Originally Posted by
claudia
Yep, Pilot induced LTE. Expected in a Jetranger yes,but a little surprising as this
was a Longranger,
I fly a SPIFR L3 and at max gross (which it seems I'm always at - it's a heavy machine) there isn't a large margin of left pedal and torque available... Not as bad as an early Jetranger, but still... Turning into a tailwind and then decelerating to a hover seems to be asking for it. There were two places I thought maybe he was going to get out of it... he starts a brief climb... I was hoping he was going to try to get a little altitude so he could then lower the collective and have a little altitude to trade for airspeed... and then again when he goes down out of sight it's pretty clear to me that he must have pretty much stopped the descent because there's a pretty long delay before you see the spray from hitting the water... I'm guessing he got some help from ground effect, but probably the turning disoriented him enough that he eventually rolled it over.
Almost 30 years ago I flew with another instructor who had an LTE encounter on top of a small mountain (and he crashed). He showed me how to hover while yawing at a fairly high rate. The trick is to use the blur of the horizon/trees/whatever to keep the wings level and the nose from pitching down or up... it's not a comfortable thing to practice, but with some practice you can hover at pretty high yaw rates for long periods of time. If you haven't practiced it, it seems like most people lose control within 5 seconds... usually by dropping a wing.
I've been into W34th a number of times (but not recently) in the L3 and never had a problem, but then I'm always paranoid about power available so I'd never try a direct downwind approach like he did... let alone a downwind deceleration to a hover!