Ultimate Issue: Analyzing a Fatal Final Turn

Van's RV-4 accident presents a tragic case study of the stall-spin scenario.

Friday, July 19, 2024 at 08:56 AM ET

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There’s a reason students are taught to establish 1.3 Vs on the downwind leg, begin the descent abeam of the threshold, and maintain a good speed margin throughout the approach. [iStock]

Key Takeaways:

Stall-spins, particularly in the traffic pattern, continue to be a significant cause of fatal aircraft accidents, partly due to unrealistic pilot training that fails to adequately prepare pilots for sudden, unexpected, and disorienting real-life stall events.
A detailed case study reveals a fatal accident involving a highly experienced pilot in an RV-4, who entered an unrecoverable stall-spin during a low, tight, unstabilized turn to final at a high-altitude airport.
Key contributing factors included the pilot's failure to maintain adequate airspeed and control the angle of attack, compounded by the aircraft's sensitive handling characteristics, potential pilot unfamiliarity with the specific plane, and environmental challenges like high-density altitude.

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In 1949, the Civil Aeronautics Authority (the precursor to the FAA), reacting to the number of training accidents involving spins, removed the spin from the private pilot syllabus. Some pilots who knew how to spin an airplane suspected that anyone who didn’t wasn’t really a pilot.

Cooler heads observed that the majority of unintentional spins occurred in the traffic pattern, particularly on the base-to-final turn, where there was no room to recover even if the pilot knew how to. So knowing how to spin and recover served no purpose, besides its entertainment value—which, to be sure, was considerable.

Peter Garrison

Peter Garrison taught himself to use a slide rule and tin snips, built an airplane in his backyard, and flew it to Japan. He began contributing to FLYING in 1968, and he continues to share his columns, ""Technicalities"" and ""Aftermath,"" with FLYING readers.