Mooney down at ORF

Cruiser said:
I am not going back to read all 4 pages of 80 messages but when did we decide that fuel was a problem? Did I miss something about running out of fuel?

The flight was originally planned for Suffolk Executive (KSFQ) and they made an attempt and missed approach there, decided to go to their alternate which was Norfolk.
They were on the second attempt at the alternate (KORF)

The transcript clearly shows they were in moderate to severe turbulence (by mention of stuff flying around in the cockpit and the gyro's precessing so bad the pilot couldn't read them) he was given a no-gyro approach. He missed.
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On the ATC tape recorded by liveATC.net the pilot tells ATC they have 1.5 hours of fuel on board then later comes back and says he thinks they actually only have about 30 min on board. That was around 10 min before the crash.
 
Cruiser said:
I am not going back to read all 4 pages of 80 messages but when did we decide that fuel was a problem? Did I miss something about running out of fuel?

The flight was originally planned for Suffolk Executive (KSFQ) and they made an attempt and missed approach there, decided to go to their alternate which was Norfolk.
They were on the second attempt at the alternate (KORF)

The transcript clearly shows they were in moderate to severe turbulence (by mention of stuff flying around in the cockpit and the gyro's precessing so bad the pilot couldn't read them) he was given a no-gyro approach. He missed.
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You can hear the pilot telling ATC that he had miscalculated his fuel state as 1:30, but he now estimates it as only 0:30 remaining. This is just as the final no-gyro approach begins. Around 8 minutes later they crash.
Also, he didn't "miss" the final no-gyro approach, since he reported runway in sight just before the crash (you can hear the TWR telling that to the rescue crews later on).
 
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Henning said:
I'm always surprised when people choose to fly in conditions like this.:(
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Things can change and the controllers along a several hour long trip might not pass the word to you. On my last trip home from Florida to NC I was cruising fat dumb and happy on top of the clouds. Until I noticed with my ads-b weather that the decent forecast for my destination was turning into widespread LIFR.

I made it home fine but only after stopping 1 hour short of my destination. I topped off on fuel, then took a few minutes to sit down in the FBO and take my time making the decision to continue or not.
 
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100hr student about to take PPL check ride next month. Question for you with instrument ratings: A friend with approx. 5000hrs in everything from helicopter to twin with all the ratings said that he isn't current in his mind if he hasn't flown IFR in past 2-3 mos, and I wondered what you all consider your minimum recent flying time for going out in IFR conditions? Seem that bunches of IR pilots crash but on reviewing the data it looks like many haven't flown IFR in months or ...years! Wondered if this pilot's time in the last year flying rough IFR was adequate even w rating.
 
dell30rb said:
Things can change and the controllers along a several hour long trip might not pass the word to you. On my last trip home from Florida to NC I was cruising fat dumb and happy on top of the clouds. Until I noticed with my ads-b weather that the decent forecast for my destination was turning into widespread LIFR.



I made it home fine but only after stopping 1 hour short of my destination. I topped off on fuel, then took a few minutes to sit down in the FBO and take my time making the decision to continue or not.
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That kind of stuff happens, but the weather here last night wasn't a surprise in this case. This sounds a whole lot like gethereitis.
 
When my father got his IFR ticket, he was told he now has a license to kill himself.
 
jhoyt said:
100hr student about to take PPL check ride next month. Question for you with instrument ratings: A friend with approx. 5000hrs in everything from helicopter to twin with all the ratings said that he isn't current in his mind if he hasn't flown IFR in past 2-3 mos, and I wondered what you all consider your minimum recent flying time for going out in IFR conditions? Seem that bunches of IR pilots crash but on reviewing the data it looks like many haven't flown IFR in months or ...years! Wondered if this pilot's time in the last year flying rough IFR was adequate even w rating.
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I am not far short of your friend's hours and also rated in both helis and fixed wing, and I consider myself not current for low IFR if I haven't flown approaches in the last couple of weeks. In fact, I consider every single day I don't fly as a slight reduction in currency, proficiency and safety for both IFR and VFR.
 
MyassisDragon said:
But the bigger surprise to me is the planned fatigue of someone trying to land with close to planned fuel minimums LIFR after coming off 6-1/2 hours of flying. They left key west at 8:30pm and planned landing around 3:30 am.
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That was the first and biggest thing that stood out to me too.
Henning said:
I was kinda wondering if he ran out of fuel. The only reason I can think that someone would chose to make that flight is riding a killer tailwind that would disappear by morning. I don't know what his wind were, just me trying to figure out why he would launch, and sadly, "saving gas money" and "skipping a fuel stop" are high on the list of reasons pilots kill themselves.
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Yep, I've made an awful lot of flight planning decisions around killer tailwinds.
dell30rb said:
Things can change and the controllers along a several hour long trip might not pass the word to you. On my last trip home from Florida to NC I was cruising fat dumb and happy on top of the clouds. Until I noticed with my ads-b weather that the decent forecast for my destination was turning into widespread LIFR.

I made it home fine but only after stopping 1 hour short of my destination. I topped off on fuel, then took a few minutes to sit down in the FBO and take my time making the decision to continue or not.
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Sounds like the flight I made from Key West to Durham NC the day that Sandy rolled up the east coast. I was very aware that Sandy was moving away from NC and was scheduled to plow into NYC that evening. I saw the possibility of a non-stop flight from KEYW given the winds. The fact that I took off into Sandy's low pressure system in KEYW hinted at its strength.

The winds weren't quite as favorable as hoped and I hit some icy clouds over SC. Ended up landing at KSOP for fuel.

That delay turned the final 30 minutes into a night flight. Forty knot winds and scattered clouds would have been no problem in the light of day. At night it turned a bit hairy.... thanks RDU approach controllers for the help!

The accident flight reminded me of the seductive nature of flying in CAVU towards a retreating mess at the destination. As long as you leave good options open and you are willing to use them, it's okay. Low fuel after 6 hours of night flying (probably after 12+ hours of wakeful fun) is not so okay.
 
If the name on Mooneyspace is correct, the PIC was a Professor of Counseling Psychology. Pretty ironic...
 
rocketflyer84 said:
TAF for the area around the time of the incident:

FM040800 22014KT 4SM -DZ BR OVC004



METAR for the area around the time of the incident:

KORF 040930Z AUTO 22018KT 3SM BR OVC002 08/07 A2992 RMK AO2 PK WND 22027/0920 T00830072 TSNO



+ Reporting to ATC having only 30 min of fuel on board well before landing (as heard on the ATC recording)



+ Apparent instrumentation issues in dealing with IMC (as heard on the ATC recording)



I will wait for the NTSB report and see what they say, but based on the above it sounds like there were a lot of entirely preventible things that went wrong on that flight.
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Was there any airmets, sigmets for the moderate turbulence the pilot reported?
 
jhoyt said:
100hr student about to take PPL check ride next month. Question for you with instrument ratings: A friend with approx. 5000hrs in everything from helicopter to twin with all the ratings said that he isn't current in his mind if he hasn't flown IFR in past 2-3 mos, and I wondered what you all consider your minimum recent flying time for going out in IFR conditions? Seem that bunches of IR pilots crash but on reviewing the data it looks like many haven't flown IFR in months or ...years! Wondered if this pilot's time in the last year flying rough IFR was adequate even w rating.
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I think everyone is a little different. For me, I find that my comfort and skill flying approaches is more a factor of currency flying in general versus how many approaches I have logged in recent time.

Coming back from 7+ month deployments and then going up with a CFI to do some approaches under the hood, I found it rather taxing and required a lot of effort to keep within IR Checkride mins. I was able to do it, but the workload was high and the flying very sloppy.

On the other hand, I have gone several months without logging an approach and feeling perfectly comfortable flying an approach to mins in actual. But, I should point out that while I may not log an approach in several months, I file IFR a lot and even when I am flying visual approaches, I dial up the localizer/ILS and have the approach out, so I do get some practice along the way. It should also be noted that while I am comfortable going several months since my last logged approach, you better believe that I plan some outs and have a solid alternate plan that is well above IFR alternate mins.

I'll also say that I fully expect to re-evaluate my viewpoint on the subject as I age ((41 now) and find that my reaction time gets slower.
 
simtech said:
When I got my IR the DPE told me to avoid the clouds like the plague.
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When I finally got my IR, I found the clouds kept running away! Before the IR, it always seemed like I was scrubbing flights due to low ceilings, but once I had the rating, they either were never present when I wanted to fly or they were full of ice.
 
simtech said:
When I got my IR the DPE told me to avoid the clouds like the plague.
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Like much of my IR training, my IR checkride was in IMC, so my DPE would have been nuts to say that. :)
 
Looking at flightaware, I wonder if they may have been flying that late trying to beat the storm, rather than it just being a planned flight at 3 or 4am. That guy might have been way tired. I know I would have been if I tried to fly that late at night.
 
N801BH said:
From the position of the blue tarp covering the body/bodies.. It looks like they were thrown out the right front window....:sad::sad::sad::sad:

I can't figure out why the yellow tarp in on the rear of the fuselage..:dunno::dunno::confused:
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Protect autopilot gear in the empennage from water intrusion before it can get tested?:dunno: My only guess.
 
Rcmutz said:
Very interesting groundspeed and altitude trace in the final minutes of the flight.
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Strange that altitude and speed rise simultaneously, especially the 200kt spike, makes me suspect that the graph info is not quite correct. This would not be a unique anomaly in reporting from Flight Aware.
 
Fearless Tower said:
That kind of stuff happens, but the weather here last night wasn't a surprise in this case. This sounds a whole lot like gethereitis.
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Maybe... and the time of day is telling. I have pulled some very long flying days but they end a few hours after dark, not at 4:30 AM
 
teejayevans said:
Was there any airmets, sigmets for the moderate turbulence the pilot reported?
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Don't have historical data for that, but judging from my memory of what the winds aloft charts looked like last night Id be extremely surprised if there were no turbulence airmets / sigmets.

The forecast for that area wasn't good at all. Unclear why a decision was made to fly into that mess... especially at that hour, after flying for so long and with so little fuel.
 
dell30rb said:
Maybe... and the time of day is telling. I have pulled some very long flying days but they end a few hours after dark, not at 4:30 AM
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Exactly, and 4am is the absolute worst time to be dealing with this type of stuff.
 
May they rest in peace,no fire after the crash,went missed twice,may have run out of gas.
 
JasonM said:
Looking at flightaware, I wonder if they may have been flying that late trying to beat the storm, rather than it just being a planned flight at 3 or 4am. That guy might have been way tired. I know I would have been if I tried to fly that late at night.
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What storm? It was just LIFR and fog here. The rain and ice are coming tomorrow.
 
N801BH said:
From the position of the blue tarp covering the body/bodies.. It looks like they were thrown out the right front window....:sad::sad::sad::sad:

I can't figure out why the yellow tarp is on the rear of the fuselage..:dunno::dunno::confused:
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For some reason I have seen this on some small local crashes recently where no one was injured and assumed they were covering the tail number before the names of survivors ( or victims) were officially released.


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Alternate selection was not good. 23 nm gets one to ORF, with 200 foot ceilings and 2.5 miles, plus winds of 19 gusting 23 . An additional 37 nm gets one to RIC, with 700, 9 miles, and 13 knot winds. Both alternates were downwind of SFQ, so quick to get to.

A 30 knot ground speed, as reported by ATC, implies big headwinds -- 50 knots or more. Having that shear to 23 knots in a thousand feet or so would provide some impressive windshear. I've landed under similar conditions, and the gyro instruments were bouncing around si much I thought I had an AI failure. Either the turbulence or a strong crosswind could produce symptoms of precession.
 
RotorDude said:
Like much of my IR training, my IR checkride was in IMC, so my DPE would have been nuts to say that. :)
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My checkride was rescheduled due to IMC. He was fine with me doing everything in IMC (after all I had a whopping 6 hrs of actual:)) except unusual attitude recovery. So he wanted 3000ft minimum and the day of the ride was at 800 so we did the oral and the ride later.
 
simtech said:
My checkride was rescheduled due to IMC. He was fine with me doing everything in IMC (after all I had a whopping 6 hrs of actual:)) except unusual attitude recovery. So he wanted 3000ft minimum and the day of the ride was at 800 so we did the oral and the ride later.
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"Everything" should at the very least include approaches, and that would be hard to do IMC with ceilings more than 500' or so.
In my own case the DPE must have trusted my CFII for unusual attitudes so he skipped that, and focused instead on approaches in IMC.
 
Rcmutz said:
Very interesting groundspeed and altitude trace in the final minutes of the flight.
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Henning said:
Strange that altitude and speed rise simultaneously, especially the 200kt spike, makes me suspect that the graph info is not quite correct. This would not be a unique anomaly in reporting from Flight Aware.
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If you look at the detailed log, it appears as if the slow speeds are when shooting an approach and on a SW heading. The high speeds are when going missed and on a NE heading. The speeds and altitudes make sense with that in mind. It appears as if he was shooting the GPS 22.
 
Henning said:
Why is he had tying 200kts though?
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Because there was 75k winds, that's why he had the low ground speeds. And if he ran into some wind shear while on final, he could have easily stalled.
 
rbridges said:
http://mooneyspace.com/topic/14699-mooney-down-in-norfolk/page-3

look at post #45
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That's just TAFs and METARs so no winds aloft, but I had looked at the lower altitude winds aloft forecast charts for that evening for 3k and 6k ft for unrelated reasons and did note that it was really nasty in the area where the accident occurred.

The conditions reported on the ATC recordings re serious IMC, turbulence, very strong winds were all exactly as forecast for that region (per my memory of the forecast). None of that was a freak occurrence or something that shouldn't have been expected by the pilot--unless of course they didn't get a proper briefing and weren't monitoring the weather in flight.

As for the exact cause of the final crash, let's wait and see what the NTSB says but seems very likely it's going to either be fuel exhaustion on short final or a wind-sheer induced stall. Given the conditions the pilot was reporting on the radio it should have been a clear case for an abort and move to alternate with better conditions.

Unfortunately various poor decisions that led up to that point mean that there weren't really any good alternates in the area (in fact Norfolk International was being used as an alternate after the first attempted airport was also a mess) and the low fuel state of the airplane meant the only choice at that point was to push a landing at KORF or ditch somewhere.
 
Some interesting/better photos of the crash site in today's Virginia Pilot paper.

Good perspective of where the wreckage sits in relation to the airport. The airplane came to rest about 2000' from the runway. It is exactly abeam the threshold and pretty much aligned with the intended runway (23), but obviously upside down. The nose and spinner are intact (no apparent indication of hitting nose first). The leading edge of both wings show significant crush points (obviously from the large trees) with equal crushing on both sides. Wingtips broken off and next to wreckage.

By all appearances, it hit the ground relatively wings level, but inverted, again still pointing in the direction of the approach path. I could be wrong, but it sure as heck looks to me that they were inverted already prior to entering the trees.

Seems a lot like a low level upset perhaps caused by turbulence/wind.
 
Fearless Tower;1719914[B said:
]Some interesting/better photos[/B] of the crash site in today's Virginia Pilot paper.

Good perspective of where the wreckage sits in relation to the airport. The airplane came to rest about 2000' from the runway. It is exactly abeam the threshold and pretty much aligned with the intended runway (23), but obviously upside down. The nose and spinner are intact (no apparent indication of hitting nose first). The leading edge of both wings show significant crush points (obviously from the large trees) with equal crushing on both sides. Wingtips broken off and next to wreckage.

By all appearances, it hit the ground relatively wings level, but inverted, again still pointing in the direction of the approach path. I could be wrong, but it sure as heck looks to me that they were inverted already prior to entering the trees.

Seems a lot like a low level upset perhaps caused by turbulence/wind.
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Link????

:needpics:
 
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