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DH Beaver Down.

Posted: Mon Jan 01, 2018 4:08 am
by Thunder Down Under
Crashed into the Hawkesbury River near Sydney yesterday. All six persons aboard have died. Victims believed to be a British family who own the big British catering company of Cutlers. (?)

TDU

Re: DH Beaver Down.

Posted: Mon Jan 01, 2018 4:21 am
by Not_Karl
And a Grand Caravan crashed in Costa Rica, 12 fatalities :( .

Re: DH Beaver Down.

Posted: Mon Jan 01, 2018 5:48 am
by Thunder Down Under
Crashed into the Hawkesbury River near Sydney yesterday. All six persons aboard have died. Victims believed to be a British family who own the big British catering company of Compass Group.

TDU

Re: DH Beaver Down.

Posted: Mon Jan 01, 2018 12:31 pm
by monchavo
The papers are full of it this morning. The CEO was apparently "good". The plane according to the coast guard is in "12 metres of water".

Re: DH Beaver Down.

Posted: Mon Jan 01, 2018 3:13 pm
by 3WE
Ban all smaller aircraft.

Light planes 7X more dangerous than driving.

Re: DH Beaver Down.

Posted: Mon Jan 01, 2018 4:39 pm
by Not_Karl
Sydney Seaplanes' crash Wikipedia article.
And a Grand Caravan crashed in Costa Rica, 12 fatalities :( .
Wikipedia. The airline seems to have a somewhat crashy record...
Ban all smaller aircraft.
That's discrimination. All aircraft should be banned equally.

Re: DH Beaver Down.

Posted: Tue Jan 02, 2018 3:48 pm
by 3WE
That's discrimination. All aircraft should be banned equally.
Going serious on you (duck, but keep smiling).

We simultaneously have a thread entitled "Safest year ever for aviation"- and look at how many of our superior US airlines have crashed. Yeah, our crews physically assault passengers and we also seem to have occasional bad days in the ground operation department, but we've been very good in the traditional safety department.

Conversely, less capable pilots and less capable planes continue to fall out of the sky- and the 7X versus driving figure is sobering. As I think over the light plane crashes I keep in my feeble mind, I can play the "Evan-that-was-pretty-predicable" card way too easy. Engine quits...a little ice...a thunderstorm...JFK in flaming VMC-but-tricky weather...And I think both of the crashes in this thread are single-engine aircraft.

This Month's Obscure Aviation Typist magazine actually discusses a Flyover-region crash...A instrument-current guy getting a fair amount of radar data in his single engine plane enters a not_quite-thunderstorm and is spit out in pieces...What makes this crash extra interesting is that a Cape Airways 402 was maybe 2000 ft higher and "in the vicinity" and reported very ordinary turbulence.

Did he do something wrong? Or was it just a guy who didn't fly on a daily basis, I doubt it is "light single" vs "light twin" (even though it factually IS EXACTLY that). Autopilot? A plane that was limited to 30,000 ft lower than what the Puppy-Mill kiddies fly (again, the 402 qualifies in that regard too)?

Big-iron-near-perfection versus light aircraft is a very unequal thing.

Re: DH Beaver Down.

Posted: Tue Jan 02, 2018 6:33 pm
by Gabriel
I don't know what information is available for that light aircraft crash, but almost always when a plane breaks up in turbulence it is NOT because of turbulence breaking the plane itself but causing loss of control + high speed + relentless pull up. (or rudder reversals)

Re: DH Beaver Down.

Posted: Tue Jan 02, 2018 9:18 pm
by 3WE
I don't know what information is available for that light aircraft crash, but almost always when a plane breaks up in turbulence it is NOT because of turbulence breaking the plane itself but causing loss of control + high speed + relentless pull up. (or rudder reversals)
Yes...which get's back to being proficient and in a properly-equipped aircraft, according to the FAR's is not the same as being paid solely to drive a 402 for many hours per week, along with a strong, company-sanctioned recurrent training program, (and - for a while Cape Airways had co-pilots at the behest of local parties)...

Still, the 402 reported no unusual turbulence and theoretically the single engine, instrument-rated pilot ought to be able to stay blue side up within fat, dumb and happy limits.

Re: DH Beaver Down.

Posted: Wed Jan 03, 2018 12:52 am
by Gabriel
I don't know what information is available for that light aircraft crash, but almost always when a plane breaks up in turbulence it is NOT because of turbulence breaking the plane itself but causing loss of control + high speed + relentless pull up. (or rudder reversals)
Yes...which get's back to being proficient and in a properly-equipped aircraft, according to the FAR's is not the same as being paid solely to drive a 402 for many hours per week, along with a strong, company-sanctioned recurrent training program, (and - for a while Cape Airways had co-pilots at the behest of local parties)...

Still, the 402 reported no unusual turbulence and theoretically the single engine, instrument-rated pilot ought to be able to stay blue side up within fat, dumb and happy limits.
My point is that maybe the little plane lost control with the same mundane turbulence that the 402 was experiencing. Being instrument-rated is not the same as being instrument-proficient as you said, and there are more than enough cases of IFR-rated pilots that lost control of the plane in IMC with no turbulence, failure, or other factor than the insufficient proficiency and spatial disorientation.

Re: DH Beaver Down.

Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2018 1:23 pm
by Rabbi O'Genius
messed up post

Re: DH Beaver Down.

Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2018 1:24 pm
by Rabbi O'Genius
Apparently the plane was not on it's usual route....

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-42882282

Based on the map in this article, I googled the location.
It appears that the plane turned left instead of right after take off.


ScreenShot015.jpg

It seems that the plane had been in the air for less than 2 km, and was flying up a 300m wide inlet with terrain rising to nearly 200m on each side, before executing a sharp right turn, which it did not complete.


ScreenShot006.jpg

The terrain view after turning left....


ScreenShot012.jpg


Your gratuitous speculation is as good as mine..........

Re: DH Beaver Down.

Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2018 4:14 pm
by elaw
Looks like the correct flight path is a right turn followed by a left, maybe the pilot had a brain fart and thought he'd already made the right turn?

The 2015 Amtrak train derailment near Philadelphia was caused by something similar. There were two curves, the first had to be taken slowly, the second faster. The engineer entered the first curve too fast, thinking he'd already passed the slow one.

Re: DH Beaver Down.

Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2018 11:29 pm
by 3WE
...executing a sharp right turn, which it did not complete...Your gratuitous speculation is as good as mine..........
I assume the dotted line is a position read out from a fancy new GPS...If that's true, they hit the water and not the side of the narrow canyon...it that's true, then bring out the ole STEEP turn and moderately-relentless back pressure theory...

Hanging questions:

-Was the visibility limiting (guessing so) (Leading to them following the shore line instead of skipping over that valley.)
-Were they really boxed in or could they reasonably have out climbed the valley...(and maintained VFR)

Gratuitous speculation posted.

Re: DH Beaver Down.

Posted: Thu Feb 01, 2018 7:02 am
by reubee
-Was the visibility limiting (guessing so) (Leading to them following the shore line instead of skipping over that valley.)
-Were they really boxed in or could they reasonably have out climbed the valley...(and maintained VFR)
This is Australia, they don't know what a cloud is, and a fully-laden float equipped Beaver.

Found these two on you-tube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Twz5sYNgBVM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsEa8XDJVqg

Pity they don't show whats round to the left

Re: DH Beaver Down.

Posted: Thu Feb 01, 2018 8:39 am
by Rabbi O'Genius
I assume the dotted line is a position read out from a fancy new GPS...
On any google map, just right click and select "measure distance"

it only represents my guess of the real fight path based on the ATSB map

Re: DH Beaver Down.

Posted: Thu Feb 01, 2018 11:10 am
by Rabbi O'Genius
........bring out the ole STEEP turn and moderately-relentless back pressure theory...
Indeed.
[Grat. Spec.]
When the pilot realizes he is going in the wrong direction, he decides to turn back before the inlet gets any narrower.
In the subsequent turn he banks too steeply, until the rudder is playing a significant, but ultimately inadequate, part in keeping the nose up........low altitude pitch-in , no time to recover.

A bit like this one in Perth a year ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5c2UX2Na_E

Additionally the control issues could have been compounded by loose passengers.
[/Grat. Spec.]

Re: DH Beaver Down.

Posted: Thu Feb 01, 2018 12:08 pm
by 3WE
ROG: [Grat. Spec.]
Several years ago, we had that baseball player smack a building in NY while doing a 180 in a narrow corridor with a 'crosswind'. (Not to be confused with the more recent baseball player doing sloppy aerobatic type stuff at low altitude)

I dialed in a similar wind and set off to do a 180 somewhere 'close by' in MSFS...because of the crappy view from the old version of MSFS, I too smacked a building on the first half-assed try. Later tries were more successful, but it helped to get way right before turning left, as well as a starting the turn in a controlled-but-aggressive fashion- using a decent dose of pull up, too...

I hate it when that stupid game shows that it's arithmetic is halfway accurate.