Vans RV-6A down in Santa Paula

That's awful.
I mean no field or open space means likely knowing the outcome as you near the end.

I hope that's not a cruel comment, I just put myself in the pilot seat of everyone of these and this looks significantly unsettling.

Very sad. :(
 
Looks like they went down just about the turn from downwind to base for 22. If in fact they were attempting to land they were probably 300-500 agl at that point. If they had any glide available at all they should have been able to make a forced landing in the riverbed just a couple hundred feet north of the point of impact. From the pictures I’ve seen it looks to be a fairly steep angle of impact that leads one to believe maybe a stall or part failure or medical issue etc. In any case very sad to see
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
That's awful.
I mean no field or open space means likely knowing the outcome as you near the end.

I hope that's not a cruel comment, I just put myself in the pilot seat of everyone of these and this looks significantly unsettling.

Very sad. :(
Click to expand...

That’s the thing I don’t get about this accident, though. There is a lot of open space around the Santa Paula airport, at least on the non city side. If the plane had engine trouble or something like that, there should have been plenty of places to set it down.

The google maps picture below shows the area of the airport with the crash site marked. Lots of open space. One would think that it would be possible to set it down unless they had some sort of catestrophic control system failure.

Or maybe it was a stall spin when turning base?

b9d3b655ffc2215c95a39f18d78f536d.jpg




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Very sad to lose two of our Van's compadres. Condolences to the families.

I flew into Santa Paula for the first time about two months ago. Agreed that it is most likely a stall/spin scenario.

This pic gives a better idea of terrain.


IMG_2353.jpg
 
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Santa Paula is my home airport. Short of a stall/spin or incapitation, it is an odd area to crash when using rwy 22. TPA is 850 or 600 AGL, even if you pull the power at the numbers downwind, you typically don't turn base untill about halfway between South mountain road and in where the drainage canal crosses the freeway in the top right corner of the picture above. There is no reason, even in a engine failure on downwind, to hit a house, its all farm fields, river bed, paintball field, and golf course between the freeway and the mountains on the right. If rwy 4 ( clockwise in the picture above) was in use, and they just departed, I can see a situation going bad fast. You have to ( in a 172 at least) make a a pretty constant climbing 30 degree turn right after South mountain road (actually it is called the 12th street bridge) to make the downwind without hitting the mountain so your turning at a pretty low altitude. Any loss of power if you were not expecting it would put you at 200-400" agl, in a 30deg bank at VX or Vy. Maybe not in a RV as the climb rate is so much better.
 
Talked to my Santa Paula based mechanic today to schedule my annual. He said that a fair number of folks around the airport are also speculating a stall/spin on the downwind to base turn. Runway 22 was in use at the time. Still all speculation, of course... Evdently the plane wasn’t based at Santa Paula. Sad.


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Plane was based out of Rosamond (L00).
 
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