Originally Posted by
FullMetalJackass
I doubt the C152 pilot was looking over his shoulder, especially if he was a student pilot on final, he'd be focussed on what's in front of him. To ascertain a plane is closing from behind fast he would have had to turn his head, capture the intruding aircraft, judge it's distance and closing speed - all whilst coming in to land. I'm pretty sure he had ADS-B in and was watching the aircraft closing on that screen..... looking at Flight Aware / Flight Radar, the C152 isn't visible, therefore had the 340A also had ADS-B in, he still would not have been aware of the C152.
What I do note is the calls of the C152 pilot - downwind, base but no call on final? Maybe this would have alerted the twin pilot as he was still looking for traffic on base....
Heres the thing, the time between the comment, "you're coming at me pretty fast I am going around..." and the call from the 3rd aircraft that 2 planes had crashed was not long. The last time I saw a 150 it didnt strike me as either fast or fast climbing... it crashed having lost one wing airborne by the looks of it around 50 yards short of the runway underrun and about 250 yards from the displaced threshold. It was also around 60 yards to the right of the C/L, without the left wing. With a pretty energetic impact stuff could have gone in all directions, but the loss of the left wing is going to make the plane roll left, pitch will depend on the wing tail geometry, in this case I would be expecting a slight pitch down from the reduction in downwash that the aircraft would have on the LHS to the lower stab. Either way, the 150 wasn't going to go far, it didn't make the runway end. The 340 got around 2800' down the runway going into the last of a series of T-hangers, with a final trajectory that was at a large angle to the runway direction. The position of the 150 suggests it was in front and therefore below the 340 and under FAR 91.113(g) the 150 would probably have ROW. It is common to shoot straight-in approaches, at controlled airports that not a problem, which makes the occasional uncontrolled airport arrival problematic; the guy who does a lot of IFR and only occasional uncontrolled airport VFR arrivals will have a natural bias towards straight in vs doing a std join. There is no evidence that the 340 did anything other than a straight in, at an uncontrolled airport. FAA-H-8083-3B Chapter 7 gives a bit of guidance for patterns, and reiterates the standard join of 45 to downind in level flight, and gives ROW to the lower aircraft. Its likely that the guys in the 340 confused the other aircraft in the circuit at the time for the one that was on finals, but there is no doubt that the 150 was on very short finals, and may well have been to the right of the C/L IAW with the G/A manoeuver. Given the time between call for the G/A and the alert of a crash, the 150 pilot is almost certainly had a look over his shoulder, so I would suspect that he was not showing poor SA, other than not continuing to manoeuver when he knew the 340 was a threat to him, and as a new pilot, hard to call his actions inappropriate, just unfortunately not achieving a clearance from the other aircraft.
FAA rules are slightly different to other countries, but only in detail, they all follow ICAO Annex 2, kind of.