It certainly wasn’t a deserted beach in the middle of nowhere, see here: http://www.jn.pt/local/ao-minuto/interior/imagens-em-direto-a-partir-da-praia-onde-avioneta-matou-duas-pessoas-8680772.html
It looks like the airplane hit something with the left wing, which lead to the strut being bent and the wing to fall.
The best way to have a chance to make the right decision in such an emergency is to prepare for it mentally on the ground, I think. I have no way of knowing if the pilot in this case actually had a choice or not, but it does seem useful to think about this in more general terms.
I agree completely with others that because we choose to fly, we must accept the risk, and that to transfer that risk to a bystander is morally very wrong.
Things become a lot more complicated (not from a moral but from an emotional standpoint) if you have your kids onboard. Risk your kids’ life to protect a stranger? Very tough.
And then there is the reality of an accident, where you face the very real prospect of death and injury, and all your instincts are to save yourself.
Again, having at least made that decision in my armchair gives me a better chance of doing the right thing.
IMHO anybody flying over water, even just for 10 seconds when departing from a coastal airport, needs to carry a raft. So you may as well ditch if there is any chance of people on the ground.
Haven’t we been trained not to do emergency landings where other people might get hurt?
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A truly awful outcome that I would hope and trust was not what the pilots wanted. However, reports are that he was an instructor, with a trainee PPL. The flaps are down in all photographs, therefore, I would assume this was a controlled descent to touchdown. The bent wing??? God knows. The report will tell.
As an instructor, one would again hope that he could complete a very controlled Forced landing, dead stick.
I have flown over that beach, it is long, and pretty wide, and I would have thought that a ditching close to the breakline would have been the number 1 option.
We were not there, so perhaps in time a report will make everything clear. I hope for the pilots though, that the beach was the only option they had
Let’s rephrase the question in this thread: “Would you kill a child to save your child?”.
We don’t know who was the pax, but still, what would you do?
BeechBaby wrote:
I hope for the pilots though, that the beach was the only option they had
Yep.
Dimme wrote:
“Would you kill a child to save your child?”.
Not intentionally…….
We don’t know who was the pax, but still, what would you do?
It was a flying student, not a passenger.
Let’s rephrase the question in this thread: “Would you kill a child to save your child?”.
An impossible to answer question I would think, at least in a generic way. But in this case it was “almost certain death or severe injury to people on the beach” – and the newspaper reports all talk about a “crowded” beach – versus “possible injury or death for me and my passengers”. For me a clear answer. In my experience, as well as in that of other pilots I have talked to, one only “flies the cockpit” in a difficult situation anyway. You try to perform your tasks as good as you can without conciously thinking about who else is with you in that plane.
