3 Lost in Crash of Beech V35 Bonanza in Williamson County, TN - May 15, 2024
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Yep. It’s just that simple.
But while description of the task is easy, your physiology makes accomplishing it very hard.
Getting an instrument rating is not simple, even though describing it is easy.
Flying a flight simulator is simple. The real airplane, with real acceleration acting on your senses, can be incredibly disorienting.
It’s horrible and tragic.
Makes one start to question some people’s judgment.
This is the 2nd fatal small private aircraft crash in this area within the last couple of months (a family of 5 in a Piper was killed March 4 in a crash directly alongside I-40 in West Nashville - a man, his wife, and 3 young children).
Flying small, private aircraft can be safe. It can also be dangerous if the operator gets in over their head.
I don’t know what happened in this incident, but I know most small plane crashes (probably most plane crashes, period) are due to pilot error.
That is more accurate than most people understand. A pilot will never crash due to, let's say, icing conditions, if he never operates in icing conditions. Light aircraft operators make terrible choices all the time. Even our Pilatus PC-12 struggled terribly with severe icing, due to flying it into an area of known icing up in the northeast. As luck would have it, the de ice boot timer failed and the situation spiraled out of control.
I don't know how much ice built up, as I was not there, I suspect the bottom side of the wings were loaded. I do know the prop was loaded with ice, and the plane could not maintain altitude, and was therefore unable to escape the conditions.
Sure, the PC-12 is certified as an all weather aircraft. However, flying right into the worst conditions possible, in a single engine prop plane, without heated leading edges? Why do that? But what do I know...
With all that in mind, the one thing that can't be controlled is when a hidden mechanical failure will occur. This could be the case with the Bonanza, they are known for this.
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Pilot error is the main reason planes crash.
Pilots flying private aircraft ( small ) have less experience and currency usually , so it's no surprise they would be more likely to be involved in accidents.
FWIW, large aircraft like the A320 are NOT certified to operate in severe icing conditions ( Airbus says 5 mm or more of ice on the ice detector is severe ) . Front wing has 5 slats but only 3, 4, 5 are heated ( tail not heated ). Tail has no anti ice capability, like most big jets ( has to prove it can handle up to 3 inches of ice during certification ).
We cannot land at an airport that has severe icing reported or the weather is showing moderate or heavy freezing rain ( only light freezing rain ). The airport would lose control of the runways if freezing rain was worse than light anyways.
Pilots flying private aircraft ( small ) have less experience and currency usually , so it's no surprise they would be more likely to be involved in accidents.
FWIW, large aircraft like the A320 are NOT certified to operate in severe icing conditions ( Airbus says 5 mm or more of ice on the ice detector is severe ) . Front wing has 5 slats but only 3, 4, 5 are heated ( tail not heated ). Tail has no anti ice capability, like most big jets ( has to prove it can handle up to 3 inches of ice during certification ).
We cannot land at an airport that has severe icing reported or the weather is showing moderate or heavy freezing rain ( only light freezing rain ). The airport would lose control of the runways if freezing rain was worse than light anyways.
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Let’s be certain to revive this thread when the final NTSB report is issued for both incidents.
Yeah , just maybe it wasn't pilot error like most are saying .
Plane crashes/deaths certainly peak people's interest much more than the daily vehicle accident risks we somewhat take for granted.
I tried to find data comparing small airplane flying risk vs. vehicle driving risk, but there is little out there. This one older article suggests that small airplane risk is similar to and/or up to 19 times greater than vehicle transportation (tough to interpret). Still, people's fascination with airplane accidents is interesting to me.
Why Private Planes Are Nearly As Deadly As Cars
Private air travel is far less safe than commercial flights, as highlighted by a recent string of high-profile private plane crashes.
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True, until the report comes out we are only speculating but history has proven that most
small planes that break up in-flight were caused by pilot error.
Flying into a thunderstorm ( pilot error ) or losing control due to spatial disorientation ( JFK Jr ) are both pilot error.
Even failing to deal with instruments that are not working properly, is pilot error ( Air France ).
Probable Cause #1: Breakup In Flight
An aircraft breakup for all to learn from described by corporate pilot and aircraft owner Brian Jacobson.
www.avweb.com
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Driving is far more dangerous.Plane crashes/deaths certainly peak people's interest much more than the daily vehicle accident risks we somewhat take for granted.
I tried to find data comparing small airplane flying risk vs. vehicle driving risk, but there is little out there. This one older article suggests that small airplane risk is similar to and/or up to 19 times greater than vehicle transportation (tough to interpret). Still, people's fascination with airplane accidents is interesting to me.
Why Private Planes Are Nearly As Deadly As Cars
Private air travel is far less safe than commercial flights, as highlighted by a recent string of high-profile private plane crashes.www.livescience.com
You could copy/paste that on track. Average doctor buying more car than they can handle it, skill wise, mechanical knowledge wise, and physical wise. Only difference is that track is far more survivable.
Amusement park rides make use of your vestibular and proprioceptor inputs to make you “feel like” you’re doing something that you’re not.
Those inputs easily override, your visual sense, and become the dominant source of information for your brain to figure out where you are and what’s going on. Those sorts of rides, and full motion flight simulators, take advantage of human physiology to fool you into believing something is happening when it is not.
The magnitude of this doesn’t make sense until you’ve actually flown in the clouds, and had your inner ears screaming at you that you were turning, when the airplane is not turning. It takes a great deal of discipline, as well as training, and practice, to overcome the limitations of human physiology as they apply to aircraft flight.
This is why people who fly flight simulators think they can fly airplanes. Because they are flying something that is artificial, without the acceleration or feel. Their fat butt is in their mom‘s basement, sitting on a seat, at one G, zero knots, and zero acceleration.
Flying a flight simulator, is to real flying, as playing Madden football on a PlayStation, is to the actual game.
Furthermore, you’ve only touched on keeping wings level, heading, and airspeed. You’ve neglected to talk about altitude control, and navigation. So you do need to turn the aircraft, fly a precise, heading, one that compensates for wind in order to maintain the required ground track. Just keeping the wings level is hard enough when faced with spatial disorientation. Navigating, maintaining precise altitude, and spatial awareness are a different matter entirely.
Spatial disorientation - Wikipedia
Amusement park rides make use of your vestibular and proprioceptor inputs to make you “feel like” you’re doing something that you’re not.
Those inputs easily override, your visual sense, and become the dominant source of information for your brain to figure out where you are and what’s going on. Those sorts of rides, and full motion flight simulators, take advantage of human physiology to fool you into believing something is happening when it is not.
The magnitude of this doesn’t make sense until you’ve actually flown in the clouds, and had your inner ears screaming at you that you were turning, when the airplane is not turning. It takes a great deal of discipline, as well as training, and practice, to overcome the limitations of human physiology as they apply to aircraft flight.
This is why people who fly flight simulators think they can fly airplanes. Because they are flying something that is artificial, without the acceleration or feel. Their fat butt is in their mom‘s basement, sitting on a seat, at one G, zero knots, and zero acceleration.
Flying a flight simulator, is to real flying, as playing Madden football on a PlayStation, is to the actual game.
Furthermore, you’ve only touched on keeping wings level, heading, and airspeed. You’ve neglected to talk about altitude control, and navigation. So you do need to turn the aircraft, fly a precise, heading, one that compensates for wind in order to maintain the required ground track. Just keeping the wings level is hard enough when faced with spatial disorientation. Navigating, maintaining precise altitude, and spatial awareness are a different matter entirely.
Spatial disorientation - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Unless you're making a separate point, I didn't neglect altitude and in a move of probable gross oversimplification, I included navigation with "heading" - my perception being that you need to at some point, make a turn to some point on the compass, then return to a wings level state.. Probably a wrong way of looking at it, but remember, I'm just a low hours arm chair rated guy.
I honestly cannot fathom how powerful the sensation is when people overrule the instruments that are no less than incredibly reliable in those sorts of conditions. It must be an inconceivable mess of fear, disbelief and confusion. That has to be a mess of adrenaline and probably a dozen other chemicals rushing through your body. Yikes. But you've got to trust and believe to in order to no auger yourself into the ground, right?
Indeed…….
If you look at a couple of sources for automobile traffic deaths in 2023, the number of fatalities pales thousands of times over compared to general aviation fatalities.
Obviously, one cited source (NHTSA) is an estimate, but let’s just agree on 40,000 killed EVERY SINGLE YEAR on our roadways.
If that happened in general aviation, we’d have Cessnas, Pipers, Beechcraft, Diamonds, Mooneys, etc., raining down upon us daily. That might make the daily news rants……..
NHTSA Launches Put the Phone Away or Pay Campaign; Releases 2023 Fatality Early Estimates | NHTSA
In addition to the new data, the agency also announced the launch of a new distracted driving prevention campaign: Put the Phone Away or Pay.
Traffic Crash Deaths In 2023 Remain At ‘Devastatingly High Level’
More than 44,000 lives were lost in traffic crashes in the United States in 2023, a 13.6% spike compared to pre-pandemic 2019 and demonstrating a "public health crisis.”
www.forbes.com
AOPA releases data on 2023 aircraft incidents, renames report for McSpadden
The AOPA released the 33rd annual safety report, along with a new name to honor a late colleague. The report shows preliminary data for 2023 in comparison with previous years, offering insight to the industry.
www.globalair.com
From the AOPA report cited above, in part:
“With one month left in 2023, the data is still preliminary. As of Nov. 29, 2023, the total number of GA accidents between 2014 and 2023 has dropped, from 1,154 total accidents in 2022 to 717 by late November 2023. The number of fatal accidents has had a far less significant reduction, only dropping by 64, from 183 in 2022 to 119 in 2023. The total accident and fatal accident rate for 2022 and 2023 is not listed, but in 2021 it states a 4.28 total accident rate and a 0.77 total fatal accident rate.
In 2023, non-commercial fixed-wing aircraft suffered 600 accidents, for 604 aircraft (each aircraft involved in an accident is counted separately) and with 102 fatal accidents. The lethality percentage is 17 percent and these accidents resulted in 167 fatalities. The number of accidents as of late November 2023 is down from 967 total accidents and 157 fatal accidents in 2022. There was one pilot-related accident, 27 mechanical, 415 other/unknown and 157 null. For the number of fatal accidents, none were pilot-related, two were mechanical, 91 were other/unknown and nine were null.
The top aircraft involved in non-commercial fixed-wing accidents were single-engine fixed-gear, which covered over 50 percent of the total accidents with 303, and 53 fatal accidents at 51 percent of the total for the year. Single-engine retractable encompassed 17.5 percent with 106 total and 26.2 percent of the fatal accidents with 27. Multiengine aircraft covered six percent of the total crashes with 36 and 13.6 percent of the fatal accidents with 14.”
In summary, I bet more cars kill doctors (and thousands of others) than GA aircraft do.
I’m not making a separate point, and I apologize for assuming you were leaving out the complexity of actual IFR flight-but when a pilot is suffering from a somatogravic illusion, “going wings level” is not easy.
It’s just not possible to extrapolate from every day experience into what that feels like.
It’s been 35+ years since I got my instrument rating, and I have only had the “leans” a few times. Discipline, training, experience, and currency are all required to overcome those sensory inputs that conflict with the actual attitude of the aircraft.
It’s a primacy thing, I think. You learned to walk by the sensations from both your inner ear/vestibular senses and the proprioceptors in your muscles. It’s how you balance when you walk, run, play sports, everything. All the time. Every moment of your life, that is how you orient and balance.
That is far more powerful than looking at an attitude indicator on a panel in front of you. The feeling of “falling over” compels an immediate response from you and that overpowers whatever it is that your eyes see on an artificial horizon.
This is what killed JFK jr. and countless other pilots who found themselves in IFR conditions. What they feel and what they see can’t be reconciled, and feel dominates. This isn’t an effect limited to amateur pilots, the experienced helicopter pilot was flying Kobe Bryant had the same thing happen to him.
Incidentally, that mismatch between what you feel and what you see is a root cause of motion sickness. People can’t reconcile the difference, and nausea is the result. Some folks are more susceptible than others.
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The YouTube Certified accident investigators are starting to put out vidoes on this incident now. Take it with a grain of salt, but, he does not sound like he was a very proficent pilot, as speculated by @Astro14 above. Apparently he was assigned 9000, but ended up at 9500, when they asked him to correct, he started to descend but then ended turned south back towards his point of origination. Then the breakup happened. Spacial disorientation in IMC, perhaps.
How reliable is the eddy current inspection on these? That is what the AD requires on the affected Pipers, correct?Hard landings stress and fatigue-cycle the wing spar on most low wing, small, general aviation aircraft. This is one reason why some Piper aircraft have recently experienced spar cracking. Especially flight school planes.
People have this idea that flying into exceptionally turbulent air is what causes the failures. While that can be so, we now understand that the cracks tend to exist for a great many hours and cycles before ultimate failure. In the case of the 210 spar, the crack was there for 3300 hours! The final failure can happen in straight and level flight, or in the traffic pattern, etc.
Eddy current inspections will find just about any crack. The level 2 and better guys are pretty darn good. Recently, the FAA put out some guidance that prohibited the use of simple dye penetrant for cracks in a helicopter tail rotor blade application. They correctly noted that for the penetrant to match the sensitivity of eddy current, the blade needed to be heated and placed under stress to open a potential crack.