Crashing via autopilot?

[3WE]

Dan Juan is suggesting a 400-hour instrument? pilot was pushing buttons and wound up in a steep dive in severe VMC/daylight.

I was first going to say he was crazy, then he showed a YouTube where she’s trying to climb at low power.

Still, it’s hard to comprehend how you would dive it in without Fing TGDA…and how an instructor would sign off and an examiner would pass you.

I WANTED to blame carbano uno oxygeno, but the gal’s own YouTube is pretty damning…self-enacted MCAS.

https://youtu.be/ViO1j1iYn18?si=-9a6CeGpgKw8tA6b

Search term for Gabriel: TNFlygirl Crash Dec. 7

Double posting for Evanie and Bobbieee

[3WE]

…and I forgot the other contributing factors: posing for photos by the plane and Go Pros all over the place.

[3WE]

Dan Juan covers it too, and suggests they spun in. Mild conflict with Dan Juan who said it was a healthy dive. (ADSB has them with high ground speed, so I’m with Dan Juan.)

[elaw]

…and I forgot the other contributing factors: posing for photos by the plane and Go Pros all over the place.

Yeah, I think I like Juan's vids more than most here, but claiming the presence of cameras was a contributing factor to the accident is a bit of a stretch.

OTOH, I knew "push yoke, houses get bigger, pull yoke (not relentlessly of course), houses get smaller" before I ever even set foot in an airplane. Getting all the way to being a licensed pilot without having a crystal-clear understanding of that concept... scary.

[3WE]

***claiming the presence of cameras was a contributing factor to the accident is a bit of a stretch.***

Flying an aeroplanie is often said to require almost full, undivided attention, and running a YouTube channel with lots of cameras and procedures and good videos of yourself ALSO demands a chunk of attention.

Also, we aren’t supposed to stereotype, but a person trying to make themselves a star may lack some aviational humility, sense, airpersonship and prioritization.

Maybe not a DIRECT contributing factor, but I’ll vote with Dan Juan on A contributing factor.

[3WE]

… Getting all the way to being a licensed pilot without having a crystal-clear understanding of that concept... scary.

As I said, there, we need more oversight and screening…and fire the autopilot executives.

[3WE]

OTOH, I knew "push yoke, houses get bigger, pull yoke (not relentlessly of course), houses get smaller" before I ever even set foot in an airplane. Getting all the way to being a licensed pilot without having a crystal-clear understanding of that concept... scary.

And, you really need advanced training: You need more power to climb and less power to descend…kinda like riding a bicycle!

And super advanced training to combine power and attitude to achieve desired vertical and horizontal speeds….

THEN, IT’S A GOOD TIME TO FOCUS ON HOW TO LAND… To hell with type-specific autopilots, Evan!

[3WE]

Double post:

After watching another FlyGirl video, I saw something critical AND am back on the carbano y uno oxygeno theory

In the video, she’s flying along with no understanding of the pitch power businesses commenting that she’s getting a bit too slow…

BUT THEN, SHE CLICKS OFF THE AUTOPILOT AND IS HAPPY AS THE AIRSPEED IMPROVES…

I know she doesn’t understand a lot of stuff, but she does demonstrate that one fundamental that the -200 vs 236A pilots did not.

A sad truth is that we might find out exactly what happened if the memory card in a GoPro or two survived.

[3WE]

Mostly snarky comment:

Does debonair trim get mechanically bound up if heavily loaded, requiring you to actually dive more to relieve the load, and trim up?

I’m struggling to reconcile that 5000 feet was inadequate to recover from a big dose of nose-down trim.

[3WE]

Beechcraft…

They all look alike.

Edit: I see a GoPro in the background.


Still shot of FB Ad:

IMG_0146.jpeg (434.11 KiB) Viewed 1757 times

[elaw]

Well it's definitely capable of crashing... and it's good not to forget that.

[3WE]

Video supposedly ~1 year before the crash.

https://youtu.be/R1W1ml-uRT0?si=fkk-3zJQY4BTMpfY

Search term for Gabriel:

IMG_0321.jpeg (392.29 KiB) Viewed 1571 times

I would love to know more about who signed her off and gave check rides. Kind of disturbing.

And, I still want to believe that she didn’t do a death dive while screwing with stuff OTHER THAN the autopilot disconnect button. [shoulder shrug].

[flyboy2548m]

I watched a couple of her remaining videos, and what struck me was not her "lack of knowledge", but that I felt like her heart was never in any of this. She did not seem to especially like neither that airplane, nor flying in general.

[Gabriel]

I watched a couple of her remaining videos, and what struck me was not her "lack of knowledge", but that I felt like her heart was never in any of this. She did not seem to especially like neither that airplane, nor flying in general.

Believe it or not, I agree with you.

Also, he seems to be focusing on the wrong issues. For example in this video, the main point she is making is that she accidentally turned off her Garmin and didn't know how to turn it back on. Surely, that's not great, but what about her inability to hold a heading or altitude or her total lack of positional awareness? That's much worse and I am not sure she even realized that this was an issue, or happening at all.

[3WE]

…I felt like her heart was never in any of this. She did not seem to especially like neither that airplane, nor flying in general…

…I agree with you…

I don’t disconcur with her mental attitude appearing off. Of course maybe it’s about feminine beauty YouTube fame more than the beauty of flight, and pretending you are Boeing Bobby.

However, I’m not sure that that explains how you can get a license and demonstrate such numerous shortcomings in basic skills and knowledge…

And, while she looks amazingly out of touch with good airpersonship, it still doesn’t explain a 6000 ft death dive with the plane ‘in control’ I’m not saying in control by her with little evidence of recovery.

Did daddy have a heart attack and slump over yoke? Did the pull-up cable break? Meteorite encounter?

I have a shred of dickleskia and have gotten wonky because the airport is east of me and I’m west of it…still, to take off and not know to turn towards the Grand Ole Opry at the heading I determined with my plotter and roughly in the same direction of some other flight I’ve taken before…

[Gabriel]

I have a shred of dickleskia and have gotten wonky because the airport is east of me and I’m west of it…still, to take off and not know to turn towards the Grand Ole Opry at the heading I determined with my plotter and roughly in the same direction of some other flight I’ve taken before…

It never happened to me in a real flight. I don't have a lot of cross-country hours but most of the ones I have were a combo of blind pilotage (where I draw the line in the sectional chart and determine the course and time between visual waypoints) and visual navigation (cross-referencing between my paper sectional chart and the view out the window) to cross check the pilotage and adjust the time and heading for the next waypoint. I did have problems (or rather "delays") finding the airport once I was getting there according to both my pilotage estimations and landmarks. But I always was actually where or close to where I was supposed to be and the problem was just that airports (especially grass runways) are sometimes just hard to tell from the country background.

But it happened to me once, flying on instruments in the sim when I was doing my instrument training that I never finished, that I had one of this "dickleskia" moments. The cockpit was like a Cessna 172 and had a very basic 6 pack + VOR-ILS, DME and ADF. There was no HSI and no heading bug to set. Also no GPS or moving map. It was an arc-DME approach to intersect the localizer. I flew the arc-DME part reasonably well and then, when I had to do a 90 degrees to the right to intercept the localizer, I turned to the left (because the DME arc ended in a roughly southerly direction and then the right turn would put you in final in a roughly westerly direction, which has the trajectory, on the paper, from going down to going left). When I "intercepted" the localizer and attempted to do "small corrections" to keep it centered, the plane seemed to be more and more deviated from the loc (it was, of course, because, flying in the opposite direction I was supposed to, the corrections were the reverse of what was needed to keep let's say a "back track" LOC away from he filed).

I didn't understand what was happening. Nothing made sense to me. But I understood that something was very wrong, I didn't know where I was, and I was descending to the ground in an approach that was surrounded by mountains which I didn't know in what direction they were relative to me. Even knowing that is was a sim, it was an awful feeling. I added power and went for best climb (maybe I should have gone for best gradient instead) and I don't remember if there were LI-LO NDBs and I had one of them tuned, or if I tuned back the VOR and looked for the radial straight to it, but I headed back to the airport while climbing to start the approach over.

I was still trying to understand what had gone wrong, and eventually I did. I don't remember at what point that was, but I remember that my reaction was not "I turned wrong way, LOL, I died laughing at myself". Rather the opposite. I was shocked, disappointed, angry at myself. If I made this mistake in real life I could easily end all CFITed.

After that I made a mental note that, when planning for the flight that included and instrument approach, or when briefing the approach to myself if it was an unplanned instrument approach, I would at some point hold the chart in such a way that each segment is pointing up at a time, and mark with a pencil L or R at each change of heading. This was one of my last if, not my last instrument training (in real flight or sim) so I didn't have the chance to put it to practice.

[Gabriel]

It was something kind of this and I was flying the North arc. I suspect that the 084° arrow indicating the radial (which is opposite to the inbound course) also had a part in either my initial confusion or in my confirmation bias.

[3WE]

***flying on instruments***

The basic instruments are a bit cryptic and good spatial thinking is necessary if the approach plate isn’t oriented. I’ve briefly done some backwards things. There’s an episode of Ice Pilots where a trainee does something backwards. My only real screw up was telling the airport I was wrong direction from them.

TN gal was VFR/VMC- for her and her dad to be clueless which way to turn and to maybe use the yoke and HI to get started on the trip is tough to reconcile.

[ocelot]

For me, an internal HSI plot is such a basic part of SA that it's hard to imagine... not necessarily making such a mistake but not realizing promptly afterwards that it was all wrong. I think this is both a fundamental cognitive bias... and also probably a result of learning in early MSFS where everything you can see is just solid green and you have to keep track on the chart or in your head.

Which just means I make other mistakes

Regarding the original videos, it's all very depressing. You'd think that reading the directions for the autopilot would be sufficient.

[3WE]

You'd think that manipulating the yoke and trim like you were taught in your very first lesson would be sufficient.

Fixed.

PS: HSIs are fancy things that Gabriel and I didn’t have in our cheap ass training planes…right up there with dual VOR thingies.

[Gabriel]

You'd think that manipulating the yoke and trim like you were taught in your very first lesson would be sufficient.

Fixed.

PS: HSIs are fancy things that Gabriel and I didn’t have in our cheap ass training planes…right up there with dual VOR thingies.

Exactly.
VOR in one instrument, and having to constantly adjust the OBS to see in what radial I am along the DME arc.
DME reading in another instrument.
Heading in another instrument, and adjusting it constantly to keep it about 90 degrees off the current radial +/- correction for the DME distance.
And don't forget to keep the altitude constant (in another instrument) by controlling the vertical speed (in another instrument).
And watch your speed! (in another instrument).
Of course, no autopilot, flight director, moving map, or any other fancy help.
One of the sims I used (a GAT-2, Baron-like) had HSI and flight director. Despite the dual throttles, dual props, dual mixtures and dual cowl flaps, it felt so piece of cake compared with the Tomahawk or the other sim (GAT-1, Cessna-172-like).

[3WE]

What’s a DME?

[Gabriel]

What’s a DME?

Distance Measuring Equipment. It what's give you the reading of the distance, almost always associated to a VOR or ILS.
The VOR symbol in an hexagon. The VOR/DME symbol is an hexagon surrounded by a square.

In the airplane, the VOR/LOC, the glide slope, and the DME equipment are different (different antennas, for example), although they can be integrated in a single box.
For example, when you select the ILS frequency in an airplane that has an integrated VOR/ILS/DME (or an HSI), you are actually tuning 6 different frequencies: LOC left love, LOC right lobe, GS up lobe, GS down lobe, DME TX, and DME RX. It is standardize that each ILS frequency will have a unique set of all these 6 frequencies. so you just have to select one and the box will know the rest.

In the Tomahawk (as in many small planes) the DME box (if installed) is totally separate to the VOR or VOR/ILS box (if installed). So if you want to use the VOR 114.4 MHz, you had to select that frequency in the VOR box and the same frequency in the DME box (the actual DME frequencies would be different, of course, but the DME box would know what those frequencies are when you select 114.4). So you could actually have the VOR box tuned to one VOR and the DME box tuned to a different VOR. Which didn't make much sense unless the VOR you wanted to use didn't have a DME, so you can use the distance radial to one VOR and the distance to a second VOR to get a fix.

[3WE]

What’s a DME?

(if installed)

Sorry Bobby, I didn’t use blue font. It’s another one of those high $ navigational things that, like an HSI or second nav radio/dial were rather rare on basic 172s

…and I know the basic acronyms.

Even TACAN…as in VORTAC.

[Gabriel]

Sorry Bobby, I didn’t use blue font. It’s another one of those high $ navigational things that, like an HSI or second nav radio/dial were rather rare on basic 172s

Ha! I fell in the non_blue_font trap.

I agree. The flight school I went had 7 Tomahawks, 2 152s, 2 150s and 1 PA-11.

Only the PA-11 had DME.

Joking. Only 2 Tomahawks had DME. Only 1 of them had ILS (LV-MRG).
None had 2 VORs.