Real Pilot Story from the Field: No Go-Around - A lesson from the Backcountry

I distinctly remember seeing the left-wing what I called giveaway and once the left-wing installed spin 'try stall spin crowd [Music] so we're here with Todd Simmons the president of Cirrus aircraft customer experience in his magnificent basement we're with his brother Andrew Simmons and his friends Jeff Smith and Jim Richmond and this summer they were in the Idaho backcountry doing some backcountry flying and carbon cubs and super Cubs something they've done quite a bit of only on this day things took a dramatic turn and they're gonna share their story with us Richard we had already been in the backcountry a few days and on Thursday June 21st we got up that morning a true Trent it was a pretty day and VFR clear three airplanes and four of us together we were looking forward to the day head so let's move on into the flight of the day then you hop into Cabin Creek and then from Cabin Creek you're gonna move on to doing more is that right we were right close to doing more and I wanted to go into doing more because I always going to do it more and grab some rhubarb it grows naturally and the things that are motivating us yeah that's because yep let's go do that and this first thing still is a very true parlors I mean you're gonna take your airplanes and you're gonna go into and just find a place for world class room alright so to walk us through that if you will in the arrival there at doing more I think the first thing I remember over the radio is Jim saying Andrew why don't you fly over doing more to see if it's clear airplanes obstructions deer what have you and then I'll go straight in he'd been in the day before you concern is is there other traffic there because Andrew flew over said don't know more the traffic then I can go ahead and make the approach the wind was zero and you guys are flying in about a mile trail or so about that approximately yeah just individual and keeping visual visual 129 is the common frequency back there that's what we're talking to listening for other traffic staying to the right side of the of the drainage like so you flew over and give kind of a pirate of the field and the traffic and so forth reported as clear and and that means a gym that you'll be you're the first one in to land right I just went in from about a mile downstream and started descending down to the to the stream level so that the end of the runway might be 20 25 feet above the water level okay so you have to get right down in them in the drainage okay do we more it's a grass strip deep in the Idaho backcountry it has a 700 foot long 30 foot wide runway and it sits on top of a bank about 30 feet above the river's edge from end to end the strip has a 13% grade toward terrain with no room for error you know been to some of the most challenging ships but I've not been into doing more and that's of course a key part of this story so both of you have been into doing more before okay so now if you would walk as soon I know at this point Todd doesn't have the memory to recall it so I think Jim let's go to your recollection I came in and landed it doing more and I I rolled to the end of the strip Todd wasn't in sight yet so I walked back to the airplane turned on the master put the headset so on and said Todd have you been in here before and he just came back said nope and I said well you can't be too low then he came into sight and he was pretty much where I expected to see him right where Andrew had been maybe 10 to 20 feet higher but I don't think he was high but he never really turned right at the I was looking right down the end of the strip and he never turned right and and came right toward me about the time he came into view he pitched up and added full power and that was a surprise and Andrew was getting out of his airplane or had just pushed it back and when he heard that he started running out and scented no no I mean he knew too that that was the wrong thing to do as Todd initiated his go-around it wasn't directly up and over this trip it'll kind of fade it a little bit more towards the middle of the land there of the triangle and then made his left turn towards the river towards another bit of rising terrain a mountain and and another left turn to head down the street at that point I really became nervous yeah trying to make that turn at that point I knew that was going to be challenging yeah regardless of the plane regardless of the pilot that's a that's a very tight space a very tight turn with a lot going on and I remember thinking to myself this is not going well mm-hm airplane is in the last left turn head heading starting to head back downstream and I distinctly remember seeing the left wing what I called giveaway installed mm-hmm spin injury and once the left wing installed spinach stalls ping crash from our vantage point the plane actually goes out of sight before it hits the ground but for this part what that meant is that before Todd hit the ground we lost sight we heard the unmistakable crunch of metal and we heard the engine stop instantly hmm once you add energy back into the situation very typically things are going bad you're making them worse and this is exactly what happened here I had an energy by there's no time to read the words yeah in a book that this is they know go around stir yep it's another thing to fully think through what that means that would be so difficult to make in the moment I don't think you could make that decision in the moment you have to make that decision ahead of time it has to be done over in the moment yeah and I'll put myself out there right now even though my landing was uneventful I was not prepared fully before I know go around yeah approach because had there been a deer on the runway I don't know that I have the mental discipline to say I'm gonna hit that deer because that is a better outcome yeah to me trying to go around that is an incredibly difficult decision I think but if you prepare enough you always have to be thinking when I turn this corner I'm gonna see a deer or or I'm gonna run into Jim's airplane at the topic and I think an important point add there is in my history of flying this airplane in fact I've I've taken into the like on and even done the things to maximize the performance of the engine full throttle in this super cover in these carbon cups that's a lot of my out in that so to the point here it's a no go around strip I have all this power I'm gonna use it right now as my out to go around instinct taking over who's working against me in this case is the point and then the drift to the middle versus the staying over this in a lot of the airstrip becomes even more of a critical factor at that point so tell us Andrew you the first one to arrive what would you see well I remember running down the hill in addition to screaming no no no and properly a few first words and some prayers and a lot of other stuff I distinctly remember thinking to myself it's hot is that you thought by night I I know just as sure as I'm sitting here right now that my brother's dead mmm and that's why I'm about to find um when I crest the hill and see the airplane I could see Todd even in the airplane but I can't really tell from the distance that I am exactly what his condition is and so I ran to the airplane as imagine I crest the hill and this is kind of what I see in this configuration damaged I run underneath the left wing I think that's just because it's the closest way it's actually on a bank but the guy thought I could get easier access to Todd so it doesn't seem like it had this kind of impact more to your point you thought even more of a pancake impact because of the the bank was steep and the airplane I believe was descending like this the the approach angle between the airplane on the ground was pretty shallow and I think the left wing hit first then that pulled the engine over to hit this Bank and the left main hit that tire ended up down right by the creek and the airplane continued on around it kind of wiped the engine under the left gear a little bit and continued on around and hit a bush and slid down we found the airplane like that the engine had been pointed down and asked but it was a violent contact with the ground but had the ground been level right there who have been much more violent so you walk up to run up to the left side so what looks Megan from bird's eye view is a relative an intact airplane when you get up to it you realize it's very much not intact and I'm looking at him from underneath the left wing and again all the the plexiglass or whatever has blown out and so I have relatively easy access to him he came back into the left he's still in his seat belt harnesses he was unconscious he had this huge laceration going from the top left side of his face to the bottom right side of his face that essentially split his nose in half I distinctly remember a very labored shallow breathing pattern hmm almost like a little gasp and then a little gasp and I guess part of me was thankful that that he was alive because that's not what I expected but then almost immediately you you instinctively I guess you go in to figure out okay what do we do next I've heard enough read enough seen enough to know that when airplanes crash particularly Cubs when you got the two fuel tanks it enough right there and you got a few lines coming down seeing this ever fuel line smelling the fumes there's a decent chance this is going to catch on fire and if that happens this means badly did you did you handle that first turn on the switches off or how did you how did you deal with that I didn't do any of that okay one of my biggest regrets of this Todd and I knew this I had a fire extinguisher right at his feet lessons learned one of the first things I should have done is grabbed that fire extinguisher because least fired at my hand and ready I had something ignited I could have extinguished it or tried to quickly as opposed to something igniting and I'm fumbling to get the fire extinguisher yeah but understandably your focus is on your brother there is in bad shape and so you're now you're trying to extricate at any area I don't I don't flip any switches I don't hang on the fuel valve off I'm trying to unbuckle in essentially my entire focus is on yeah Todd and trying to get their attention yeah and then not long seemed like an eternity but probably few seconds Jeff appeared Jim appeared we all realized what we needed to do we've got to get Todd out I think I was in the front and Andrew sung an unnatural way because I still can't explain it was able to get behind Todd reach over him and we got him out of the airplane you know and and you know Todd hit the ground right next to the airplane and then the three of us gathered ourselves and gathered Paul took him down the hill but that's interesting it took all three of you to extricate him from the airplane he did belt I am NOT he's being generous when he says deadweight 12:04 me you weren't at the airplane yet I do carry idle or min reach which is now a Garmin enrage it's an earlier model than this one within the past couple years I have decided to carry it for exactly this reason even though you don't think an emergency everything we're gonna happen if it does I have better chance of surviving if I have this and then in addition this particular device also allows me to text with just about anybody so it's not a satellite phone but it is a since the satellite communication device via text and so for the most part I use it to text my wife when I can't reach her via cell phone I've landed I'm in the backcountry I'm having a good time I'm late but I'm gonna be home or in a more challenging situation I've got some trouble but I'm okay and then of course the ultimate is pressing that SOS button where you need help but I do remember pressing it relatively quickly I knew that this was a bad accident and I was going to need whatever resources SOS was going to get me an important that that was on your person though luckily I had decided a couple of years ago that where I was going to keep this was in my I have a posit and in my pants on the left side and I have always decided to keep it there so that when I get other airplane it's with me yeah and I don't have to go looking for it yeah I've heard it said that from experienced backcountry pilots that camping equipment what's in the back survival equipment is what's on your body right and this you can see how this scenario where you saw this you start running instinct and then oh my god ago to go back to the airplane and get my hen reach right that would have been oh we're good several more minutes it yeah when I started running towards the crash site there was no thought of going back to get to the airplane to get anything at that point and I was fortunate that that was in my leg and so I pressed the SOS button you hold it down and it confirms that a signal is sent to an international rescue center so I knew that had gone out or was in the process of going out while we're on that equipment and taking a little bit of a tangent here helmets and airplanes like super Cubs and and carbon cubs in the backcountry what do you guys think about helmets for Christmas this year I bought myself a Bell helmet and a halo microphone that I can put on under that I'm not sure I helmet would have done Todd a great deal of benefit but I can certainly see that a high percentage of the time in an accident a helmets gonna help in anymore they're lightweight they're relatively comfortable well certainly we are skiing you know if you go back more a decade ago noise wearing a helmet and you see where that's come today I will say you're right I do wonder what kind of helmet I would have had to be wearing to avoid you know the injury to my face I think it does speak to perhaps more of an awareness of what all's in the cockpit obviously in 1954 and 55 when this airplane design unfortunately probably not thinking about crash worthiness you're probably not thinking of soft surface is when I think about today and my place that serious aircraft that's all we've thought about the design of soft services I also think you know there's different pilots have different preferences whether it's headset hooks or other things that are portable in the airplane suddenly you give that a lot more thought in a case like this of quite frankly the kind of things that you can hit and you know even as I think about the way I if you will impacted things in the cockpit it's not straightforward you can't really predict so I think the helmet question is worth some thought about what you may have added to your cockpit what's loose in the cockpit the things that can hit you in the head and I think the reality is it's way more than you might appreciate so a helmet can still help even though in this case it's hard to say unless I have had some protection literally right in front of my face and we were talking earlier about flown a carbon cub and you notice the stick is lower than it is in a Super Cub right I mean it's it's one of one of the first things you notice about flying it but there's a real safety advantage in that and having that stick out of the way there so there's no possum gravy but this day we're tailing obviously is how we prefer to fly it was not part of this accident and I'm not part of an injury that I'm aware of and down there out of the way so it was good yeah speaking of the contents in the airplane almost all the contents were thrown well away from their planet we found his iPad his iPhone his sunglasses his headset 20 30 feet away from there that stuff left the airplane quickly unless the benefit of rebuilding the airplane as we did you know recently a couple of years ago a very important sec and super cub turns out to be the seatbelts I was wearing and you know the original design those seatbelts unfortunately and again they're not thinking about it this many decades ago or attached to the seat itself yeah of course if that seat becomes unattached those seat belts aren't helping you at all have what's called a nurse or real seatbelts in this seatbelt of course they go back and through a partition in the back and they're connected to the fuselage in the back and that was critical in this case so not only do we have the benefit of your nursery but we have the benefit that they're attached to the structure if you will mm-hmm I'd had cracked ribs and a crack sternum and believe it or not that's a good thing that year no doubt with just another place if I don't have that or I don't have the benefit of the arresting that that's going on I think the injuries I suffered are magnified just in fact I know they are and almost surely fatal so now you guys have them out you've hit the SOS button and I think is it Jeff you're an EMT or have some medical training right how fortunate how fortunate is a super important part of this story and yeah so a long time ago actually when I turned 18 I had been working on and was trained as a medic sore for about five years I worked as a medic to kind of work my way through college yeah so you have some knowledge of how to help her where to go from here in terms of you know life-saving maneuvers so would you do the Todd was gonna bleed to death or suffocate because of the trauma to Todd's face and you know nasal passages everything that would typically be open was was beginning to close because of swelling because of clotting blood because of the trauma so he was in in those situations your body's going into shock you know you're just trying to keep him breathing by keeping his airway open yeah well some point right in there we realized that we had first-aid kits I had one in my airplane you had one of yours you ran up and got both of them brought them down and we just basically threw everything on the ground so we can see what we have and meanwhile rescue are you confident that you hit the SOS button you've got a receptor oh yeah leaving that rescue is on the way they do send you almost instantaneously a confirmation that they have received your message and then not long after that they start asking questions what is the nature of your emergency I you you have the ability to pair via bluetooth this device with your iPhone and I had done that because it's pretty easy to type in text messages on an iPhone it's not as easy by the long stretch on this device itself because as you're controlling the bleeding and in this process you're also sitting messages and and making sure Reza and then as he said at some point I mean we we knew we had first aid equipment of course I didn't think to grab that on my way down the hill I ran back up the hill grabbed gyms grabbed mine Todd had some in his airplane we didn't necessarily think to go get that but we had plenty of first-aid acquit the most important first aid supply was the coagulant came out of them you know that helped stop the bleeding on his wrist mm-hmm everything else you know and we didn't use this plant well maybe we should have but what I mean there's a lot of lessons learned on this that are so powerful for the rest of us but one of them that's just really standing out to me is those things are not optional in the backcountry right and even people that do frontcountry flying you know to think about if you find yourself in some kind of situation those things are literally literally life-saving shouldn't be considered obviously so Todd's airlifted out you guys have a chance to take a present Paul it's but it's now probably relatively late in the day and you still have two airplanes in a demanding trips and I ain't got to get out of there what's it in in a fairly emotional state right so I mean we all talk about the mental preparedness to fly beyond everything else and so how can you just walk us through that how did you it was quiet yeah for a little while I mean right there at the tree guys I I think we just sat for a minute it didn't do much of anything yeah I think we said anything to each other we just kind of sat and paused and cleaned up and cleaned up we had some trash bags and kind of cleaned up the mess you had made was one of the messages I hey there's an airplane sitting over there they didn't put my trash bag it's started to gather everything back up at the the two car because they're still the softest trip including as much of the stuff that we could get at a top airplane I think we pretty quickly realized that we didn't have enough useful load to carry everything out that we needed to care which is everything we had originally in the three airplanes now two airplanes and we were kind of leaning on Jeff during the first aid process of this based on his knowledge when it the next task became more of an airman ship knowledge of okay now we have to safely get out of this trip and to where we need to be I quickly turn to Jim being the flying expert to help make those decisions loading the airplanes when do we want to leave making the right preparations again slowing down and we've discussed a fair amount I remember the departure out of doing more which is not a not a no-brainer it's a short strip departing as well as weather had become a and whether because issue any issue there was a moment there where I thought okay if we want to leave we have to leave now but I personally was uncomfortable leaving now because you know Andrew just seen his brother go through a terrible accident and we're involved in this and and you know your body is still in some heightened state you know and now's not a good time to be calling on technical skills I was much more comfortable waiting it out I think we took 15 or 20 or 30 minutes maybe to evaluate you know what we were facing and it was not a okay let's get let's get out of here and race Todd to the hospital essentially we saw the benefit of the weather service inside the airplanes XM weather so we could go in there and get a little bit of an idea of what was coming through we all three came to the same conclusion so you you wait it out and then you leave and you head back home did you ever get the rhubarb no so he owes you at a minimum Todd I know that your your memory stops from Cabin Creek until when you recover in the hospital which is another story entirely the miraculous recovery that you've had but I know you spent a lot of time talking to these three and just analyzing it with your background and flying so can you walk us through as you look back on it what are some of the lessons learned we can all take away from it I'll refer back to planning and briefing and you know availing yourself to all information about this trip and really getting down to the issue of are the pilot and the machine both ready to complete this mission today in terms of what in that strip and the answer is no and then the outcome as you can see is part of that I think the second most important issue that I take away that candidly is causal is in fact my experience experience really in two types total experience and recent experience probably checking the box and total experience and the recent experience I'm not even though we had been out there for a few days by no stretch of the imagination had we been to strips challenging like this one would tend to be versus the others that we had been to glad to summarize all my takeaways I think I could simplify it and just saying slow down and think just slow down and think you know if you do that or do you plan B probably if you slow down I think you'll probably do the right things make the right decisions and have a successful yeah interesting with you Jim I'm the lowest time pilot of this world and what what I take away from this the stall spin scenario is something we're taught from the very beginning about how you avoid that situation and and I think you made the point Todd you know the training that we get is really not sufficient to educate you and make you understand how violent that event can be it's made me think more about the quality of my my airmanship I think you make a really good point on stall training and we did a report on this and the nasi about a year ago but you know if you think about Moses stall turning that most of us go through you know it's coming your instructor takes you up let's do power on let's do power off stalls and like a Super Cub it can take forever to get the airplane to finally stall on your right because you're such a benign and you know it's coming and you know how to react as opposed to so I'm such a fan of upset recovery training where you get with people that do this for a living and they'll put you in that situation without you being aware of it they'll throw it on you right so that suddenly there you are in this situation and now you have to deal with first the shock of it then the reaction of it so I really agree with you and I think the training for that really needs to be we will then need to look hard at that when I look at this accident I look at for folks really highly experienced some very highly experienced in the back country in airplanes that were built for the mission going out on what seems like such a such a fantastic day you know I'm jealous of that ability to go to go do that I love that kind of flying when you start peeling back the onion of you know what happened then it looks to me like if you start okay as the stall spin accident what caused that a go around on a one-way strip what caused that possibly not just the assessment like you guys have said and with like we've talked about the real decision of going into a one-way strip in the decision that you're making going into that strip that one way or another you're gonna pass a point where that airplane is going to be on the ground and just a pause as you guys are brought up to think through that maybe is something that breaks the chain well I want to thank you guys for coming together and sharing your story and supporting general aviation safety all of you do and thank you for that especially Utah for being willing to come out and share your story and share it with others I think it's a key component of aviation safety and as you know and your job with cirrus how we've driven down the accident rates so successfully over the decades is people like you willing to come out and share your story and then we sit and think about it and try to keep ourselves out of that same situation glad to do it thank you and thank you a OPA and ASI for your commitment to the same you

Channel: Air Safety Institute

Views: 235,416

Rating: 4.9031711 out of 5

Keywords: institute, aopa, aviation, pilot, fly, flying, flight, plane, airplane, airport, air, safety, asi, air safety, training, education, aircraft, owners, pilots, association, Todd, Simmons, Jim, Richmond, cirrus, super, cub, piper, tailwheel, backcountry, back, country, bush, grass, strip, Idaho, Dewey, Moore, landing, go, around, accident, crash, documentary, investigate, investigation, analysis, Richard, McSpadden, crafters, supercub, stall, spin, survival, first, aid, jeff, smith, andrew, rhubarb, one, way, one-way, go-around, bushplane, mountain, cubcrafters

Id: NGt6TmkYdUw

Length: 29min 31sec (1771 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 02 2019