Apparent plane crash on TPC Scottsdale Golf Course
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FlyingTiger
Pre-takeoff checklist
Didn't realize there were GA aircraft with no audible warning. Personally, I would want one, you can miss a light depending in where you are looking, however an audible alarm gets your attention no matter where the eyes are.
WannFly
Final Approach
Not really. Number of people land gear up with gear warning horn blaring
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This will be a really boring NTSB report.
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Pilawt
PA-28s and PA-32s had red stall warning lights on the panel -- no audible horn -- until the mid 1970s or so.
Extreme left edge of the photo on this 1969 Cherokee 140B:
An exceptional pilot would have managed to nurse that plane around a really wide pattern and land back at the airport. This plane was flown by passengers in the front seats.
I can somehow understand how the young kid got this wrong and stuffed all the cute girls he could muster into 'his' plane. I don't get how a UND aviation graduate and ATP could get on board with this suicide mission.
CC268
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CC268
They did it for the kitty
rtk11
Pattern Altitude
The recklessness of it just is mind boggling. We’ve all done stupid things in our youth, but the CFI’s error chain is beyond belief. Aircraft out of annual? W&B concerns? Warm evening? Geez...
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Yeah and no, I just don't understand how an ATP rated CFII would have gone along with this. Unless he was blinded by the kitty.
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Or even the possibility of same.
aftCG
Line Up and Wait
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aftCG
Neither of the planes I currently fly have stall warning systems. I haven't missed them
SoCal RV Flyer
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SoCal RV Flyer
Me too. The stall warning is when you feel the buffet...and I don't mean the all-you-can-eat buffet.
or Warren. Really, just pay attention to the airspeed and don't load up the wings and/or use crazy bank angles in the pattern and you'll be fine. The only time I stall, or get really near one, is in the practice area 3000' up, or 5' off the runway when landing.
PaulS
Touchdown! Greaser!
Do we really know it was over weight? They didn't look like big people.
47PILOT
Pre-takeoff checklist
Let’s talk about what the tower saw that would make him ask if everything was “OK”
Do we know if the plane was in the air when the question was asked?
Do we know if the plane was in the air when the question was asked?
arkvet
Line Up and Wait
I think the simple fact that the tower asked this is pretty telling. In my limited time as a pilot I’ve found that ATC interaction is pretty objective. Comfortable and maybe at times relaxed, but objective. I find the statement “everything ok?” to be somewhat alarming. In my view, tower would only say that if they were pretty certain something was very wrong. I am curious to know what specifically initiated that question.
I really doubt it’s commonplace for any tower controller to ask a question of that nature.
The news story implies that the plane was off the ground when the question was asked, but that may not be accurate.
denverpilot
Tied Down
Probably just a horrible climb rate. That’d be the most obvious thing one would see from the tower.
“That guy barely cleared the fence and used almost all of the runway in a spamcan...”
“That guy barely cleared the fence and used almost all of the runway in a spamcan...”
Who knows, maybe they can retrieve a w&b from one of his 'apps' in the ''cloud' where he carefully calculated how much fuel he had to offload if he filled all six seats with anorexic ballerinas.
Maybe.
The C Comanche I flew had a UL of 1294. 40 gallons of fuel leaves you in fact 175lbs per person. Two of those have to be <200lb combined. To make this work w&b wise you need a unique distribution of weights:
- two Japanese ballerinas for the last row
- two hefty guys for the front row to make the cg work
- two intermediate weights for the middle row
I kind of have the same math problem in the A36TC. Loading six adults would be possible, but it requires careful attention to detail and two who are very lightweight.
denverpilot
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3393RP
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3393RP
It's one thing to speculate about the cause of a crash. It's quite another to pronounce a dead person responsible for the incident and death of five other people.
Your post is odious and unfounded.
Hank S
En-Route
I've been asked that question once, after being cleared to depart an unfamiliar Delta at night. It was my first experience with lots of green lights embedded in the runway centerline, and I taxied slowly away from them before starting my takeoff, prompting Tower to ask if I was alright. Turns out that lining up dead on-center isn't always a great idea . . . .
hindsight2020
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That's valid, but I still think this one goes to Occam's Razor. The tower most likely asked because something in the conditions as-observed pointed to a higher than normal probability of tragedy. And surprise surprise, it did. Occam's razor.
denverpilot
Tied Down
Odious perhaps.
Unfounded, no. Not with the photos we’ve all seen.
Just because it’ll take NTSB a year to write a document doesn’t mean obvious things like being loaded to the extreme of the airframe, aren’t still obvious.
Go pull up a POH for the type and do the W&B and pick whatever weights you want for six adults and see.
And something else for us CFIs that we all know... you could take a photo of us asleep in the back seat, sick, and the official report would still name us as the senior person on board to be partially or fully at fault in almost any accident.
But especially with a student pilot flying.
Even in cases of mechanical failure they’ll still say the emergency landing was botched.
So call the reports themselves “odious” if you like, too. Many do. The reports almost always blame the pilots on board. I bet the stupid Florida wing falling off, they’ll hint that was the pilot’s fault too.
Maybe not since a DPE was on board. That might look bad politically.
Or just slap this on every one of them and NTSB would be happy...
“The pilot’s inability to react to the consequences of something they did a couple of seconds earlier, faster than a superhero, even though our stopwatch says they could have done it, in order to avoid sudden death.”
Wouldn’t surprise me at all if that pilot had never flown anything that heavily loaded or with a significant aft CG. Especially coming out of the school he came out of where there’s always a dispatcher backstopping safety decisions and a super formal process.
Hammering through ratings the only thing you see is two people and fuel and the occasional “student brought the 50 lbs of crap they bought from Sporty’s” flight bag.
But this instructor decides to teach with six aboard? It’s a “training flight” he says on the recording? Mmmm?
The photos don’t back that up. You don’t train with six on board. What are you training? How to be absolutely 100% distracted?
Doesn’t really matter if they find other mechanical causes, that flight was an accident chain well-started long before it left the ground.
Fearless Tower
Touchdown! Greaser!
A lot of early airplanes only have a light.
Then there are oddballs like my Beech 18 that only has a stick shaker.
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Fearless Tower
Touchdown! Greaser!
It also depends on the airplane’s stall characteristics and certification requirements.Me too. The stall warning is when you feel the buffet...and I don't mean the all-you-can-eat buffet.
Really, just pay attention to the airspeed and don't load up the wings and/or use crazy bank angles in the pattern and you'll be fine. The only time I stall, or get really near one, is in the practice area 3000' up, or 5' off the runway when landing.
For example, the 1948 Cessna 170 does not require a stall warning, whereas the 170B (very different wing) is not airworthy without a working stall warning.
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Aztec Flyer
The Comanche C would typically have a useful load +/-1275 lbs. Assuming the so-called FAA standard adult weight of 170 lbs x six, leaves about 255 lbs for fuel and baggage.
arkvet
Line Up and Wait
Not sure where but I thought I remember reading the plane was full fuel at departure. Give them each a VERY conservative 10 lbs baggage and that would allow for about 33 gallons of fuel.
Of course as it’s been noted here that plane can fly over gross if within CG... but given full tanks it could have easily been 200-300 over gross AND aft CG.
With precision it may have been able to do it.
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Aztec Flyer
Full fuel is 56 gallons in the mains + 30 gallons in the outboards. They were only on a roughly 2 hour planned flight I believe, so fuel in all tanks seems unnecessary. Perhaps they just had "full tanks" in the mains? But that would still be 330 lbs of fuel
Sorry I hurt your feelings.
Nothing anonymous about my post. I just don't expect this NTSB report to reveal anything interesting. They will be over gross and at or beyond aft CG. Doing what they did was irresponsible and I have no problem standing by my opinion that the CFI caused the death of five people.
denverpilot
Tied Down
And what exactly does that have to do with what he said about this crash? Did they also overload an airplane and probably put it out of aft CG, while shooting Instagram photos doing it?
hindsight2020
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hindsight2020
I went ahead and found a comanche C W&B, transposed the moment arms into excel, and made it input friendly.
Even if we are to give the Comanche in question 1300lbs useful (the example POH I cited actually admitted an empty weight greater than 2000lbs, giving the acft less than 1200 useful), what is quickly apparent is that the child row loading arrangement is the real killer, even when defueling to only 3 hours of endurance for a scottdale to vegas flight (2hr ETE + 1hr reserve).
Here's a snapshot with a sample acft at 1300 UL, full mains, empty outboards, and male/female arrangement to coincide with the accident, with the very conservative assumption that the females were on average all 120 lbs. Males were assumed at the FAA standard of 170lbs. I also assumed no bags beyond a cursory 10 lbs shoved in the child row legs (what the poh calls the baggage compartment in the B and C PA24):
What is quickly apparent is that even though they're within 60 lbs of the max gross in this conservative no-overnight bag for 6 people scenario (again, yeah right), they're 2/10" from the aft CG limit. This is a much more critical effect for that takeoff in terms of pilot technique, than the fact they were at almost max gross. That airplane is going to be very cantankerous on rotation, and pilot technique will be of critical importance, especially if any flap use was made. This is probably what the tower saw as squirrely enough behavior to pipe up about.
The problem is that these assumptions miss one important element: bags in the child row. I literally added 10 measly lbs per female pax for bags and personal effects to put that row at 260# and boom, CG immediately past allowance by quarter of an inch. Game over. Which perfectly coincides with the POH limitation of 250 lbs in that section. Now add the fact either child row female may not have been sub 120-pounders, plus their personal in-lap bags might have been in the order of 30 lbs combined, and it's not even close. And mind you, the aircraft remains under max gross weight the entire time assuming 1300UL.
IOW, it's very possible to throw the comanche aft of CG without touching the max gross, when you treat the baggage row as a place to put median adults of any gender. You know what we call that? A 4 seat airplane.
My guess is that the CFI wasn't all that familiar with the aircraft loading in question, and the pilot was new to his ownership of the aircraft. They were prob lax in their treatment of the 3rd row loading and it surprised the both of them on takeoff. Add the excitement and "party atmosphere" of a flight in anticipation of the Vegas outing, and one would be likely to treat the loading particulars with non-chalance.
Even if we are to give the Comanche in question 1300lbs useful (the example POH I cited actually admitted an empty weight greater than 2000lbs, giving the acft less than 1200 useful), what is quickly apparent is that the child row loading arrangement is the real killer, even when defueling to only 3 hours of endurance for a scottdale to vegas flight (2hr ETE + 1hr reserve).
Here's a snapshot with a sample acft at 1300 UL, full mains, empty outboards, and male/female arrangement to coincide with the accident, with the very conservative assumption that the females were on average all 120 lbs. Males were assumed at the FAA standard of 170lbs. I also assumed no bags beyond a cursory 10 lbs shoved in the child row legs (what the poh calls the baggage compartment in the B and C PA24):
What is quickly apparent is that even though they're within 60 lbs of the max gross in this conservative no-overnight bag for 6 people scenario (again, yeah right), they're 2/10" from the aft CG limit. This is a much more critical effect for that takeoff in terms of pilot technique, than the fact they were at almost max gross. That airplane is going to be very cantankerous on rotation, and pilot technique will be of critical importance, especially if any flap use was made. This is probably what the tower saw as squirrely enough behavior to pipe up about.
The problem is that these assumptions miss one important element: bags in the child row. I literally added 10 measly lbs per female pax for bags and personal effects to put that row at 260# and boom, CG immediately past allowance by quarter of an inch. Game over. Which perfectly coincides with the POH limitation of 250 lbs in that section. Now add the fact either child row female may not have been sub 120-pounders, plus their personal in-lap bags might have been in the order of 30 lbs combined, and it's not even close. And mind you, the aircraft remains under max gross weight the entire time assuming 1300UL.
IOW, it's very possible to throw the comanche aft of CG without touching the max gross, when you treat the baggage row as a place to put median adults of any gender. You know what we call that? A 4 seat airplane.
My guess is that the CFI wasn't all that familiar with the aircraft loading in question, and the pilot was new to his ownership of the aircraft. They were prob lax in their treatment of the 3rd row loading and it surprised the both of them on takeoff. Add the excitement and "party atmosphere" of a flight in anticipation of the Vegas outing, and one would be likely to treat the loading particulars with non-chalance.
denverpilot
Tied Down
What are the first words in 91.103? Interesting that you chose the word “familiar” isn’t it?
If you aren’t “familiar”, you aren’t legal. And if you’re calling that a “training flight” you missed something important somewhere.
Happy happy Vegas flight with the girls and distractions from all of them shooting Instagram photos or not.
You neglected to be the Pilot In Command and became a passenger on a deadly carnival ride.
Be PIC before being Tour Guide or Friend. Always.
When I first got checked out in a 206, the club required a checkout flight with enough brave souls and ballast on board to bring the plane up to gross weight.
I think they dropped that policy at some point. They don't have a 206 on line anymore, but when I got checked out in a Centurion a few years ago, they didn't require it.
denverpilot
Tied Down
I get what they were doing. I also recommend people moving up in airplane try to get the airplane fully loaded in controlled conditions at least once with another qualified pilot on board, or at least recognize they need to approach the new limits of their new aircraft with respect if they have to do it the first time with passengers.
It’s pretty unlikely that’s what this flight was about.
There’s always a slight chance the instructor and student had sat down and discussed this ahead of time, but the general “feel” from the photos from those involved screams “completely distracted from being PIC” to me.
If the investigators find that the pilot and instructor met early and the passengers showed up later, and they found a written or electronic W&B that matches the human payload and takeoff and landing data on a sheet in a knee board or book in the cockpit, I’ll be quite surprised.
Of course I haven’t stated flatly that the pilot killed these folks, but I have stated I’m convinced they didn’t do their duty as PIC to properly plan for this flight.
In another forum I’ve stated that I think the pilot’s got their training flight they claimed they were on, but it turned out to be training in W&B in the hardest possible way to learn. Hadn’t said that one here yet, but there it is.
I also know of so many accidents where it didn’t matter in the slightest what ratings the pilot held, as soon as they ignored their duties as PIC (or built up a habit of ignoring those duties out of familiarity or neglect or just being naturally lazy, and all of us can fall prey to that, they end up on the news, and someone says they “Died doing what they loved...”
You get sick of it after a while and don’t pull any punches when you see signs of it happening again... hoping maybe someone notices it’s pretty easy to fall into the trap of complacency and decides they’re going to do it right again on their next flight and commit to doing it right.
Also you hope they get it that they should respect and be careful with aircraft type switches or even different model years of some long-produced aircraft. Especially if you’re going to fill all the seats with friends.
You don’t have to care for your own butt solo if you don’t want to, but don’t take people out with you for lack of two minutes of W&B effort in any of the modern electronic tools or five minutes with a chart.
FlyingTiger
Pre-takeoff checklist
Just because gear-ups happen doesn't mean an audible warning isn't better then a light, just means it isn't a perfect warning system. How many gear-ups would we have if there was only a light with no horn?
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Aztec Flyer
So what would constitute a perfect warning system? Two sequential audible warnings with different tones? Maybe three?
FastEddieB
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Fast Eddie B
Thanks for taking the time to put that spreadsheet together.
To be fair, even with a plane right at the rear limit, it should be fully controllable by normal control inputs. A pilot might notice the plane a bit more “squirrelly” if he or she was used to a more forward cg, but not “cantankerous”.
Exceed that limit, and all bets are off, of course.
To be fair, even with a plane right at the rear limit, it should be fully controllable by normal control inputs. A pilot might notice the plane a bit more “squirrelly” if he or she was used to a more forward cg, but not “cantankerous”.
Exceed that limit, and all bets are off, of course.
If your plane gives sufficient aerodynamic buffetting you don't need any sort (aural or visual) indicator.