PA-28 Pilots and LAMEs be aware!

[old man emu]

This needs to be brought to the attention of everyone who flies an old plane, no matter who the manufacturer was.

 

http://www.recreationalflying.com/threads/cherokee-control-column-failure-investigated.149155/

 

OME

 

 

[turboplanner]

Now that WOULD make me drop my coffee.

 

 

[Guest SrPilot]

This needs to be brought to the attention of everyone who flies an old plane, no matter who the manufacturer was. http://www.recreationalflying.com/threads/cherokee-control-column-failure-investigated.149155/ OME

Thanks OME. It pays to think about such things before they happen. I would expand the application a bit though.

 

It's not just older aircraft. I've known of relatively new aircraft experiencing similar failures. For example, a fellow GlaStar builder/pilot was in a fatal accident in his plane some years ago. The picture in the story you posted reminded me of Champ's crash. Champ and I had recently flown into an airshow in separate airplanes. We chatted at length as I admired his well-built GlaStar. I saw nothing to concern me about his kit plane. It was well built and looked ready to go. After his crash soon thereafter, I studied the information as it was released and triple-checked my control torque tube and linkages when I saw reports that his control stick had broken away from the elevator torque tube. My kit, it turned out, had a beefed up torque tube and stick attach point, an improvement from the version in Champ's airplane.

 

The guys in your posting were lucky to be where they were when things went awry. Champ was not so lucky. Here are two stories about his crash.

 

http://www.champsclock.com/glastarcrash.htm

 

http://www.ntsb.gov/_layouts/ntsb.aviation/brief2.aspx?ev_id=20001212X18845&ntsbno=MIA99LA156&akey=1

 

I once put one of my airplanes in the shop for some maintenance. When I went to the shop to pick up the airplane I did a thorough inspection. In doing so, I discovered that one of the control sticks was in place but the installation bolt and nut were missing. The stick was just inserted in place without the hardware. Oops. I also once walked out to an arriving Super Cub. I was a bit unimpressed by the airplane when I noticed that the wing strut was attached to the wing not by a bolt and nut but by a screwdriver inserted where the bolt should have been. I guess they'd run out of bolts.

 

Preflight and annual inspections are the times to find issues. Not so with "in flight." That's the wrong time to discover something's amiss.

 

The AOPA has featured a discussion of flight control failures recently. Here's a link to the original AOPA article. I now have problems in attempting to access the article directly (ergo, the link is to a cached copy of the original posting):

 

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1AWBKVL_3wUJ:flighttraining.aopa.org/students/presolo/skills/controlfail.html&num=1&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1&vwsrc=0