Aviation Safety

The pilot reported that climbing to about 25 feet after takeoff, but the airplane did not feel right so he pulled the throttle off to abort the takeoff. The airplane stalled and landed hard, collapsing the right landing gear main mount. The airport manager documented that the airplanes wing had approximately inch of wet snow covering 2/3 of the wings upper surface. The pilot stated that he had performed a preflight inspection that involved clearing some of the snow from around the wings vortex generators with his fingers.

At approximately 1506 Central time, the brand-new airplane was substantially damaged during a forced landing. The Commercial pilot was seriously injured; the two passengers sustained minor injuries. Visual conditions prevailed. According to the pilot, the turbine-inlet-temperature warning light illuminated, followed by a sudden loss of engine power. When the pilot realized he would not be able to make a nearby airport, he landed in a grass field.

I continue to be surprised about pilots having accidents while doing maneuvers close to the ground. This list includes airmen from a wide variety of backgrounds, including airshow performers, flight instructors, military pilots and general aviation pilots. It seems to me that some of us have forgotten or misplaced the early-learned information concerning the relationship between Gs and wing stall speed.

Youve been in the clag for what seems like hours. The monochromatic gray outside the windows is broken only by the raindrops streaking up your windscreen and meandering back at a slower pace along your side windows. Youve turned off your strobes, but you can see the reassuring red and green glow of the recognition lights at your wing tips, reflected back from the thick grayness.

The ducks were going to be walking soon. It was sometime in the early 1980s-I had just flown my rented Skyhawk down to the ILS Runway 5R minimums at the Raleigh-Durham (N.C.) International Airport (RDU), breaking out at decision height. Earlier, I missed the 600-foot minimum descent altitude radar approach at the nearby Horace Williams Airport at Chapel Hill, N.C. This was Plan B.

I was painting myself into a corner. Id departed Louisville, Kentucky into a screaming westerly wind bound for Jefferson City, Missouri. Snow and icy clouds threatened to the north, so I steered the Cessna 172 slightly south of a direct course and crossed the Mississippi somewhere north of Cape Girardeau. Now making maybe 70 knots ground speed, I was over heavily forested hills, the few small airports below closed from a recent, heavy snowfall. I started to worry about fuel.

The number of our landings must always equal our takeoffs, or so goes the old adage. But sometimes the safest way to ensure equality is to do neither. Unlike birds possessing the gift of flight and whose skills are instinctive, we have the hard-won gift of thought. We earn our skills through repetition and reason.

Keeping current is one of the downsides of earning the Instrument rating. Even if our flying activity is above-average, logging all of the required maneuvers in actual IMC during six-months of normal operations is next to impossible for many pilots. Thankfully, the FAAs recent-experience rules allow us to simulate instrument conditions even in good VFR as long as we have a safety pilot along.

Our long national nightmare-winter-is mostly over as I write this. Daylight Savings Time has arrived to those locales embracing it and engine pre-heaters are getting a well-deserved rest. As spring arrives, along comes a list of real and potential changes with which we all may need to contend.

Walter Atkinsons “Top Five Engine Myths” (March 2007) described all of the habits Ive been observing for years and the life-extending advantages in abandoning at least one of them. Before I become a non-believer, however, I would like to poke at one of the arguments.