Aviation Safety

The float-equipped airplane collided with water and terrain at about 1040 Alaska time while maneuvering. The pilot sustained serious injuries and the sole passenger sustained minor injuries. Marginal visual conditions prevailed for the FAR 135 on-demand air taxi flight. The pilot subsequently reported attempting to follow a shoreline at low altitude and in worsening weather, but was unable to maintain visual contact with the ground.

The airplane was substantially damaged at about 1350 Eastern time while landing. The private pilot and four passengers were fatally injured. Visual conditions prevailed. Two witnesses reported the airplane was high during its initial approach, performed a go-around, and made a left turn for another approach. During the second approach, the airplane was high again and the approach steepened, nose-down onto the runway.

The airplane was substantially damaged at about 1045 Eastern time when it impacted an airport perimeter fence following a loss of engine power on takeoff. The commercial pilot and the pilot-rated passenger were not injured. Visual conditions prevailed. Prior to departing a nearby airport, the pilot serviced the airplane to have about 20 gallons of fuel aboard. After picking up his passenger, the pilot taxied the airplane and performed a brief run-up. The pilot initiated the takeoff roll normally and observed normal instrument indications.

At 1738 Central time, the airplane was substantially damaged while landing. The flight instructor and pilot-receiving-instruction were not injured. Visual conditions prevailed. The flight instructor reported the airplane encountered a gust during the landing flare and drifted left of the runway centerline. He assumed control and increased engine power for a go-around, but the airplane impacted a ditch and taxiway.

At about 1143 Mountain time, the two airplanes were substantially damaged during a mid-air collision. The Cessna 172 impacted an embankment. The flight instructor and private pilot receiving instruction aboard the Cessna 172 were fatally injured. The Cessna 180 impacted power lines and a fence during a forced landing. The pilot of the Cessna 180 sustained minor injuries. Visual conditions prevailed. The Cessna 180 pilot stated she was northbound at approximately 7000 feet msl when she heard a loud bang. The airplane immediately pitched up about 50 degrees and rolled into an approximate 45-degree right bank.

Not a winter goes by without someone sending me an e-mail that includes the sentence, “You aren’t really suggesting I don’t fly my airplane in IMC in the winter?” It’s usually from the pilot of a very capable piston single or light twin that is not certificated for flight in icing conditions; often the pilot includes something like, “I live in the Great Lakes and we get icing a large part of the year.” Sometimes I get a similar question about passenger and baggage loads. “The engineers at [insert airplane manufacturer name here] wouldn’t have designed the airplane with six seats if it couldn’t carry six adults, or at least four adults and two kids. Do you really mean I can’t fill the seats and the fuel tanks?” A current trend is questions about synthetic vision systems in glass cockpit panels or cutting-edge heads-up displays. “With an essentially VFR depiction of the runway, I can make a zero-zero takeoff and even a zero-zero landing ‘if I have to’, can’t I?”

One of the first few things primary students learn is the stall. More accurately, we learn how to enter them and recover from them, the idea being to avoid them and, when we can’t do that, to survive the event. At first, all these stalls are more or less straight ahead. But as we gain time and experience, our fiendish instructor will introduce other types of stalls, like the cross-controlled variety we might get into when botching a turn from base to final in the pattern. You probably mastered straight-ahead stalls early on—you wouldn’t have gotten very far in your training if you hadn’t—and were trained to avoid the cross-controlled variety by carefully planning and executing your turns when low and slow, like when in the traffic pattern.

I’ve done relatively little scud-running over the years. That’s mainly because I earned an instrument rating at about the same time I started using personal airplanes more and more for transportation rather than recreation. It’s difficult to say which came first—the utility an instrument rating affords or the need to use an airplane for personal transportation—but in my case, the two developed at about the same time. My most memorable scud-running flight involved flogging a Skyhawk between Columbus, Ga., and Knoxville, Tenn., one summer afternoon. Writing about it now, I don’t recall the exact reason I determined getting an IFR clearance wasn’t the way to go, but that’s the decision I made. I presume it had something to do with either the airplane or the weather.

I got the telephone call all of us dread: My mother had just been hospitalized and wasn’t expected to live out the day. It came as I was in the middle of tackling some must-do, employment-related work from which I simply couldn’t walk away. By the time I finished, it was late in the day. The hospital was some 600 nm away, in a rural Southern town, albeit one with a well-equipped airport. After a quick call to Flight Service to check weather and file IFR, I was out the door. Soon, I was airborne, southeast-bound and headed into a typical summer evening, with pop-up thunderstorms in all quadrants. By the time I started letting down, my cockpit-mounted Nexrad display was painting a red splotch just beyond my destination.

The aft canted bulkhead (p/n 2612060-5) at station 474.40 was discovered with two cracks, each approximately 1.5 inches in length. During removal, other damage was found. Both vertical stabilizer webs (p/ns 2631021-15 and 2631022-2) were replaced because of significant fretting, as was the aft bulkhead assembly (p/n 2612059-1).