Originally Posted by
lucille
It will be interesting to see what they can infer from all of this. There are many plausible yet unprovable scenarios that this will have to remain an open finding.
Yes, I suspect that will be the case. The '
pax ko's pilot' hypothesis has never held water to my mind. We know that the accident aircraft executed a normal take-off to the north-east from the Cottage Point end of Cowan Creek and then made a what appears to be controlled right turn into Jerusalem Bay, then flew in a controlled fashion for about one kilometre before commencing a steep right turn. The aircraft's nose dropped in the course of that turn and it crashed nearly vertically into the water.
So at what point was the pilot incapacitated? Before the aircraft made the turn into Jerusalem Bay? If so, it is astounding that the aircraft turned right and then flew for a further kilometre before banking steeply into a right turn. And how exactly was this knock out blow accidentally delivered? An elbow to pilot's head? While the Beaver is not a particular spacious aircraft there is a good 30-40 centimetres shoulder-to-shoulder separation between the two front occupants. The maximum extension of someone's elbow from their shoulder is about one sixth of their height. Importantly, the maximum extension occurs when the elbow is extended horizontally; in other words, when it is oriented towards the other occupant's shoulder. Raising the elbow to orient it towards the other occupants head shortens the horizontal extension by about 15 per cent (it varies depending on the height difference between the two occupants). While both Cousins and his eldest son were stocky fellows they weren't particularly tall. I just can't see how one of them could have elbowed the pilot's head.
Could someone have biffed the pilot with the camera? The Canon EOS 40D is not a particularly bulky camera (the body weighs in at around 750g). Based on the photo in the interim report it looks like it's fitted with the bog standard 50mm EF lens. It's hard to see how a passenger could have inadvertently clocked the pilot with that. When it comes to the myriad ways in which an aircraft can accidentally come to grief, it's best to never say never, however, that theory just doesn't appear to be plausible.
What I'm more interested in is:
1. Why was the track offset to the left rather than down the middle of Cowan Creek per Sydney Seaplanes' recommended flight paths from the Authorised Landing Area register?
2. Why did the sequence of photographs stop shortly after the right turn over Little Shark Rock Point started?
I'm wondering if the left offset was to accommodate the pax's photography out the right hand side? Was the 'plan' to execute an orbit over Little Shark Rock Point to further accommodate photography?
This is pure speculation but I'm wondering if the pax inadvertently dropped the camera shortly after that turn started. A dropped camera, a bit of shuffling around to retrieve it, pilot temporarily distracted and head down for a moment and then head up and temporarily disoriented and he's rolled out of the turn into the wrong bay. I'd argue that is a more likely sequence than the knock out. And it certainly wouldn't be the first time
something like that has caused some grief on a flight.
Any old how, absent a CVR I suspect that we'll never get to the bottom of this one, as lucille has opined, the findings will be largely speculative I think.