PILOT SPIN
Pilot Zone => Accident Review/Never Again (I hope..) => Topic started by: Rush on July 07, 2022, 08:19:17 PM
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It was the gust lock. Damn!
https://cdn.planeandpilotmag.com/2022/07/Snodgrass-NTSB-Final-Report.pdf
Probable Cause and Findings
The National Transportation Safety Board determines the probable cause(s) of this accident to be:
The pilot’s failure to remove the flight control lock before departure, which resulted in a loss of airplane control and impact with terrain. Contributing to the accident was his failure to perform an adequate preflight inspection and flight control check before takeoff.
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You are only as good as your last flight.
That saying still rings true.
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Richard McSpadden has a nice short video on this. Unfortunately it’s on FB using Tick Tock, and I don’t do ticktock.
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In the early 70's I was stationed in Gila Bend, AZ with the Air Force. A retired gentleman from the NE had retired there and brought his V-Tail Bonanza and his C-150 there and was the FBO operator living out of a double wide and had a little brick building for the FBO part. He was a CFII. I had begun training in IL and continued with him in AZ. He had several other students, a guy that owned the Exxon station, another gentleman and a young man that was the irrigation engineer for a feed lot. The feed lot owned a plane, 172 I think. I left there in 1974 but kept in touch. One day the young man, his wife and young daughter were going to flying. Someone else had the plane and had just returned from flying. The family got into the plane and they taxied to the runway to take off. He never noticed the column lock in place and the plane lifted off, then crashed, killing his daughter and messing his wife up pretty badly. You can't take anything for granted.
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That's why we have checklists and USE them.
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I cannot imagine not verifying controls free and clear before takeoff, it is unthinkable. I fail to see how anyone can do that. And yet I KNOW I could do that. It’s the random brain fart. Even with a checklist you could miss it. If a pilot that good can fuck up that bad, any of us could.