Originally Posted by
Dan Winterland
A Kenyan aircraft crashed in the Irish Sea during testing. The pilot ejected, but drowned. And the composer James Horner died in his own privately owned Tucano in the USA. These aircraft have deactivated seats.
I remember that Kenyan Tucano well, as it was the only fatal crash of an aircraft for which I had any responsibility while I was in the RAF.
The Shorts Chief Test Pilot went to do trials in FEBRUARY over the sea near Rathlin Island (think Atlantic/Irish Sea) whilst wearing trainers and no immersion suit. The aim of the trials was to increase the permitted max speed from 270kt to 300kt whilst carrying underwing stores (only fitted to export Tucanos, not RAF ones). Essentially, the heavy stores damped oscillations in the wings and this energy had to go somewhere so it vibrated the tail which fell off at about 293kt (IIRC). Shorts had failed to spot from the recorded figures that this point had been nearly reached on the previous flight. Due to changing the PSP just before take-off, the pilot had then failed to re-attach his leg restraints, so when he ejected after the tail failed, his legs were up under the panel due to negative G. With these injuries and the cold he failed to get free of his parachute and get into his dinghy, and was found dead a short while later.
A feature of the Embraer design (not changed by Shorts) was the quite narrow rear fuselage. Although the tailplane had provision for mass balance weights in the elevator horns, these were empty and the mass balance was an awful arrangement inside the fin. My belief was that Embraer had probably found oscillation in original trials and so had moved the mass balance weights inboard to ease the problem. Hence the deficiency in the tail was probably known.