LFHNflightstudent wrote:
I’ll probably get lynched over this, but here goes anyway. A 75 year old pilot…. with “only” 500 hours total time. Honestly what is somebody like that doing flying passengers (2 of them) around for a discovery flight.
Not lynching you, but I don’t see the problem. 500 hrs TT should be plenty and the pilot would have a valid medical, right…?
Stop the oldies from carrying passengers and you will decimate GA in Europe.
Leave the BEA do their job.500 h is enough to fly with or without passengers and the ulm was a pioneer 300,which is a well equiped ulm.
I don’t know the pilot of the DR 400,but i kneew the pilot of the ulm and he was reconized like a good pilot.
The report of the Arcachon crash (4 killed) is out :
https://www.bea.aero/fileadmin/user_upload/BEA2020-0404.pdf
local copy
They were outweight (about 50kg over MTOW, so 950kg) and out of balance (rear CG) in a cruise-prop DR400/120.
The pilot tried to climb but got stuck in region of reversed command (second régime in French), stalled and crashed.
He had 9-yo twins and their dad on board.
Even worse : another more powerful plane was available at the time of the attempted flight.
RIP
The report reads like a very sad story we unfortunately read way too many of.
The PIC had 180 hours total time and 6 hours in 7 cycles in the last 3 months.
The flight was private, not an air babtism or similar organized by an aeroclub.
Take off was started at intersection Bravo without backtrack. If I am checking this correctly, this means about 100-150 m of runway was behind them when they began the take off roll. The airplane became airborne after 500 m of rolling at about 110 km/h IAS. The take off was recorded on video by one of the passengers if I understand that correctly. After lift off, the stall warning sounded repeatedly and the airplane took a pitch angle of between 10 and 15 degrees nose up. The engine ran at 2300 RPM, the airplane reached an altitude of about 60 ft AGL, where the speed decreased to 100 km/h.
The airplane consequently turned to the right, touched some trees and crashed.
There was a post crash fire. The pilot was ejected from the plane and survived the initial impact, he died shortly afterwards but was able to give some testimony:
- he did not have any thrust anymore
- he heard a “bang”
- despite him pulling on the stick, the airplane did not appear to follow his control inputs.
The aircraft was consumed by fire to such an extent, that neither the position of the flaps nor the trim could be determined.
The ELT did radiate a signal which was received by the SAR centers. However, as the ELT was still registered to the former owner of the airplane, the aeroclub could not be contacted.
The BAE states that the airplane was equipped with a Lycoming O-235 engine and had a maximum take off mass of 900 kg. The normal procedure for a take off at maximum weight is to set the flaps to the first position. With flaps thus extended, stall speed is indicated at 88 km/h with the stall warning starting to sound about 10-15 km/h above that.
The take off profile using flaps on the first position described in the POH is to rotate at between 90 and 100 km/h, then obtain climb speed of 120 km/h. Minimum RPM during take off is 2200 RPM. The POH figures for the conditions resulted in a ground roll of 285 m and a passage of 15 m (50 ft) at 590 m.
The aircraft was found to be approximately 50 kg overloaded and the CG outside the rear envelope, with the heaviest passenger sitting on the aft bench.
The BEA concludes that the probably cause of the crash is a loss of control due to stall at low altitude. Contributing factors were a lack of flight preparation, namely weight and balance, maintaing a high pitch angle and AOA during the whole climb attempt, which prevented the airplane from picking up speed and the possibility that the pilot got distracted by his passengers.
The BEA further comments that in the last 20 years, a series of 23 similar accidents have been recorded, 7 of which were fatal.
16 accidents lead to the destruction of the airplane, of which 7 resulted in the death of all occupants.
13 accidents were caused by a loss of control including all 7 fatal accidents.
11 were a result of overloading the airplane, again including all 7 fatal accidents.
Personal remarks:
All in all a very sobering read if not totally surprising after the information we had. The weight and balance problem is very evident here yet again and the statistics state that WnB is not to be trifled with, yet I would estimate it is one off the most disregarded performance figures. It is also important to stress that a CG out of envelope can, even with few or no overweight, have massive consequences, particularly at low powered airplanes.
These aircrafts are underpowered and DO go overweight regularly (unless you put a sticker on backseats saying NO PAX), but I doubt this was the main cause of the accident, they were just too slow and pulled too much as simple as that…
It’s easy to get into a similar situations even flying bellow MTOW:
- The underpower situation can happen in any aircraft either power loss or high density
- The pull on the stick happens every time the hedge or obstacles are coming quickly
The above MTOW situation should never happen and it’s plain reckless, disregarding stall warning on climb is stupid
I can only think of one aircraft where max angle climb happens with stall warner is buzzing dead in the drag curve, the DA40 was certified with V50, sort of Vx to use up to 50ft, then push stick straight to Vy, I think similar certification logic should apply to all these underpowered aircrafts, anyone hanging 4 seater on the prop at Vx other than +200hp touring or Carbon Cubs is looking for troubles, 50hp per pob is a golden rule written somewhere? bellow that it’s like soft field or high density takeoffs plenty of runway and keep low AoA…
Ibra wrote:
I doubt this was the main cause of the accident, they were just too slow and pulled too much as simple as that…
I think it may well be a mixture of both.
They were overweight but more significantly out of aft CG. And while 50 kg overload for a O235 is not few, I personally think the aft GC exceedance plays a larger role here.
Clearly the airplane did not perform as by the books with this configuration, you already had 500 m ground run iso apprx 300 m by the book. Once it did lift off, the aft CG may well have surprised the pilot as the plane may have had a nose up tendency he did not usually experience. Hence the very high deck angle of between 10 and 15° described by the BEA. This is way too steep for almost any GA plane but clearly for one with so few power.
The next bit is that in this situation it is against the instinct of most pilots to actually push forward when they see the plane does not climb sufficiently. Unfortunately, we see a lot of accidents where pilots will in such a case go for the Pull=Up trap and stall and crash. I know at least 5 examples off the back of my hand including this one where a perfectly flyable plane was stalled and crashed on take off because of this mistake.
One of them a Robin with 180 hp at MTOW + 5 kg overload but with the CG out of the back The accident was a carbon copy of this one: Take off in this configuration resulted in a stall and crash. One person died, 3 others got heavily injured. That one got quite a bit of attention in Switzerland, as the pilot was first sentenced for manslaughter but now acquitted mainly because of a faulty STSB report (which has been retracted in the mean time). Nevertheless, the accident was a carbon copy of this one.
CG deviations out of envelope are much more dangerous than a slight overweight. Aft CG on take off may easily result in an out of trim situation, where pilots will realize much too late that the airplane will try to take a much higher nose up attitude and they actually need to push after rotation to get the speed to build up. I think this would have been possible here if the pilot would have counteracted the nose high tendency immediately. Also it is not clear what the flap setting was. If the flaps were up, that would have aggravated the situation even more but might be why they took so long to get airborne apart from the high weight.
The report of F-GSBS near Grenoble is out now as well.
https://www.bea.aero/fileadmin/user_upload/BEA2020-0405.pdf
So it turns out they had a crack in the exhaust pipe and they found significant CO contamination in the pilots blood. This amongst other stuff which was probably contributory to this accident, it appears strongly that this is another CO poisoning event.
It appears to me that quite a few of those “mystery” accidents turn out that way, I am reminded of the Dallach accident and some others.
Unfortunately this valley got another fatal crash this summer, I am expecting some more clue in the report, because the pilot was quite experienced.
