"rps" wrote in message
oups.com...
The pilot was a reasonably experienced CFII. When I last flew with
him, I think he probably had at least 2000 hours. Landing on a freeway
when there's a perfectly good strip nearby might be a little
embarassing to a professional pilot, but my guess is that he probably
thought he had the airstrip made.

I agree that's a good guess. A guess nonetheless, but a good one.

While going through the emergency
procedures checklist (or trying to control the descent without
stalling), he could have failed to see the tall tree that he ultimately
clipped with one wing.

I also agree that this is a good guess. It doesn't look like in that area
that it would have been impossible to avoid all trees, at least during the
emergency approach.

I wouldn't expect such a mishap to cause fatal
injuries because he was sufficiently low and slow that impact forces
could have been survivable, but I'm still unaware of the full set of
facts and the preliminary NTSB report is not yet published.

As I mentioned, an eye-witness reported that the airplane was already upside
down well before actually crashing. That is, it's likely that the airplane
had already struck a tree quite early in the approach. That completely
changes the nature of the accident, and being "low and slow" as he might
normally have been isn't necessarily helpful as it normally might be.

Of course, there is also the unsettling thought that he may well have
survived the impact, only to be consumed in the fire with the rest of the
airplane.

But back to the impact issue...it is a bit of "luck of the draw". A few
years ago, at Thun Field near here, a Lake Buccaneer pilot aborted an
approach and then screwed up the go-around. He wound up crashing into a
stand of 75' evergreen trees just to the left of the runway centerline.
Broke the very top of a tree off as he entered the stand and came down at a
very steep angle (at the crash site, you could see the path the airplane
took just by noting the broken trees and branches). The airplane turned
around 180 degrees during the final descent, but didn't flip over. It was
basically totaled, but the pilot and his passenger (to whom the pilot was
demonstrating the airplane in hopes of selling it) walked away with
relatively minor injuries (one of them wound up with a hairline fracture in
his hip...the pilot, if I recall correctly).

Comparing the two accidents (with the suspect assumption that they are
comparable), one major difference is that where the people walked away, the
entire accident took place within a dense stand of trees. They lucked out
and failed to hit any tree directly, so with each tree what happened is that
more and more energy was removed gradually from the airplane, reducing the
impact forces. In that respect, it seems that one might conclude that it's
better to hit a couple dozen trees at the end of the approach than to hit
just one. Of course there were many other lucky aspects, including that the
airplane did not flip over, and that there was no post-crash fire.

And of course, it's better to not hit ANY trees, and of course in the case
of the Lake accident here, the cause wasn't due to mechanical failure.
There was no good reason for the airplane to have wound up in the trees in
the first place in that accident.

But still, all of this just reinforces that during an emergency, the pilot
MUST keep "aviate" as the very highest priority. Something that ought to be
a "walk away" accident can turn into a deadly event, if one's attention is
distracted even for just a moment.

Pete