AT- 3R100 goes from usable to unusable in a second Cockpit video

Oh fudge.....

Man, good thing that didn't end with the plane upside down.
 
Ouch. I got my SP ticket in an AT-4 (Gobosh 700) and can attest that the landing gear is pretty darn robust, but they still don't take kindly to smacking the nosewheel into the ground.
 
No expert here, but it looks to me like he started to yaw to the right and hit first on the left main first and collapse before the nose hit and collapsed. Amy I crazy?
 
Who's the passenger in the right seat?
 
PPC1052 said:
No expert here, but it looks to me like he started to yaw to the right and hit first on the left main first and collapse before the nose hit and collapsed. Amy I crazy?
Click to expand...

I don't think you are, I think it's a combination of flaring too high and not maintaining crosswind input. Looks like the passenger may have been an instructor, he shut everything off after the crash.
 
taking a picture on short final with his cell phone, phone in hand all the way through the crash sequence? no way that guy was the instructor. If he was, holy sh.... :D
 
Zeldman said:
Don't know, but he sure wanted out...
Click to expand...

I was thinking that he was supposed to be instructing cause he knew he plane pretty well, or as you noted, the exit procedure!
 
Mason said:
So why the big white "X" on the (closed?) Runway?
Click to expand...

Displaced threshold marking. The displaced threshold was one of the links in this accident chain, methinks.
 
So... what's going "on" on the right side of the runway? Another plane, probably a tow plane landing in formation in the grass? A sail plane parked and other planes back-taxiing (running up?) adjacent to the pavement? Somehow connected? :dunno:
 
As an instructor that has banged airplanes into runways thousands of times with students (without ever bending metal), a few thoughts:
- The tail of the airplane struck the ground first (you can hear that at 1:04 in the video when the nose attitude was high). This force on the tail tries to pivot the nose down.
- At that very same second, you can see the student shove the stick forward, right before the students head blocks the view of the stick. They always do this when the tail hits, it scares them. This further amplifies the pivoting of the nose.
- Game over.

Where did the instructor mess up? Well. Like anything, there is usually a chain.

I would have had my hands on my lap, calmly relaxed, instead of dicking with the phone. Nervously guarding controls just makes more pilots more nervous. I'd like to have think I would have prevented the tail-strike from occurring in the first place, but, TBH that can be hard sometimes. **** happens fast. The instructor had roughly one second to identify the over-flare and take preventive action. This instructor failed to prevent the over-flare. (Mistake 1)

90% of the time as an instructor, if I come on the controls to prevent a landing crash, there are always two things I am doing:
- Holding the stick/yoke back and resisting the student who wants to shove it forward. This instructor failed to apply any yoke inputs. (Mistake 2)
- Getting on the rudder to straighten **** out. This instructor failed to apply any rudder inputs. (Mistake 3)

Usually as an instructor you don't have an option of using the throttle to help fix a situation. As you can see in the video, this stuff all happens in the matter of a single second. You work with what you can reach in that amount of time (stick/yoke and rudder). Throttle has the students hand on it and there isn't time to work that out.

Like I said. **** happens. Sometimes a student bangs a tail into the ground on an instructor. Yeah, an instructor should have prevented it, but sometimes a mistake happens. In this case though, the instructor made three critical mistakes in a row, and that is usually enough to bend metal.
 
Last edited:
PaulS said:
The comma police are here, lol.
Click to expand...

Sometimes they are needed:

iu
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top