him freaked out and he probably pulls back a little bit harder inducing a stall and of course the airplane's not coordinated at that point unlikely that it would be students aren't coordinated typically almost ever let alone when they're panicked like this and staring at a fuel pump in front of them and of course the left wing drops contacts the pavement and hits in a relatively low energy state the headwind helps slow the airplane down the airplane was below gross weight flying as slow as it possibly could all the way through a nice deep stall and so he was able to hop out pretty much unharmed our next video is a student and instructor doing a soft fuel takeoff in a cessna 150. the intest believes that carbice might have been a factor here that when they came into land just before this that at glide power they might have picked up some carburetor ice so the engine may not have been producing full power the flight instructor doesn't really remember the accent sequence which doesn't help but the airplane comes up over the trees and we can see they're dragging plowing through the air and trying to avoid the trees that are in front of them right across the road understandably so you see big trees and you want to go up over them and it looks like they're about to clear them by a good 20 30 maybe even 40 feet until the airplane stalls and in an uncoordinated fashion spins in luckily cessnas are pretty benign they're light wing loading and there's not a lot of power in this cessna 150 to corkscrew it around quite as quickly as those big 0540s on the comanches producing 250 horsepower so the airplane does a stall and spin but a little bit more gentle and luckily the student instructor both get to walk away although banged up pretty good now what's our takeaway here well there's no prize for clearing the trees by 50 feet rather than clearing them by five feet emotionally it's very difficult to skim across trees at five feet but it would have been good to try to keep that wing flying could the airplane have kept flying if they just lower the nose skim the trees by a few feet and then potentially landed in a field beyond there or landed at least keeping the wing flying and landed in more of a level state and chose or had a little bit more of a choice involved of where the airplane's going to go rather than just leaving it up to gravity i'd like to think that as a pilot we could make a better choice of where to crash an airplane if it's going to crash then gravity can so what is the difference between these two incidents and the comanches well i'm not saying that these pilots did anything right and the comanche pilots did something wrong in fact i'm quite certain if you put these piles from the cessnas and the comanches they would have the exact same outcome and they'd be dead luckily they were flying a different airplane and i'm not saying that the cessnas are somehow safer than the comanches either but the comanches are high performance airplanes and they deserve a certain amount of respect they're higher wing loading and they don't like to fly slow it's going to be very unforgiving when you stall a comanche at full power compared to stalling a cessna 150 at full power what i ultimately want you to see here is simply that well there's a different case in how the airplanes actually contact the ground and the ones where the guys got to go home is the airplane's contacting the ground not straight down and a little bit more of a nose level attitude in a much lower energy state if you're going to be contacting the ground straight nose down there's nowhere to dissipate that energy when you're crashing the ground's not soft dirt is not soft it's not going to absorb energy very well but just being able to skim across the ground 5 10 20 feet and spread out that deceleration over time it's going to make a big difference and also these slower airplanes although they're slower and we don't want to fly them once we get our private pile license we want to fly something high performance and faster well you're going to be crashing faster too and the bottom line is whether you're landing or crashing you gotta dissipate energy dissipating energy over 20 feet and then dissipating double the amount of energy over that same distance is going to hurt approximately twice as much more but at the end of the day what i really want you to take away from this is that airplanes don't stall and spin without back pressure in our fingertips yeah there's cases where loads shift but hey let's take the time to make sure that our loads are secure and our weight and balance is within cg limits let's take the time when we get out just before we take off to make sure our trim is set appropriately so we don't have to worry about that the airplane i'm flying now has a nice mnemonic checklist for it three m's and three ps master mixture mags all on prop pressure and pitch all set pitch is trim so right before i take off i'm checking my trim i'm checking that my prop is set full forward since it's a constant speed propeller airplane i'm checking pressure my oil pressure the engine is operating as it should right before i had power for takeoff that keeps me from making a mistake like that and of course doing a good pre-flight getting the airplane configured properly my load is secure with bungee straps and all that if i have any cargo that's loosened back so that's not going to shift on me ultimately airplanes should not stall and should not spin unless we have back pressure in our fingertips how do we prevent getting back pressure on our fingertips since it seems to be a problem with pilots and it has been for a while well we get proper training and we get proper training more than just once you can't go out and get spin training i'd love to tell you go out and get spin training but what i really want to tell you is go out and get spin training every couple months if not more often than that i at first when i became a cfi said okay well i'm a cfi now so i'll get my flight review every 24 months from a buddy who's a cfi will go fly together i'm pretty proficient and what maybe you'll learn something new maybe i don't know 24 months every two years sounds good to me and i went to the airlines and they do a different thing where they do annual checkups so to speak they do an annual proficiency check where you go back to the simulator once a year that made a lot of sense and the airlines have a pretty good safety record with that and then i got to thinking and realizing that after 5 000 hours of flying and thousands of hours of teaching i realized that in my own flying if i want to be at the level of proficiency that i want to be at if i want to fly the airplane the way i want to and be safe and basically safe for myself your mind can't think quite as fast as the airplane moves sometimes so you're going to have to rely on your hands and your feet to do some things on their own subconsciously automatically because your brain's not always going to keep pace so now i go up once a month starting just a few months ago i started going up once a month for recurrent training about an hour to an hour and a half of a specific regime of slow flight stalls of course steep turns power on power off stalls all that good stuff some landings a lot of slow flight a lot of flying the airplane slow going through all these different maneuvers making sure that my skills are staying sharp practicing go-arounds practicing aboard takeoffs practicing the things that don't happen often so when they do occur you're ready for it and it's automatic and no big deal another thing i want you to be aware of the link is in the description below for it is the spin awareness course on flightmycalf.com it's about 45 to 60 minutes it's totally free you don't have to sign up you click the link you can go through that course i can guarantee you that if you take that course it will not save your life it will not save your passengers lives it will not prevent you from stalling or spinning your airplane but it might help it might actually help a little bit and what will help a lot is recurrent training i understand it's hard to do it every month but there's no reason why you shouldn't if you're flying more than once a month there's no reason why you shouldn't throw into that flight for fun down the beach over 100 hamburger a few practice maneuvers there's no reason why you shouldn't throw your cfi in the airplane with you and keep your skills sharp on the things that we don't do often so we don't get surprised by a go-around we don't get surprised by the trim being out of whack on takeoff we don't get surprised by the nose coming up more than we expect and we know how to detect that our airplane is getting into a dangerous state we can correct it early and properly so that it's a non-event that is what i hope you take away from this video i hope you guys use the comment section below and post a few things in there that you will do different going forward that you will add to your regime to make sure that you don't taxing into another airplane when you're taxing to go get fuel to make sure that you don't fly into a helicopter into another airplane or have a mid-air collision when you're coming in to land because maybe your radio's not working so great or the sun's under your eyes or the windscreen is a little bit fuzzy i want to make sure that you guys are not going to stall or spin your airplanes that you're not going to call on your airplane to do more than it can these machines are great machines comanches 172s 150s they're amazing but they'll only do what they can do and when we call on them to do more than that it's our fault it's our problem breaking the machine forcing it to do what it can't i want you to realize the signs of when you're getting close to the edge and stay away from the edge and never cross it that is what i hope you can take away from this video if you have any questions at all that's what the comments below are for you can reach out to us through the website at flightmycalpha and definitely check out that spin awareness course at flightmycalpha.com be safe out there guys hopefully this was educational and we'll see you all in the next one

Channel: FLY8MA.com Flight Training

Views: 177,874

Rating: 4.8666301 out of 5

Keywords: aircraft accident, accident case study, aopa, aopa accident case study, asi, air safety institute, vfr into imc, crash, airplane crash, fatal accident, student pilot, student pilot crash, emergency landing, fly8ma, stall, spin, midair collision, midair plane collision, mid air plane collision idaho, fatal, fatal vowsfit, loc, loss of control, adm, plane crash, aircraft, flysax aircraft accident

Id: k82JE5qkUiI

Length: 29min 13sec (1753 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 24 2020