Exact tracks of both aircraft with timestamps:
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Midair Collision over Denver
131–140 of 237 posts
Re: Midair Collision over Denver
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did his wife survive?
The second link is the crash report. There were four occupants and only one fatality, so only he died. Looks like he tried to land in bad weather, descended before he could see the runway, and clipped some trees. Weather is an alarmingly common cause of accidents in general aviation.
Yes, those cumulogranite clouds are dangerous.
Re: Midair Collision over Denver
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
It may sound pointless unless you consider that the pilot will not need to be replaced.
There's the issue that in many cases people tried to save the airframe rather than activate the parachute, knowing the aircraft was likely to be written off, and died doing so. It the same when the pilot is equipped with a parachute.
At the point a pilot is considering declaring an emergency, they should do so. Once they have declared an emergency, the insurance company owns the airplane, and the pilot should be focused on preserving as many lives as possible. This is as true for a mechanical emergency like a gear up landing as it is for every other kind of emergency.
Re: Midair Collision over Denver
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
I completely agree, but for a more complete analysis, we would have to consider the fatality rate for the sort of crashes in which CAPS is employed. IIRC, Cirrus is now encouraging pilots to use CAPS in any engine failure with sufficient altitude for it to work, on account of the number of such accidents, in CAPS-equipped aircraft, where the pilot chose not to use it, and someone aboard was killed or seriously injure…
Are there any fees associated with an emergency landing like that? I imagine La Guardia runways are in pretty high demand but pilots have a culture that prioritizes safety above all else so I’d be curious which takes precedence.
There are no emergency-specific fees. Whether Newark (I think it was EWR, not LGA) would assess a normal landing fee is probably not a consideration for the pilot, especially back then.
Landing fees are quite reasonable. Off peak, the landing fee would be $25 now. On peak, it would be $125.
https://www.panynj.gov/content/dam/airports/pdfs/scheduleofc...
Re: Midair Collision over Denver
#135Just in case anyone (like me) is thinking - wait did that aeroplane have a parachute? From: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirrus_Airframe_Parachute_Sy... The Cirrus Airframe Parachute System (CAPS) is a whole-plane ballistic parachute recovery system designed specifically for Cirrus Aircraft's line of general aviation light aircraft including the SR20, SR22 and SF50. The design became the first of its kind to becom…
Thank you, I was so confused. I was thinking the pilot a genius for bringing and activating a parachute. Now I see it was just great design. > As of 1 May 2021, CAPS had been activated 122 times, 101 of which saw successful parachute deployment. In those successful deployments, there were 207 survivors and 1 fatality. No fatalities had occurred when the parachute was deployed within the certified speed and altitude p…
21 of 122 failed? That’s a concerning statistic. I’d expect closer to 99% success, not 82%. How many fatalities when the parachute failed to deploy? 100%? If so, then you have almost a 1/5 chance of dying when you engage the parachute?
Re: Midair Collision over Denver
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
NB: There is no instrument approach to 17R @ KAPA. I agree I'd have an extended centerline up (it's up by default if I zoom the MFD in close enough in my lesser-equipped A36), but this is a fully visual maneuver. Almost no one is going to define a user waypoint near the touchdown zone for 17R and pull an OBS line off that just so they can use the FD/AP to make an entirely routine turn to final.
That makes things a lot harder for the Cirrus pilot. Easy to get the lineup slightly wrong with for example some wind correction in from far away. Crazy that ATC had them do this at the same altitude as conflicting traffic with no underlying approach as a safety net. You can ask someone not to go through final, but that's very easy to miss judge from a couple of miles away.
Slightly harder? I'd agree with that. A lot harder? 20 hour student pilots make visual turns from base to final from 3 miles out every day. This is not Top Gun material.
Re: Midair Collision over Denver
#137Wow, that's incredible. Goes to show that people do walk away from plane crashes with some regularity. My father was a pilot[0]. He sold his plane about 15 years ago (to a group of owners, one of which was a priest, I'm sure there's a joke in there). A few of winters later, he was called out to Romeo Airport; the pilot flying the plane that was formerly his had crashed the aircraft a few miles short of the runway in…
> The weight is so critical that the 7-seat plane can realistically only seat 4-5 adults. I remember being shocked that they had to weigh the paint they applied when he had the plane re-painted.
I used to work in general aviation. If my eyes could fly a loop in my skull they would have.
Were the occupants required to use the bathroom before flying? That's how much weight you're potentially saving by weighing the paint on a small aircraft.
They make you weigh the paint because they want you to spray on a certain thickness so they say "X oz paint, Y oz thinner/hardener" (or something like that) in order to get your mixture into the right ballpark so it will work with whatever procedure they want you to spray it on with and get the thickness/finish/hardness the OEM wants you to get.
In aviation there's a ton of treating simple systems as black boxes and "do X and exactly X" type maintenance that happens in order to smoothly transfer liability. You paint a cowl the way the OEM says not because you couldn't get an equivalently performing cowl a different way but because you don't want the NTSB coming after you trying to determine if you did it different but right or different but wrong.
The specifications to which general aviation stuff is done isn't really any more exacting than stuff in automotive or heavy industry. The service literature is just more verbose and the service procedures are more tightly defined.
Re: Midair Collision over Denver
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's the issue that in many cases people tried to save the airframe rather than activate the parachute, knowing the aircraft was likely to be written off, and died doing so. It the same when the pilot is equipped with a parachute.
This is indeed the early experience with BRS, which has been substantially addressed via training which started with some complex scenario-based messaging and later evolved to a more simplified “pull early, pull often” which has resulted in a bias in a better direction for human safety.
What's the risk to the people below?
I'm reminded of a 2011 airshow crash of a Red Arrows T1 jet which, at least according to this account, [0] may have involved the pilot heroically making the decision not to personally eject, but to crash the aircraft away from crowded areas, perishing as a result. Of course, the aircraft itself had no parachute, unlike a Cirrus. (Also, I'm uncertain if that account of the incident is consistent with later investigation. The relevant quote is not from any investigation, but from a politician.)
Re: Midair Collision over Denver
#139Wow, that's incredible. Goes to show that people do walk away from plane crashes with some regularity. My father was a pilot[0]. He sold his plane about 15 years ago (to a group of owners, one of which was a priest, I'm sure there's a joke in there). A few of winters later, he was called out to Romeo Airport; the pilot flying the plane that was formerly his had crashed the aircraft a few miles short of the runway in…
It's hard to impress upon folks who have never been in a small plane like that just how ... yeah ... how much it feels like you're hanging onto a kite
Went up in a four man single engine chopper once. It had all the reassuring solidity of a bicycle. Never again. I can’t even imagine what the truly tiny ones are like.
Re: Midair Collision over Denver
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wrong - most singles can’t fill the seats and the tanks. This is general aviation 101 folks
This sounds like backcountry tent sizing. 3-person tent! (Good luck fitting two people in there and anything else!)
Over-sizing vehicles for the intended cargo is far more of an upscale suburb thing than a BFE thing.