C172 crash at Coney Island

nrp,
That's like driving a car loaded with people. Someone is always
talking and/or the driver is listening to someone else in the car. My
attention would not be even near 90% unfortunately. That's why
sometimes I hate driving with people in the car on long road trips.
Always distractions of some sort.

I am not a pilot but I would imagine there would be some kind of
parallel here.

wrote:

That's like driving a car loaded with people. Someone is always
talking and/or the driver is listening to someone else in the car.

While that might be true for you driving your friends, this case is more like a
limo driver carrying clients somewhere.

George Patterson
"Naked" means you ain't got no clothes on; "nekkid" means you ain't got
no clothes on - and are up to somethin'.

okay, so I was remembering right.
Yahoo Movies played a dirty trick on me and showed me a different trailer
for the movie (for other movie)
weird.


"Milen Lazarov" wrote in message
nk.net...
Guillermo wrote:
Speaking about common misconceptions, yea, unfortunately a chunk of
people
seem to believe that the airplane is being held in the air by the
propeller
itself.
I remember I once saw a movie (a few years ago; I thought the name was
"trapped", about a girl who gets kidnapped, but I cannot find it with
that
name).
Has anyone seen that stupid movie or remembers the name ?


Yes, "Trapped" it is. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0280380/combined
Look at the user comments at the bottom of the page:

"The father (Stuart Townsend) drives an airplane (to a convention he can
drive to, no less) once, and then, right when he needs one to escape, he
finds one and flies it perfectly! If he's supposed to be a young father,
how could he have gone through all of medical school, settled down and
gotten married, AND gotten his pilot's license? "

"It started going up," said Roberto Paredes, 10. "Then it stopped [for]
a . . . second. Then it went down fast."
(http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/44449.htm)

I'm inclined to trust the 10-year-old kid's matter-of-fact report more
than those of reporters or adult witnesses who like to "interpret."

So, this 1800-hour instructor -- who reportedly overflew his
girlfriend's apartment at less than 500' AGL "to impress her," a clear
violation even under Part 91 -- definitely stalled the plane.

An unintentional stall, with or without a running engine, almost
certainly points to pilot error.

Almost all general-aviation "tragedies" are preventable. Too bad.

- Miles

"R.L." wrote in message
om...
Sure they can. But then if the engine quits, you're at the limits of w&b
(four occupants, nearly full fuel, and who knows how many fat guys are on
board)), 500' AGL/MSL, in a slow turn AND THEN YOU FLY BY THE BOOK AND
TRY
TO PULL BACK AND GET TO MAX GLIDE SPEED @ 69K WHEN BEACH WINDS ARE
SLOPPY-VARIABLE -- that's a killer recipe. Notice the sky pic in the NYT
article. Doesn't look like stable air to me.

From what I know of Coney Island, if the guy eating an eggplant
sandwich
at Nathan's saw the whole show, it must mean the pilot was turning to set
up
a landing on the Brighton Beach side of Coney Island where there was
likely
more unoccupied open space.

In my opinion, you're being dumb trying to duck under the class B floor at
500' MSL along a beach with perhaps a strong on-shore wind unless you're
solo with half-tanks in a C172S.

Are you talkiing about a gale force wind? I doubt it. The wind has no
appreciable effect.

moo

"nrp" wrote in message news:1116771237.
I get suspicious about these - a low time pilot, no experience or
instruction with aft CG, maybe a little show-off to the many friends on
board. I shouldn't speculate until the NTSB gets done.

No need to specutale. You're simply wrong. One minute with a search engine
would spare you this ignominy.

But why is it that a disproportionate number of crashes happen with all
the seats filled? Do instructors cover that situation (both technical
and psycological(sp?)) in a private pilot course? They should.

You have any stats on this?

moo

In article ,
says...


"Greg Farris" wrote in message
...
In article ,
says...

It's perplexing that an 1800-hour CFI would have a stall/spin crash on a
sightseeing flight, with or without an engine failure.

Perplexing - maybe. Disturbing - certainly. Rare - NOT.

It's not rare for an 1800-hour CFI to have a stall/spin crash in good VFR
weather? How often does that occur, according to your data?


Not my data - that's the job of the NTSB.
Check out these two, which I just pulled out or recent memory, off the top
of my head. High time, high-class pilots. Thousands of hours. ATPs. Lives
lost after stalling by exceeding allowable angle of attack in low-altitude
manoeuvers. Admittedly, there is a medical "factor" in one of these tragic
accidents, which by some accounts may have been more important than the
simple "factor" status allowed by the NTSB, but even if you strike this one
out, it's only one of dozens you'll find in the NTSB database.

http://www.ntsb.gov/NTSB/brief.asp?e...15X00505&key=1
http://www.ntsb.gov/NTSB/GenPDF.asp?...03FA173&rpt=fi

It is disturbing that seemingly no amount of time or experience will put us
completely out of danger from this type of misjudgement. The two cited here
are complex aircraft, with crew coordination considerations, however you'll
find dozens of "stall turning final" kinds of accident reports by ATP's in
Cessna singles.

G Faris

"Greg Farris" wrote in message
...
In article ,
says...

"Greg Farris" wrote in message
...
In article ,
says...

It's perplexing that an 1800-hour CFI would have a stall/spin crash on a
sightseeing flight, with or without an engine failure.

Perplexing - maybe. Disturbing - certainly. Rare - NOT.

It's not rare for an 1800-hour CFI to have a stall/spin crash in good VFR
weather? How often does that occur, according to your data?

Not my data - that's the job of the NTSB.
Check out these two, which I just pulled out or recent memory, off the top
of my head. High time, high-class pilots. Thousands of hours. ATPs. Lives
lost after stalling by exceeding allowable angle of attack in low-altitude
manoeuvers. Admittedly, there is a medical "factor" in one of these tragic
accidents, which by some accounts may have been more important than the
simple "factor" status allowed by the NTSB, but even if you strike this
one
out, it's only one of dozens you'll find in the NTSB database.

Both of these accidents occurred in poor visibility (1100', 3sm in the case
with the medical factor; in the other, a witness described the plane
"reappearing" from clouds at 200' on a *visual* base leg). Thus, neither is
an example of the sort I was asking about.

--Gary

wrote in message
oups.com...
(http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/44449.htm)
So, this 1800-hour instructor -- who reportedly overflew his
girlfriend's apartment at less than 500' AGL "to impress her," a clear
violation even under Part 91 -- definitely stalled the plane.

What report are you referring to? The article you cite says nothing about
the plane's altitude at that point. (Also, as the article points out, the
girlfriend's house was along the beach, a common sightseeing route for small
planes, so it wouldn't have taken any special effort to overfly it).

An unintentional stall, with or without a running engine, almost
certainly points to pilot error.

This report also says, for the first time, that the plane was "trailing
black smoke" while it descended and circled. If there was a fire onboard, it
becomes much less clear that there was any pilot error (and it would make
any such error more comprehensible).

--Gary

Full gross. Tight turn with sightseers. I doubt a "stalled" engine
had much play in this one. You have to maintain enough airspeed
for the wing to keep flying. Very sad deal innocent people had
to die.



"Gary Drescher" wrote in message
...
"Ernest C. Evans" wrote in message
...
I'm not a pilot but I was wondering why this plane went down "nose first"
??? I'm thinkin', don't these things have some gliding ability ???

i guess the pilot must've been too low to recover ..... Having an engine
quit on you is bad enough luck ..... but having it happened when you just
happen to be at a low altitude is even worse luck ! (

Actually, having an engine quit would *not* cause a plane to fall. As you
say, it would just glide instead.

What does cause a plane to fall--whether the engine is running or not--is
pulling back too far on the control wheel, which causes the plane to slow
down too much (at least, that's the simplified explanation). When that
happens, witnesses who are not familiar with aerodynamic principles often
perceive the incident as an engine failure, which is then how the press
reports it initially.

You're right too that when a plane stops flying (the technical term is
"stalling", but that's confusing because it has nothing to do with the
*engine* stalling), you can recover if you have enough altitude, but being
lower makes recovery harder. Stall recovery shouldn't take much more than
100 feet, but there's a particularly bad type of stall--called a
spin--that can take more than 1000 feet to recover from.

--Gary