Bonanza down at Long Island Airport

I’m getting to the point of wondering if I want to stay in the game anymore. Too many small planes going down it seems.
 
Summertime is the worst.
I’m getting to the point of wondering if I want to stay in the game anymore. Too many small planes going down it seems.
 
I’m getting to the point of wondering if I want to stay in the game anymore. Too many small planes going down it seems.
Nah, thats just perception. Its always been this bloody. Landlady late husband perished on a botched go around in a bonanza almost 30 years ago, while she waited for him at the terminal. Same MO and general demographics as always have been.

If you severely limit the weather profile, don't fly at night, and exercise max schedule flexibility, It's not that bad, other than the engine clapping out on ya one day, which it will of you stay in the hobby long enough.
 
I’m getting to the point of wondering if I want to stay in the game anymore. Too many small planes going down it seems.
Yep, I feel that. And lots of riders going down around me too!
 
In 2022 in Florida, there were 3,434 car fatalities or 9.5/day. No one is thinking "I might hang up my car keys". We now have POA folks that peruse the internet daily and report any aircraft accident. So we are seeing a lot more. No idea if the actual rates are going up though.
 
They're not going up. And most of them still happen because we don't want to learn from the previous mistakes and keep repeating them.

I've been looking at this a bit more. Could only see a few frames with the wreckage in a news video, but it seemed to be on airport property.

The ADS-B track looks strange.

N1089W.jpg

Altitude is never above 0, and his speed is decreasing towards the end of the runway. This was reported as an intersection departure, I wonder if he ran out of runway and pulled it into a stall/spin.
 
Nah, thats just perception. Its always been this bloody. Landlady late husband perished on a botched go around in a bonanza almost 30 years ago, while she waited for him at the terminal. Same MO and general demographics as always have been.

If you severely limit the weather profile, don't fly at night, and exercise max schedule flexibility, It's not that bad, other than the engine clapping out on ya one day, which it will of you stay in the hobby long enough.
Not sure about that … I remember reading that engine failure rate was something around 1 per 10 000 hours ( and thats all failures not just catastrophic ones ) which suggests to me that your average GA pilot with 2k hours or so total has a pretty good chance of not having to deal with this issue ever.
 
I'm guessing they regretted doing an intersection takeoff at some point during this climb out....
 
On average, someone dies in a car wreck in the US every 15 minutes.
How many people are driving in any given 15 minute period vs how many are flying as PIC? How many of those car accidents were solely because the driver wasn’t skilled enough as a driver or because the weather turned too bad for the car to handle? Comparing car accidents to aircraft accidents isn’t even remotely the same thing.

Flying is intolerant of minor mistakes which makes it a risky hobby. You can do everything possible to reduce risk but it’s never going to be zero. There have been some very long accomplished pilots who ended up dead because they made one small mistake after decades of flying. You either accept that every flight has the potential to be your last or you give it up either temporarily until your risk tolerance gets lowered or you stop flying altogether if it doesn’t. There is risk in everything you do but flying is just inherently more risky than most common activities that people engage in. Some people are ok with that and others are not.
 
For the pilots who are VFR only, summer is the time when they fly the most. If they are rusty because they are not flying during the winter months, then it stands to reason that summer would be when we see an uptick in GA accidents. I'm not bashing VFR pilots, it's just a statistical observation. Obviously, some of these pilots may have been instrument-rated, commercial, instructors, etc. but, at least up north, there do tend to be fewer available days for VFR pilots in the other 3 seasons.
 
"But is it safe? THINK, of the children..."

Ok, I'm back from the bathroom.
Seriously, though, I've NEVER taken an insection departure ("resist.......!.......") in the Seneca. It just kills V1 vs V2.
.....And, the accident report always reads....like a mistake was made.
 
This is the stuff that really freaks me out as a student pilot. I know it might not make sense and maybe it’s sensationalized a bit on the internet, but it seems like it’s all I hear. I’m 45, firefighter, ride a motorcycle (‘73 Honda scrambler not a rocket) so I’m not new to risk, but those things at least have an illusion of control. Being up there and losing an engine still freaks me out. My CFI definitely preaches best glide, wings level, walk away. Same with failure on takeoff…. Nose down not to stall, best glide, find something out in front-ish, but as much as we practice emergency operations, as we do often, you still hope you react accordingly and even then are fortunate enough to not be over the business if/when it happens.

I have been asking myself…. If I keep her fueled up, stay out of the weather, plan my routes ahead, always have an alternate, and pay close attention to my speed and AOA, how risky is it? I guess it’s an impossible question. It’s just so dang fun to fly.

My condolences to the folks affected by this crash.
 
This is the stuff that really freaks me out as a student pilot. I know it might not make sense and maybe it’s sensationalized a bit on the internet, but it seems like it’s all I hear. I’m 45, firefighter, ride a motorcycle (‘73 Honda scrambler not a rocket) so I’m not new to risk, but those things at least have an illusion of control. Being up there and losing an engine still freaks me out. My CFI definitely preaches best glide, wings level, walk away. Same with failure on takeoff…. Nose down not to stall, best glide, find something out in front-ish, but as much as we practice emergency operations, as we do often, you still hope you react accordingly and even then are fortunate enough to not be over the business if/when it happens.

I have been asking myself…. If I keep her fueled up, stay out of the weather, plan my routes ahead, always have an alternate, and pay close attention to my speed and AOA, how risky is it? I guess it’s an impossible question. It’s just so dang fun to fly.

My condolences to the folks affected by this crash.
I think everything is sensationalized on the internet nowadays. The good, the bad, the ugly. I personally read all of these reports, subscribe to Aviation Safety and read all the reports, watched every episode of Air Disasters. There is so much that can be learned from every incident. Many are getting into bad situations with weather, get there itis, forcing a landing. Others are failures of the powerplant or airframe. Sometimes it really is just bad luck. Every time I fly I try to do everything in my control to reduce risk for this flight and if I ever really need to get somewhere, I fly commercial.

This comes from someone who, against all odds I would assume, was struck by 3 bicycles last summer while walking on the sidewalk.
 

and yet getting into med school is super competitive and being a doctor is so desirable.
 
This comes from someone who, against all odds I would assume, was struck by 3 bicycles last summer while walking on the sidewalk.
On three different occasions? Holy crap
 
This is the stuff that really freaks me out as a student pilot.
This is for you, and everyone else that has doubts about GA. I have copied the text of the reddit post, just in case it disappears, but link is below as well:
I had this same question a year ago and decided to “do my own research.”
I made a spreadsheet of every US fatal accident from 2016 and 2017 in “my type” of flying, which I defined as part 91, piston engine, non-experimental (n=~250). You know, flying for a $100 hamburger or to get the family from A to B or whatever. Im not assuming anything about the experimental accident rate; I just didn’t want to take the time to filter out parts of that world that don’t apply to me. I’m instrument rated, so I didn’t limit the search to VFR stuff. This turned out not to matter much.
I then read the NTSB final for each accident and capriciously and unilaterally categorized them into the following bins and brief descriptions:
Hold My Beer: this is for stuff like the pilot was on cocaine and drunk during the flight, the plane was over gross and 5 years out of annual, AND he took off VFR into IMC without getting a Wx briefing.
Stupid: Pilot ignored some fundamental steps in the process, but it wasn’t an obvious suicide mission from the get go. This is stuff like trying to make a 6-hour flight on 5-hour gas tanks, attempting a takeoff that even a glimpse at the POH’s Takeoff Performance page would have told you was never going to work, VFR into IMC that wasn’t intentional but should have known it was coming, and thrill-seeking. I mean no disrespect to the dead with the “stupid” title.
Swiss Cheese / Stick and Rudder: this is for stuff where with good training and skills, you should be able to fly out of it, but if you’re honest with yourself, it could get you. Unfortunate and atypical encounters with wake turbulence, nasty wind on landing, partial panel in turbulent IMC.
Fate Is The Hunter, with compliments to Earnest Gann: these are the nightmare-fuel ones, the ones that are uncomfortable to read because you know that despite whatever you might tell yourself about your skills and decision-making, there was no escaping death in that plane on that day. A bird strike by a bald eagle removed the horizontal stabilizer. Some NORDO idiot drops out of the sky onto your high-wing plane when you’re on final. Engine failure at 200’ AGL with no good options.
The final tally: HMB: 29% Stupid: 33% Swiss Cheese: 17% Fate is the Hunter: 10%
You’ll note they don’t add up to 100%. I set aside suicides, of which there were a surprising amount and reports where it was just really hard to figure out what on earth happened.
What have we learned here? People do astonishingly dumb stuff in planes. I would tell anyone who asked me to be very careful about who they get in a small airplane with.
On the other hand, you can handily disregard ~65% of this stuff if you are a pilot who uses even a modicum of care in your flying! Just don’t
10% in the “Fate” category is more than I was hoping, but whatcha gonna do? Not fly? Get real.
That 17% is what catches my eye. That’s the stuff you can really protect against by treating this thing more seriously than a hobby. Do the unfun, expensive, but important hours with a CFI, even when you’re not working on a rating. Deeply inconvenience and disappoint your passengers when taking off just really isn’t the right decision that day.
That’s all I’ve got!

 
and yet getting into med school is super competitive and being a doctor is so desirable.
Not like it used to be. Been practicing for more time than I care to remember, and from as long as can remember all I ever wanted to be was a doctor. It used to be a field where taking care of patients was the top priority, now days there are so many constraints, taking care of patients seems to be an afterthought. It is sad what the government, insurance companies, and hospitals have done to medicine. Unfortunately, in todays world many medical decisions though appearing to have been made by doctors are anything but.
 
Yeah, I watched that one the other day and cringed the whole way through. Not just weak ADM, complete absence of ADM.

How does someone reach the point of being able to purchase and pilot a PC-12 and not have the judgement necessary to scrub a flight that's overweight, out of balance, and into massively unsafe conditions?

Money. If you have lots of it then buying a nice plane is like buying a jet ski.

You either got that money from being highly successful in most everything you do, or it was handed to you. Both can lead to bad endings with aircraft.
 
Yep, I feel that. And lots of riders going down around me too!

Although they have similar risk profiles, I'm super comfortable on a motorcycle, probably due to experience. I have nearly four decades and well over 1 million miles on two wheels (stopped keeping track over a decade ago) and feel that I have it pretty well figured out. Yes, someone could take me out tomorrow, but I think my chances are good.

The last thing I ever think about when riding is "Is this the corner where the engine will lock up and throw me into the woods?" Modern motorcycle engines, like modern automobile engines, just don't fail. The probability is SO low that it's not even a thought.

In the plane, however, every flight I think "Is this the day the engine ****s the bed?"

Fate Is The Hunter, with compliments to Earnest Gann: these are the nightmare-fuel ones, the ones that are uncomfortable to read because you know that despite whatever you might tell yourself about your skills and decision-making, there was no escaping death in that plane on that day. A bird strike by a bald eagle removed the horizontal stabilizer. Some NORDO idiot drops out of the sky onto your high-wing plane when you’re on final. Engine failure at 200’ AGL with no good options.

I think the McSpadden crash really got to me. Here is a guy with far more training, experience, and skills than I will ever have, yet when the fan quit that was it. My home drome does not offer any easy outs, an engine out at 200ft means I pick the softest looking trees and pray.

I probably need to fly more, but man, why are GA piston engines so terrible? If $30-50k car engines failed at the rate GA engines do, manufacturers would go out of business.
 
I probably need to fly more, but man, why are GA piston engines so terrible? If $30-50k car engines failed at the rate GA engines do, manufacturers would go out of business.
HOw bad are the failure rates? Any stats that you can share?
 
My home drome does not offer any easy outs, an engine out at 200ft means I pick the softest looking trees and pray.
My CFI (I hit the CFI jackpot) who is an Air Force Colonel, has a ton of experience in various aircraft, was a C-130 pilot and instructor, and just a super positive and awesome guy insists that even in the canopy .... best glide, wings level... you will walk away. He maintains, obviously, yes... there is a risk of course, nothing is without it, but if you do your part and have the discipline to go wings level at best glide... you will 99% walk away. We are of course in an old 172. Obviously that profile changes with different aircraft. We are also on the east coast, not in redwood country. While that may be a bit optimistic, I think it is mostly accurate. I also have 42 hours so that is nothing relatively speaking. As he says... best glide, wings level and you walk, or pull back and stall/spin and you have virtually 0 chance.

All that said I think the thread might be getting hijacked a bit. Sorry if my post contributed to that.
 
I probably need to fly more, but man, why are GA piston engines so terrible? If $30-50k car engines failed at the rate GA engines do, manufacturers would go out of business.
As someone currently a pedestrian on account of it, I can tell you it's the 50k tag what grinds my gears, not the lackluster reliability, and I got the t-shirt on the latter.

As I've said before, I don't mind settling for trash, I just want trash prices for the concession.

The answer to your rhetorical question is the same as it always has been: low economies of scale and regulatory capture leading to captive audience dynamics. Automotive space has strength in numbers wrt consumer advocacy, so you dont get bent over nearly as frequently. The standard song and dance around here by contrast is "nOT cHeAP, iT iS wUt it iS", which again I argue it's a "not the bug, but the feature" argument from some within that peanut gallery. But I digress on that.
 
My CFI (I hit the CFI jackpot) who is an Air Force Colonel, has a ton of experience in various aircraft, was a C-130 pilot and instructor, and just a super positive and awesome guy insists that even in the canopy .... best glide, wings level... you will walk away. He maintains, obviously, yes... there is a risk of course, nothing is without it, but if you do your part and have the discipline to go wings level at best glide... you will 99% walk away. We are of course in an old 172. Obviously that profile changes with different aircraft. We are also on the east coast, not in redwood country. While that may be a bit optimistic, I think it is mostly accurate. I also have 42 hours so that is nothing relatively speaking. As he says... best glide, wings level and you walk, or pull back and stall/spin and you have virtually 0 chance.

All that said I think the thread might be getting hijacked a bit. Sorry if my post contributed to that.
I know 5 pilots that have experience an engine failure, and every one of them walked away. I'm one of the 5. Every one of them flies GA regularly.
 
Although they have similar risk profiles, I'm super comfortable on a motorcycle, probably due to experience. I have nearly four decades and well over 1 million miles on two wheels (stopped keeping track over a decade ago) and feel that I have it pretty well figured out. Yes, someone could take me out tomorrow, but I think my chances are good.

The last thing I ever think about when riding is "Is this the corner where the engine will lock up and throw me into the woods?" Modern motorcycle engines, like modern automobile engines, just don't fail. The probability is SO low that it's not even a thought.

In the plane, however, every flight I think "Is this the day the engine ****s the bed?"



I think the McSpadden crash really got to me. Here is a guy with far more training, experience, and skills than I will ever have, yet when the fan quit that was it. My home drome does not offer any easy outs, an engine out at 200ft means I pick the softest looking trees and pray.

I probably need to fly more, but man, why are GA piston engines so terrible? If $30-50k car engines failed at the rate GA engines do, manufacturers would go out of business.
I totally hear you. I am very comfortable on my bikes as well. I do ride oldies though... I am hoping their Japanese motors stay strong!
 
I know 5 pilots that have experience an engine failure, and every one of them walked away. I'm one of the 5. Every one of them flies GA regularly.
Just realized I know 6. But one ejected and rode a chute down so that doesn’t count anyway.
 
I think the McSpadden crash really got to me
Keep in mind there's a good chance he wasn't at the controls, and being a disciplined pilot he probably didn't try to take over or second-guess the owner.

Going back to the current accident, what baffles me is the choice of an intersection departure at an airport without a lot of options to put it down if something goes wrong.
 
On three different occasions? Holy crap
LOL, yep. Twice coming to a corner where the building blocks the view around. One wasn't too bad. One knocked me on my rear. Third was from behind as they tried to negotiate around another pedestrian and clipped me. That one was particularly annoying because there was a bike lane on the road 5 feet away.
 
The answer to your rhetorical question is the same as it always has been: low economies of scale and regulatory capture leading to captive audience dynamics. Automotive space has strength in numbers wrt consumer advocacy, so you dont get bent over nearly as frequently. The standard song and dance around here by contrast is "nOT cHeAP, iT iS wUt it iS", which again I argue it's a "not the bug, but the feature" argument from some within that peanut gallery. But I digress on that.
I've seen a lot of the blah blahs about regulatory requirements, insurance, liability, etc. I get the economies of scale angle, but still the prices are insane for what you get. That made me wonder though, has anyone ever gone after Lycoming after a loss of power/powerplant caused a crash? I'm assuming you'd have to show some sort of negligence to get any real money.

I was just thinking in this particular case, is someone going to go after the engine manufacturer or overhaul shop if it turns out to be a loss of engine? I'm guessing not.
 
Yes, grieving widows and high net worth estates have been known to sue big pocket bystanders as named defendants in rich guy fatality cases. I'm not in the camp that believes liability is the root cause of costs being so outsized relative to what these things are in recreational aviation, but it certainly doesn't help.
 
Shoot, you had me scared there for a second. I live on "Long Island Airport" though not THAT one.
We did have a Bonanza hit power lines after departing our place (pilot stupidity) once and it showed up under our location in the accident reprots.
 
I’m getting to the point of wondering if I want to stay in the game anymore. Too many small planes going down it seems.
I think you're just looking for an excuse, and that's a lame one.
 
I think you're just looking for an excuse, and that's a lame one.

Could be. I just haven’t had a burning desire to fly. As my old farmer grandfather used to say, “**** or get off the pot.”
 
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