Ron Garret wrote:
In article ,
Matt Whiting wrote:


Flyingmonk wrote:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWC2X...rplane%20pilot

Overweight? Out of CG? Stalled? Too slow? What do you all think?


Overweight.


Hard to tell from that. I don't understand Spanish and wasn't sure I
understood the video. The first part looked to be from after the crash
when they were treating the people,


No, it was some kind of medevac mission. The video is in chronological
order. They had the plane stuffed completely full of people and heavy
equipment, including a pretty large gas cylinder of some kind.

OK, I wasn't clear on that. I saw what appeared to be someone holding a
bloody piece of bandage and the cylinder, so I thought maybe that was
the rescue part of the incident, but the condition of the fuselage
certainly wasn't consistent with a crash at that speed!


yet the airplane looked to be in too
good of condition to have survived the crash that was show later in the
video, especially given the fire. The airplane looked to be right wing
heavy and then it appeared that a lot of left rudder was applied to try
to raise the wing.

The airplane seemed to get off the ground reasonably quickly


Not to me. It looked like it was behind the power curve the whole time.

I guess that is a matter of opinion. I flew a C172 over gross (not a
lot) on a hot day before and it took off worse than what is on the video
and the initial climb was more sluggish than shown there. However, I
kept the nose down until I had 80 knots and then was able to climb like
a 150. :-) It did look like he was behind the power curve, but what
seemed strange to me was the large skid the airplane appeared to be in.
Maybe it was just the camera angle though.


and it climbed well out of ground effect


Only for a few seconds, which just proves it was overweight but not
stalled (yet). They were just barely flying, they traded the last bit
of extra airspeed they had for altitude when they ran out of runway, and
then they mushed it in.

I'm not as certain as you. Ground effect begins to be detectable at one
wing span of altitude above the grond, but just barely (see reference).
I was always taught that it really is only signficant at 1/2 the wing
span. However, I agree with you that the airplane appeared to get 50 -
75 feet high which is well out of ground effect. He should have been
able to fly away once getting to that height. I wonder if something got
into the controls or something like that. I just am not sure that what
we saw is completely explained by either overloading or out of balance.

Matt