Another LOC on final for a forced landing [06/19 USA]

[Garfly]

 

 

[Jabiru7252]

Forty years flying, can't think what LOC means. Yes I can, loss of control. Yep, looked like he flew that into the ground. Dumb ass.

 

Edited January 21, 2022 by Jabiru7252

[Thruster88]

The engine, which had given plenty of WARNING that it was not in good health failed at 3000 feet over flat farm land with a wind from the north east at 10knots. The late decision to turn down wind while not maintaining adequate airspeed sealed their fate. Even without the wing drop (stall) they would have had a 20 knot higher touch down speed than a landing to the north east. The aircraft crashed in this area. 

 

 http://www.kathrynsreport.com/2019/06/beechcraft-a36-bonanza-n8014t-fatal.html

 

[Garfly]

38 minutes ago, Jabiru7252 said:

Forty years flying, can't think what LOC means. Yes I can, loss of control. 

 

 

Ha, ha ... sorry about the jargon.  I blame it on a bout of headline writer's syndrome.

 

Nevertheless, regarding that, ummm,  LOC:  this chap had over 10,000 hours. 

Only recently, on here, we looked at another one, almost the same; he lost it in the last seconds of what otherwise would have been an everyday outlanding.

It tells me that it could happen to me.   It warns me that I MUST heed Crisis Checklist item #1:  Don't Panic

And, oh, yeah, #2: Fly the Plane.  

And maybe #3: Pulling back doesn't make the ground go away.

 

 

 

 

Edited January 21, 2022 by Garfly

[onetrack]

Yep, he really needed to fly on that totally worn out Conty. Couldn't wait for a new engine, just had to keep flying that worn-out POS until it died - and he died with it.

I guess this pilot wasn't well known for his great decision-making, it makes you wonder how he got to 66 - and 10,000 hrs. What gets me, is they nearly always manage to take innocent, trusting pax with them.

For a pilot who called he was going to make an emergency landing, it looks to me on the "last seconds" video, like it was 40 years since he practiced any type of forced landing.

Do these people really understand how their aircraft responds with a completely stopped engine? Surely they must have some inkling that an aircraft with a stopped engine flies little better than a thrown housebrick?

[APenNameAndThatA]

1 hour ago, Garfly said:

 

Ha, ha ... sorry about the jargon.  I blame it on a bout of headline writer's syndrome.

 

Nevertheless, regarding that, ummm,  LOC:  this chap had over 10,000 hours. 

Only recently, on here, we looked at another one, almost the same; he lost it in the last seconds of what otherwise would have been an everyday outlanding.

It tells me that it could happen to me.   It warns me that I MUST heed Crisis Checklist item #1:  Don't Panic

And, oh, yeah, #2: Fly the Plane.  

And maybe #3: Pulling back doesn't make the ground go away.

 

 

 

 

That’s what I take from these stories too. Not how dumb they were but how dumb I could be. 

[alf jessup]

5 hours ago, Jabiru7252 said:

Forty years flying, can't think what LOC means. Yes I can, loss of control. Yep, looked like he flew that into the ground. Dumb ass.

 

7252,

 

Maybe Loss of Consciousness?

 

[red750]

19 hours ago, Jabiru7252 said:

Forty years flying, can't think what LOC means.

LOC is an Amway detergent product - Liquid Organic Cleaner.      

[Garfly]

Yet another one:  Loss-Of-Control - this time after an engine failure (carb ice) at take-off. 

 

 

 

It's because these accidents are so common that they had to come up with the acronym.

 

https://www.easa.europa.eu/domains/general-aviation/flying-safely/loss-of-control

 

Loss of Control (LOC-I)

• Downloads

How to Stay Safe?

Stay safe and enjoy flying!

This section addresses important safety risks in General Aviation.
Several risks will be addressed starting with Loss of Control In-flight (LOC-I).

 

 

Edited January 24, 2022 by Garfly

[Garfly]

This is Scott Perdue's analysis of the Bonanza accident (above).

 

 

[kgwilson]

Lots of information about the state of the engine and why it failed. That didn't cause the crash. The guy had plenty of time and altitude and didn't stall in the turn. He just flew it in to the ground. If he'd set up a forced landing, trimmed for best glide and a straight in approach with wings level and flaps when he knew he was going to make it, he & passenger would very likely still be here today and they may even have walked away even if it was downwind. A belly landing on dirt fully stalled is a good option. Probably 9500 of his 10,000 hours were on autopilot

[Thruster88]

3 hours ago, kgwilson said:

Lots of information about the state of the engine and why it failed. That didn't cause the crash. The guy had plenty of time and altitude and didn't stall in the turn. He just flew it in to the ground. If he'd set up a forced landing, trimmed for best glide and a straight in approach with wings level and flaps when he knew he was going to make it, he & passenger would very likely still be here today and they may even have walked away even if it was downwind. A belly landing on dirt fully stalled is a good option. Probably 9500 of his 10,000 hours were on autopilot

If you look there was a stall with a substantial wing drop at only about 50 feet, that is high enough to kill every time.

[Garfly]

40 minutes ago, Thruster88 said:

If you look there was a stall with a substantial wing drop at only about 50 feet, that is high enough to kill every time.

Yes, when he speculated that it was not a stall/spin, I'm guessing that "Flywire" hadn't seen the "What You Haven't Seen" vid. (original post).

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited January 24, 2022 by Garfly

[kgwilson]

2 hours ago, Thruster88 said:

If you look there was a stall with a substantial wing drop at only about 50 feet, that is high enough to kill every time.

That was my initial thoughts also. The speed looked to be pretty high and the turn was not steep but that could be camera angle I suppose. There may be some other explanation as to why the left wing dropped just before impact but aerodynamic stall is the most likely.

[Jabiru7252]

A friend of mine stalled at about 10 to 20 feet AGL during a practice forced landing. His plane didn't have the height to enter a spin, the left wing got caught up in canola and the plane did a cartwheel coming to a stop pretty quick. One thing when you are really low, pushing the stick forward to break the stall will put you into the grass. As an experiment, I kept my Jab off the ground during a landing while the stall horn blasted but before the nose could drop I had sunk onto the runway. (as I hoped). I don't have the berries to do that sort of stuff any more. 

[Old Koreelah]

I dimly recall a few lessons holding a stalling Blanik’s wings level with rudder, but every time I’ve tried that in my short-winged Jodel my feet are too slow.

[MattP]

This video shows a good view of stall and the start of autorotation close to the ground and what happens. 

 

 

 

 

[onetrack]

Apart from the good flying lesson as regards the botched go-around - I must say I'm pretty impressed with the strength of a Cessna, for him to hit the ground that hard, without the aircraft breaking up! 

[Old Koreelah]

But I hope there was enough “give” to absorb some of the impact.
Yonks ago a Blanic spun all the way to the ground and the pilot walked away- one wing hit first, cushioning the arrival.

[turboplanner]

7 hours ago, onetrack said:

Apart from the good flying lesson as regards the botched go-around - I must say I'm pretty impressed with the strength of a Cessna, for him to hit the ground that hard, without the aircraft breaking up! 

The wing and the nose played a part in that, decelerating things. Years ago at a local airshow an Aerobat pilot decided to take up a girl at the end of the day and tried to pull a wingover at the end of the strip, stalled and rolled over hitting the ground upright with no deceleration. First rescuers arriving on the scene thought the aircraft was undamaged, but found the pilot and passeger dead from internal injuries.

 

Being a first solo pilot with a bounced like that it's possible he didn't have anything on his mind than climbing for the sky because that's a VERY steep climb out angle. 

 

That's very good information about using the lower left reference area to get a lot more physical reference of what the aircraft is doing. I grew up on low wing where the left window was used as the primary reference, but my Jabiru instructor insisted on me looking straight ahead for landings and it was certainly better doing it that way in the high wing.

[Mike Gearon]

That’s surely a failure at the training level. I did King school in USA. John and Martha King teach you to fly in a 172 in little video clips and teach you to pass your written with online exams.  (I guess it’s Bob Tait here) Your CFI does the actual flying with you of course. It’s burned into my memory when John King says during a landing bounce “add a little bit of power, you can do a nice landing that way” then he does. 
 

Also, that pull back with application of power is crazy. I can’t remember any specific moment I learned this. Probably in soft field take offs early in training when I’d lifted us too early. I have that burned in as well. I can picture it on grass field Wahoo Nebraska. CFI pushed the nose down hard and it didn’t feel scary. It felt safe. I’m always adding power near the ground with thoughts of roll it on, don’t slam it on, right rudder as needed, wings level  and keep the nose down. Yeah, I think it’s a training failure.

 

The Lindbergh reference. Awesome. I was a little slow understanding dashboard to horizon/ shore reference in float planes. I was told often enough! Just slow to take it on. I don’t think the instructors tired of telling everyone the Guy from down under does everything backwards. 

[Blueadventures]

looks to me he must have added power as the elevator doesn't look to be moving up.

[cooperplace]

On 21/01/2022 at 4:12 PM, onetrack said:

 Surely they must have some inkling that an aircraft with a stopped engine flies little better than a thrown housebrick?

I practice engine-out landings all the time in the Jab, and actually it doesn't fly too badly. Not the same as with power, but very controllable. It helps if you have practiced.

[turboplanner]

That's the second person in the last few days who's given up the redundancy of an engine and that's like walking a tightrope with no net on steroids.

Most of us can land reasonably with the throttle at idle if we want to, so it's probably not a skill we need to practice.

 

And we've seen the people who obtain the glide rate figures for their aircraft, and start practicing forced landings based on how far they can glide with the engine out or at idle.

 

Thankfully we haven't seen the one a month death toll for quite a while now, but in those days, but two type of failures used to stand out in RA, both loss of control. One was the pilot who failed to realise there was no propellor thrust, and tried to stay at his 1000' by pulling the stick back and stalled/spun from that height when there was a perfect forced landing are below him. The other was the person who hadn't practiced forced landing sequences correctly and had failed to make good decisions on the way down. There's a good video of an Ultralight pilot who suffers a siezed engine over grassy farmland. The camera has his face in full view all the time and he shows sheer terror when the engine stops, and you can see him searching in the distance for a good place to land at the same time as you can see smooth grass 100' below him. Instead of deviating slightly and landing in one of these paddocks, you can see him eyeing his original selection in the distance, then more terror as he realises he's not going to make it, and a good decision to put the aircraft down now while he has control ....................and slides into a big drainage ditch and destroys the aircraft, but at least crawls out and walks away.

 

I'm not saying these two people couldn't handle an engine-out landing because that's what they practice and obviously do. What I am saying to other people is that this, on most occasions is not where any danger is; the danger is what happens at the time the engine stops, and in poor decisions on the way down, and both of these are difficult to train for because (a) if we decide to practice a few, our subconscious is already primed and ready to go when the engine stops or (b) if the instructor in the pre-flight briefing says "We'll do a few forced landings today, your're again primed and will usually do textbook sequences, although my instructor once diplomatically said "well on that one we would have crashed and burned" I was lucky enough once to have an instructor who not only pulled the throttle where you'd leat expect it without any warning, but kept distracting me aggressively all the way down with "we're gonnae die!" which made me realise we weren't looking for than smooth end landing onto the airstrip or a perfect paddock.

 

Some people in the past have excused engine-out practice by saying that if they were landing a glider, they wouldn't have an engine either, but that's not exactly true. In a normal landing, when you come in on approach throttle you can back the throttle off if you're a little high or give it more throttle if you're a little low. In a glider, by comparison you come in high, then when you're able to guarantee a landing over the threshold you apply airbrake, or if you're low, you use the additional lift factor to get up over the fence.  

 

However, the biggest factor that makes engine out landing practice deadly is wind shear. If you've experienced it you'll know exactly what I'm about to say; if you haven't, you'll have many different thoughts on your mind right now including what exactly wind shear is (we have a thread on this from about ten years ago covering the span of these thoughts.

 

Over many years I've experienced two, both times with instructors on board, both on late final.

 

In the first one, I adjusted throttle when I noticed the initial sink, and the Instructor slammed on full throttle as we started to drop like a rock. Left alone, even after years of flying, I would have killed us, but through his action we overcame the shear and cleared the ground.

 

On the second one I slammed on full throttle as I felt the drop.....and beat the Instructor, the top gun who was yelling "we're gonna die" in the forced landing I mentioned before. Nothing like past experience.

 

If you give away this redundancy by practicing engine-out landings, you'd most likely be dead in either of those cases.

 

 

 

 

 

[Jabiru7252]

23 hours ago, cooperplace said:

I practice engine-out landings all the time in the Jab, and actually it doesn't fly too badly. Not the same as with power, but very controllable. It helps if you have practiced.

The Jabiru J170 with its big wing flies very nice with the power back to idle. The fact that the J170 wants to keep flying makes it harder to land in a small paddock when the engine stops.