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#31
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Wing De-Icing Question
On Feb 16, 7:51*pm, VOR-DME wrote:
This discussion is rapidly running in the wrong direction. While I do not share the admonition of some that it is "taboo" to speculate about causes of an airplane accident before all of the factual information is in, it is certainly unhelpful and disrespectful to start crying "pilot error" and lamenting all of the things they should or should not have done, before any of the salient facts of the scenario are in place. Similarly, it is reckless to start decrying insufficiencies in any of the aircraft's systems or their use without a solid factual basis for these assumptions. It may be useful to discuss airframe icing and tailplane icing, and it is perhaps *pertinent to speculate about its role in the current case, but to go much further can only foster misunderstanding and misinformation. Have instead some respect for the people who lost their lives, and for their families, as well as for the flight crew who just may have known a thing or two about how to fly their airplane. . . Keep in mind that this is a pilot's discussion group. Some of us fly in conditions similar to that in existence for the Buffalo crash. As with all such events, there are things to be learned. I subscribe to "learn from your mistakes, but it's better to learn from the mistakes of others because you won't live long enough to make all the mistakes yourself." As each new bit of information about this event comes available, I try to imagine myself in the same situation and try to figure out what was going on. I had previously been shown the NASA video on tailplane icing while attending a Flight Safety Inc recurrent training course for the Citation. Previously, I'd never heard of this before. Hearing some of the preliminary information about the Buffalo event reminded me of this video so I found it on-line and watched it again and I'm glad I did because I was remembering some of it incorrectly. Anyway, more recent information is a bit inconsistent with the "tailplane icing" theory, namely, that the flight data recorder says that both the stick shaker and stick pusher were activated. This are activated (at least in the Citation) by angle of attack sensors which are electrically anti-iced. I can't see how this could happen in the tailplane ice induced stall scenario. The information about excessive bank angle would also be inconsistent with this, except that if it really were tailplane stall due to ice, the yoke might have been yanked forward and out of the hands of the pilot. Attempting to pull it back might have resulted in inadvertent aileron deflection, causing the roll. K l e i n |
#32
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Wing De-Icing Question
VOR-DME wrote:
This discussion is rapidly running in the wrong direction. certainly unhelpful ... disrespectful ... reckless ... foster misunderstanding and misinformation Yeah I don't really disagree, but egads, this is Usenet and for that sake r.a.p. The epitome of inconsequential. Who cares what's said here? |
#33
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Wing De-Icing Question
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#34
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Wing De-Icing Question
On Feb 16, 11:58*pm, VOR-DME wrote:
In article , says... VOR-DME wrote: This discussion is rapidly running in the wrong direction. certainly unhelpful ... disrespectful *... reckless ... foster misunderstanding and misinformation Yeah I don't really disagree, but egads, this is Usenet and for that sake r.a.p. *The epitome of inconsequential. *Who cares what's said here? Well, a family member may care. What if someone, desperate for information after losing a loved one, starts hunting around usenet and finds a bunch of pilots saying that autopilots are dangerous and their use is negligent? There is a huge human cost in tragedy like this, and we shouldn't forget it. As pilots, we accept the risk involved, but we must be sensitive to the situation of general public who are not expected to accept this risk. Besides that, just as a matter of intellectual honesty, we should give the crew enough benefit of the doubt not to fall to the "it wouldn't have happened to me. . ." fallacy - at least until all of the ifactual information is in? I fly IFR by hand in IMC for practice and recurrent training, but would not subject trusting passengers to this risk. Instead I use the autopilot, whose judicious use I consider to be one of the most important safety devices in the airplane. To say the autopilot should not be used under certain circumstances is one thing, but here we are coming close to the Fox News ideal of posthumously condemning the pilot to 50 counts of first degree for having used the autopilot. Interesting, in that we tend to handfly the Mooney in IMC, using autopilot only when we need a break if there's only one pilot on board. It's a subjective thing I suppose, but hand flying does not take a lot of effort en route (or most of the time, if truth be told) and I'd not want to have to suddenly transition to hand flying in IMC in the unlikely event the autopilot had a subtle failure. |
#35
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Wing De-Icing Question
On Feb 17, 12:23*am, VOR-DME wrote:
In article , says... On Feb 16, 3:38*pm, VOR-DME wrote: In article , says... On Feb 15, 5:41*pm, Tman wrote: Dudley Henriques wrote: There's a very good chance the Boston crash might have been tailplane icing. Did you mean BUF or did I miss something in Boston? T Yes. I've been dealing with a Boston issue most of the day and my senior moment quota kicked in. It was Buffalo. DH Oh thanks! Spent two hours on the NTSB database trying to figure what Boston crash we were talking about! :-) Sorry. Those "senior moments" can be annoying for sure. It's a shame youth is wasted on such young people. :-))) -D No harm done. We always learn something by going back through the NTSB records! I was surprised to find how few accident records included both the location "Boston" and the keyword "icing". Aside the FEDEX takeoff incident, where ice caused physical damage to one of the engines, I learned that a Skymaster crashed in 1975 departing Boston, probably because of airframe icing. His intended destination? Buffalo :-) I belong to a world-wide flight safety work group that uses the base all the time. It can be useful as you say. Our work is primarily involved with the low altitude aerobatic display environment but many in our community are airline people and have a great interest in anything that enhances the learning curve safety wise. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that in our work group alone, the interest in tailplane icing has increased since yesterday to the point where information has been spreading throughout the low to medium altitude turbo-prop scheduled and non- scheduled operations world wide. -DH |
#36
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Wing De-Icing Question
On Mon, 16 Feb 2009 13:42:52 -0800 (PST), Dudley Henriques wrote:
I belong to a world-wide flight safety work group that uses the base all the time. It can be useful as you say. Our work is primarily involved with the low altitude aerobatic display environment but many in our community are airline people and have a great interest in anything that enhances the learning curve safety wise. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that in our work group alone, the interest in tailplane icing has increased since yesterday to the point where information has been spreading throughout the low to medium altitude turbo-prop scheduled and non- scheduled operations world wide. -DH There's something radically wrong here. Of course the horz stabil can ice, a tail can ice. Of course there should be a sh**load of info on it but I'll be damned if I know where it is. POH? Cessna 15x or 17x? Diamonds? |
#37
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Wing De-Icing Question
On Mon, 16 Feb 2009 18:51:05 -0800, VOR-DME wrote:
This discussion is rapidly running in the wrong direction. While I do not share the admonition of some that it is "taboo" to speculate about causes of an airplane accident before all of the factual information is in, it is certainly unhelpful and disrespectful to start crying "pilot error" and lamenting all of the things they should or should not have done, before any of the salient facts of the scenario are in place. Similarly, it is reckless to start decrying insufficiencies in any of the aircraft's systems or their use without a solid factual basis for these assumptions. It may be useful to discuss airframe icing and tailplane icing, and it is perhaps pertinent to speculate about its role in the current case, but to go much further can only foster misunderstanding and misinformation. Have instead some respect for the people who lost their lives, and for their families, as well as for the flight crew who just may have known a thing or two about how to fly their airplane. . . Explain to me how much more clearly I could state (especially in a discussion group): "Following the theory, for the sake of discussion, is this pilot error and is it avoidable?" |
#38
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Wing De-Icing Question
On Feb 17, 1:43*am, VOR-DME wrote:
In article , says... Interesting, in that we tend to handfly the Mooney in IMC, using autopilot only when we need a break if there's only one pilot on board. It's a subjective thing I suppose, but hand flying does not take a lot of effort en route (or most of the time, if truth be told) and I'd not want to have to suddenly transition to hand flying in IMC in the unlikely event the autopilot had a subtle failure. Interesting. I do not share your point of view, but I respect it. I not only hand-fly, in training, but I (like others) fly partial panel, to simulate vacuum failure (conventional systems) or electrical failure (glass systems). In "real" flight, I use everything available, freeing up the xx% of my brain that was used just maintaining heading and altitude to maintain a higher-level vision of the progress of the flight. I believe this overall vision is more important that the difficulty of transitioning to a degraded control mode in the case of a system failure, partly because of the unlikelihood of the latter. There's more to our side of the story -- we like to hand fly! Our self adminstered safety flights are a bit more challenging than those administered by our cfi, esp w/r/t partial panel, instrument failures, and unusual attitudes. I suspect the difference in safety between our two methods would be hard to quantify. One of us could type more loudly than the other, I suppose -- this is the usernet after all. . |
#39
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Wing De-Icing Question
On Feb 16, 5:23*pm, Gezellig wrote:
On Mon, 16 Feb 2009 13:42:52 -0800 (PST), Dudley Henriques wrote: I belong to a world-wide flight safety work group that uses the base all the time. It can be useful as you say. Our work is primarily involved with the low altitude aerobatic display environment but many in our community are airline people and have a great interest in anything that enhances the learning curve safety wise. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that in our work group alone, the interest in tailplane icing has increased since yesterday to the point where information has been spreading throughout the low to medium altitude turbo-prop scheduled and non- scheduled operations world wide. -DH There's something radically wrong here. Of course the horz stabil can ice, a tail can ice. Of course there should be a sh**load of info on it but I'll be damned if I know where it is. POH? Cessna 15x or 17x? Diamonds? You're right. There should be much more written on the issue. NASA has been working on it for quite a while now and in fact has done a film piece on it for distribution throughout the aviation community. Just in case you haven't seen the NASA piece, I've included a link on it for you. It's worth watching! http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...23060735779946 -DH |
#40
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Wing De-Icing Question
"VOR-DME" wrote Besides that, just as a matter of intellectual honesty, we should give the crew enough benefit of the doubt not to fall to the "it wouldn't have happened to me. . ." fallacy - at least until all of the ifactual information is in? I fly IFR by hand in IMC for practice and recurrent training, but would not subject trusting passengers to this risk. Instead I use the autopilot, whose judicious use I consider to be one of the most important safety devices in the airplane. To say the autopilot should not be used under certain circumstances is one thing, but here we are coming close to the Fox News ideal of posthumously condemning the pilot to 50 counts of first degree for having used the autopilot. While I agree with your basic premise, (of not blaming the pilot before the report is out) it is fact that they were still on auto, they knew there was ice, it was against company policy to do so in ice, and it is a generally accepted "fact" that flying on auto in ice can be very risky, indeed. It seems only truthful to say that the pilots did something that was wrong, and in this case, they bought the farm because of it. -- Jim in NC |
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