And in this case, neither the pilot nor the charter company were experts. There is a reason that airlines and corporate operators dispatch with two pilots. An average two pilot crew is better than a good single pilot during normal ops, and in an emergency where workload increases, the crew runs away from a single pilot. If you question that, ask any simulator instructor.Originally Posted by peterb
Likes pretty much everything in every caliber.
I think they (especially the NASCAR affiliated ones) push pretty big planes into small fields. Through a job I used to have I was acquainted with Randy Dorton and when the news of that crash hit, and the time of day it happened, I expected he woulda been on board. Many of those tracks are out in remote areas where the nearest airports are marginal for operating stuff like King Airs, and also are in areas where the only hotel space is taken up by the fan base, and are not the kind of places to get good rest before raceday. I think it was/is common for the crews to go back to the Charlotte area overnight, because it is easier to get back and forth in a King Air than get back and forth to a shitty hotel in a van. And they need the rest, rest they will not get if they are trying to get up at 03:00 rather than go to bed at 03:00. The drivers stay in motorhomes that somebody else drive to and from, but the crews don't have that luxury.
Then you get people that have a lot of money buying expensive aircraft they couldn't afford until they hit the big show. The cat that has nine lives is Jack Roush, the story of him putting the homebuilt into the lake and being saved from the submerged plane by the retired rescue diver who had survived cancer sounds like shit from a Lifetime movie.
I used to be pretty active in a group that did a lot of twisty street riding and it seems to me that fatal crashes numbered fewer than fatal cancer.
I wonder if, like the race drivers, he bought a nice helicopter, hired an experienced guy to fly it, and got on with life. I also wonder if, like the race drivers, we will never know how many times he came close and never knew it.
Last edited by mmc45414; 01-28-2020 at 05:38 PM.
Are there not tighter limits to what an ATP operation can do, compared to what a guy can hire somebody to do in their personally owned aircraft?
ATP is a pilot certificate— do you mean an air carrier? The helicopter operator in this case is a charter operation, governed by Part 135.
It was always my understanding that if people are buying a ticket it is a different category than hiring a pilot to fly your plane?
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One of the articles linked quoted a SME talking about vertigo possibly occurring. I never really understood what vertigo was until I conducted night dives with no light except a glowing compass board in front of my face....I had all kinds of problems acclimating where I thought I was spinning, ascending, descending...truly bizarre and unsettling. Hard to believe until it happens. Can't imagine that happening while driving an aircraft.
Yes— this is a pretty simplistic breakdown, but scheduled air carriers operate under Part 121, charter/on-demand operates under Part 135, and general aviation flights are under Part 91 of the FARs.
I believe a supposed eye witness said he heard it "sputtering" right before the crash. To me that could mean mechanical trouble or the eye witness mistook the normal sound for one with "sputtering". Then again, the pilot never declared an emergency did he?
Eye witness reports are notoriously unreliable. The joke is three pilots witness a crash, and one reports a single engine in takeoff, another a twin landing, and the third a helicopter enroute.
Likes pretty much everything in every caliber.
Yup. A helicopter can move and tilt in roll, pitch, and yaw. Now do it in zero visibility or with a poor ground or horizon reference.....
The classic scenario for a fixed-wing aircraft is that it starts a gentle turn while in cloud, and the pilot doesn’t notice. The pilot’s inner ear stabilizes in the turn, because in a coordinated turn “down” is the bottom of the airplane, not the earth. When the pilot does notice that the instruments are showing a turn and rolls level, his inner ear tells him he’s just started to turn. So he rolls back into a turn because that feels right. It’s not coordinated, the airplane starts to accelerate, the pilot adds back stick without leveling the wings first, which accelerates the turn, which makes the pilot add more back stick.... The plane usually comes out of the bottom of the clouds in a screaming tight spiral dive, sometimes ripping the wings off in the process.
I did just a bit of instrument work getting my private, and without training it’s really hard to trust those gauges when your body is screaming at you that you’re doing something different.
This pilot was instrument rated, but chose to fly VFR in marginal conditions when one might have to rapidly transition from ground reference to gauges and back. In hilly terrain and scattered cloud it’s also easy to get a glimpse of a sloped ridge or cloud edge and think it’s a level horizon reference. Staying legal in Special VFR means staying clear of the clouds, which is hard when the ceiling is low or coming down and the terrain is going up....
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