My money is on a problem with the aircraft, instruments, or the pilot himself.
Climbing out in an aircraft that requires careful engine management normally means ‘cleaning up’ straight away to allow you to then progress to other tasks. Especially in IMC.
In a heavy airframe on a marginal climb over obstacles you may choose to leave the gear but on a 210, take off flap is a hinderance once airborne and needs getting rid of.
The fact that the gear and flap were deployed means he couldn’t get to them for a specific reason, and it’s not likely he was intending to return in those conditions, so it wasnt that.
I think something specific was happening. Maybe if it was fully VMC he could have dealt with an the issue, but if it was a serious instrument or health related issue, in IMC neither legal IFR into solid overcast or illegal departure in zero Viz makes little difference to me.
RIP.
The discussion here has become mostly meaningless and not related to the accident. It’s going around in circles. The stuff about “AIP legality” was done to death here.
Posts moved to off topic thread, as before.
The discussion has again moved back to obscure legalistic arguments.
There is also this thread.
there was no overload. the reason the pilot flew to edja was to pick up passengers there
at the longer runway to avoid overload at the shorter runway in loih.
You obviously didn’t understand – it’s not aircraft that was overloaded; the pilot was.
just to climb above the fog. not thinking of flaps or gear.
This is very probable.
My money is on a problem with the aircraft, instruments, or the pilot himself.
Based on what? After 12 pages of posts, pictures of aircraft’s trajectory, stable climb (although obviously underperforming due to gear and flaps), very possible confusion and loss of orientation which ended up in CFIT, you put your money to instruments or aircraft or pilot. Or maybe gremlins?
Emir wrote:
although obviously underperforming due to gear and flaps
I largely agree with @Emir, but the departure flaps (10deg) on a C210 hardly – if at all – affect performance. In fact, they’re very easy to forget. Not a factor, IMHO.
To my mind, this is a pretty clear case of pilot disorientation for whatever reason.
Really?
Next time you fly a 210, leave the gear and or flaps and see how much MP you need to get to 130kts.
So you’re saying he was disoriented so much as he climbed to 50ft he couldn’t reach for the gear lever?
I’ve never once been in a retract where the 1st action was anything other than gear up.
Why would you change anything from a normal SOP on a day when it’s marginal let alone when you’re pushing limits.
GA_Pete wrote:
Next time you fly a 210, leave the gear and or flaps and see how much MP you need to get to 130kts.
Oh, I fly them all the time. Agree wrt the gear, but not the flaps. No problem at all getting to the 140kts max flap 10 speed. Don’t ask me how I know…
again one simple question (again sorry, but this really haunts me) to all of you (very) experienced pilots:
you got your c 210p
you got g500txi, gtn750, gtn650
you go out 05
straight out for some 20 seconds. in zero viz.
(you just keep on going straight and nothing would be happening. all clear skies above in about 5 minutes).
you want to go to edja (gps course. some 30°)
then you start turning right (east to southeast)
in long almost half circle in a time of about 50 to 70 seconds
to crash into a wall of rocks.
(you could come up with all kinds of speculations, wild guesses, hypotheses etc.)
nothing as yet could give me any reasonable and consistent theory:
why he is turning right in a seemingly controlled (at least kind of steady) way climbing
for such a long time ! without noticing his heading or obviously looking at his instruments ?
(engine/technical problems, health problems, desorientation, even distress and overload) would not result in a somewhat steady course/turn and climbing ?!)
a somewhat close arguement was, that he could not even have noticed that he was turning or being in an emergency situation (lost orientation).
how would you not look at your instruments, not noticing your heading for about 40 seconds, in the icm situation given ??
@cpt_om_sky, all it takes a simple mistake, like initiating the turn into the wrong direction because of a momentary lapse. Everything works nicely, the heading changes, the horizon shows a nice banked attitude, beautiful, everything is as expected…. bang.
People make left/right or “wrong way” mistakes all the time. Ages ago an IFR pilot intercepted a radial the in the wrong direction and flew into a mountain. That was pre-GPS, and ATC didn’t notice, either. I had controllers giving me a turn in the wrong direction. Students sometimes struggle to figure out which way to turn when turning to a heading. Not all of them are slight disorientation, some are simple lapses. Humans are fallible.
The only thing that I find strange is that he did not change the aircraft configuration at all. Forgetting to raise the gear could indicate that for some reason the workload was higher than expected or he could deal with, but why? Or it might simply be the muscle memory of turning right 90% of the time taking over when distracted by the failure of the gear to retract.
I don’t think we will ever find out.
But given everyone makes mistakes, I would like to understand what was available to recover from the mistake – did he have EGPWS? What would it show in this situation; would it be useful at all?
Even if we don’t know why it did not help him, we could learn the limits of these accident prevention tools; or learn that it would be a good idea to have them.
cpt_om_sky wrote:
why he is turning right in a seemingly controlled (at least kind of steady) way climbing
for such a long time ! without noticing his heading or obviously looking at his instruments ?
The long and the short answer is – I don’t know. Only hypothesis I can come up with is disorientation and unfamiliarity with the installed avionics. The latter possibly leading to the former.
Edited to add: what @Cobalt says. Turn right 99% of the time, do it again. And perhaps not familiar with the instrumentation. It would be interesting to know how much time he had with the avionics as installed during the accident flight. Failure to raise the gear does, IMHO, point to being overloaded.
Yes; unfortunately there is no limit to how stupid mistakes can be done by high-hour pilots. Especially if there has been some preceeding stressful stuff – as is very often the case in GA ops. Or just a crappy night’s sleep.
I’ve got ~3k hrs in the TB20 and I have got runways mixed up. I once landed on the opposite runway (following conflicting info on which one was in use by a previous unit). And I got well confused on another occassion (much assisted by a faulty AHRS).
Nobody is immune, which is why we have procedures, checklists, etc.
