Bent Caravan Alaska

I'm quite interested in what happened. Ice-induced stall?
 
Wow. Bent the freaking aileron. Perhaps aerodynamically-induced damage? Because that would be simultaneously impressive and terrifying (sounds like it was a wild ride). The airframe inspection should be interesting.
 
A social media post by a passenger said the Wright Air Service Cessna Caravan “twirled upside down twice,”
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Wake turbulence?
 
A few years ago there was a sky diving caravan being ferried which went down because of ice. Loss of control from something like 9k feet.
Discussion at the time was that the caravan doesn't handle ice well at all.
I say good on this pilot for bringing it home
 
aftCG said:
A few years ago there was a sky diving caravan being ferried which went down because of ice. Loss of control from something like 9k feet.
Discussion at the time was that the caravan doesn't handle ice well at all.
I say good on this pilot for bringing it home
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Yeah, that's what they're saying and some of them have experience with Caravan's and ice. There's the usual talk of 'self induced hero' like she probably shouldn't have let it start in the first place, but you have to give a hats off to her recovery. There's no 'evidence' yet it was ice anyway.
 
Kenny Phillips said:
I'm quite interested in what happened. Ice-induced stall?
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Ice induced stall that led to a 2 turn spin with an overspeed or overstress on recovery is the current speculation, but I haven’t talked to anyone who actually has first hand knowledge of what happened.

According to passengers onboard, they went upside-down twice. Kudos to the pilot for getting everyone home safe. She really did a marvelous job, and I don’t think anyone who has criticized her would be anything but a pile of goo on the side of a hill if they were put in a similar situation.

You can go from a perfectly clean airplane to falling out of the sky in a caravan astonishingly fast. I always got a good hee-haw doing my yearly recurrent Caravan icing course looking at pictures of the “severe ice” on the NASA Twotter. You can see stuff substantially worse than their reference pictures on days where ice isn’t even in the forecast.
 
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That's a pretty sharp crease in that aileron and looks to me to have been the result of some sort of impact. How would ice cause that?
 
Capngrog said:
That's a pretty sharp crease in that aileron and looks to me to have been the result of some sort of impact. How would ice cause that?
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POA approved speculation here but that is a Frise type aileron with hinges far enough apart that if operated during severe overspeed it could bend like that
 
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Holy crap!

I have read of similar regarding Caravans and ice and hence that's part of the reason why FedEx has retrofitted all their Caravans to tks

But damn! Good on this pilot!!!!!
 
aftCG said:
POA approved speculation here but that is a Frise type aileron with hinges far enough apart that if operated during severe overspeed it could bend like that
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I think that's some pretty sound speculation, but not knowing much about the Caravan, I was unaware of such a failure mode with the ailerons. Do you know of any other such failures?
 
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