Depends on which door...
There’s a video of that one…I’ll see if I can find it.
During one of my Mooney checkouts, the importance of ensuring the baggage compartment door was properly latched and locked was discussed. I discuss it when I Mooney training.
I was always impressed by the pilot and his SO in this one. Well done.
You are right. Particularly the pilot sounded like this was no big deal. Makes the whole thing so difficult to understand.
Yikes.
Stressor/response behavior can certainly be trained but I have no doubt there is "who you are" piece. But in this case, unless the person in the right seat went crazy, the pilot displayed absolutely no concern that it was anything other than a normal door open event.
He was new in the plane. Had just bought it. I'm betting it's as simple as him not recognizing the stall speed compared to other planes he had flown. I think it's entirely possible that the door didn't contribute much of anything to this sad event.
There are several large assumptions built into that speculation which may or may not be true.
Absolutely, that's why I said "my bet is", rather than "here's what happened". Definitely connecting dots based on incomplete data. But it's a fact that he was a newbie in the plane and my bet is that people aren't given that enough weight in their reading of the situation.
We don't even know that. We have pretty solid information he just bought it, but that's about it. That doesn't mean he's a newbie to the model or to Mooneys in general. He might have been flying it fairly regularly before purchase. He might have several thousand hours of experience in multiple models (this is not a difficult airplane to fly). Even if a newbie, people don't buy a high performance retract and simply hop in with zero training so the "passenger," for that matter, the "pilot" might well have been a CFI providing insurance-required training.
We do know that he managed to fall out of the sky in it.
One of the very few things we know.
I had a similar thought. The Mooney apparently went in steeply -- it was difficult for the police helicopter ("Knight 2") to find it at first. If it went in under a more controlled attitude, it could have been expected to leave a more obvious and lengthy scar in the vegetation canopy.
Cool, have to read that now--had glanced at the book before. Thought for a minute you meant that Langewiesche once had a stall-spin accident himself. It's the fashionable thing to do these days. Never goes out of style.
I understood that to be an artists rendition. I didn't think it was actual radar returns. So I haven't been taking it as gospel.
Yep, and a glide in would have been more likely to result in a need for medical attention also. Everything about that wreckage is consistent with a spin. If the investigation confirms that, then the question will be why. And they may never be able to determine that beyond speculation.
Some people like the book, others hate it. His writing style can be a challenge to get past: PoA thread
Any observations about a crash can be picked apart.
I just like reading “my speculation is better than your speculation” comments.
That's how I took the thumbnail image and the progressive track from the YouTube video replaying the tower audio. I expect the track was based on the ADS-B Out data from the accident aircraft's transponder, and that data would be available to the NTSB investigator. I didn't presume the track was faithfully applied over a geo-referenced satellite image to more than a first order approximation.
