Originally Posted by
markkal
A follow up on my comment left above. There are plenty of videos, and data to help the inquiry come to conclusions, this will take time. The final report will be published, but not before 2 years. There have also been reports that the aircraft hit some power lines. So better not speculate here.
However there are rumors, within the firefighters community and an old Tornado pilot who was flying decades ago with the captain involved, that the captain may , I say may, have been trapped by it's own bravado.
While certainly a very skilled pilot, he had a reputation of having the the wrong behaviour and mindset.
He was involved in a crash years ago with a Siai 208 airforce trainer in which a young navigator died and he survived. And the inquiry concluded in reckless flying.
There are suspicions that he was lacking the discipline necessary to stay safe. So one cannot dismiss an complacent and over confident attitude.
This is a risking activity, which being also repetitive does not allow for any deviance. And "normalisation of deviance" in this framework will eventuall bite.
There is an article about the crash in the regional sicilian issue newspaper "La repubblica" titled..."The hero and the reckless".........
https://palermo.repubblica.it/cronac...nia-372087352/
Hmmm… I think some are trying to hang two innocent pilots. For starters, which one were actually flying at the time of the prang ?
From the limited info presented to this thread so far I can see no deliberately ‘dangerous flying’ as such from the pilot. There are some who think flying aircraft just above the tree tops, in hill country, in gusty and low vis conditions is a dangerous activity - to the fire bomber crews it is just another day at work.
I suspect the prang were merely a simple mistake that could have happened to any crew.
Looking at the limited information available on the two videos in this thread we can ballpark wind direction and visibility and what the sight picture of the pilots might have been. Wind direction indications for the valley at the time of the prang can be found at the end of video #1. Sun glare effect can be found at the beginning of video #1.
We don’t know the actual location of the fire the pilots were targeting. The smoke seen in the video could be well down wind of the actual fire.
Reference the aircraft turning right starting at the beginning of the videos you can note the ‘flow’ of the terrain leading up to where the aircraft crashed. You can see a valley just behind the water drop and after that what appears to be a protruding ridge that caused the aircraft to veer away from and stall. From the limited video info there appears to be no houses or power poles on that protruding ridge. Houses are important for getting that ballpark distance ‘feel’ in low vis. i.e. house big = close.
The lead in flight track around the hill top ridge line seemed prudent to me considering the apparent wind direction. The track would have kept the aircraft in the relatively ‘clean’ updraft wind coming up the valley whilst positioning the aircraft for a down valley water drop - except the protruding ridge got in the way. How did they not see it?
Noting the through smoke sun glare effect at the beginning of video #1 I would guess the pilots would have had a similar degraded view looking towards their flight path. Looking through smoke degrades depth perception. Looking through smoke at a dull green-brown back ground of hills with sun glare gives a pilot an extremely limited depth perception - unless, there be a distance reference of a house for example.
Whilst depth perception issues are just another thing in the day to day of air fire fighting I suspect that little protrubance of a near invisible, to the crew, green-brown protruding ridge were just not noted by the crew until the last moment. A simple innocent mistake.