Spot the problem.
Originally Posted by
Lookleft
A deliberate act would, from the descent profile, to be something that should be considered. Why is the possibility of suicide immediately discarded just because its an unpalatable scenario although very difficult to ascertain.
Not really a big call at all. The ATSB stated :
Its a 172 nothing complicated about it. All the control surfaces arrived at the point of impact and those control surfaces were attached by the necessary wires to the point at which they are controlled. If the flight controls were rigged incorrectly then it would have become apparent during the previous circuits with the instructor. Once again the final descent profile at high power suggests that a flight control problem would not be the main focus of the investigation. There is no precedent for a training aeroplane in the circuit to simply plummet to the ground at a high power and high RoD unless it is being made to do so.
This is a rumour network after all so what do you think (without being stupid of course),might have led to the accident Clinton?
I learnt, long ago, that pilots’ worst enemies are pilots, Lookleft. Across the spectrum from industrial relations to aviation medicine, there’s an endless supply of pilots ready and willing to throw themselves and their colleagues under the bus and plenty of people happy to run them over.
When pilots leap to the keyboard to suggest that incidents like the one the subject of this thread were suicide by the pilot – or, in other threads, leap to the keyboard to suggest pilot incapacitation was the cause of incidents – all that does is add fuel to the Avmed fire. A credulous public calls out to be saved – from pilots – and Avmed is always very happy to answer that call. The suggestions must be credible because they’re coming from pilots.
Try – just for a moment – to put yourself in the position of the pilot who died in this tragedy, and of the family and friends of that pilot, and imagine that you weren’t suicidal and something else caused the tragedy. How do you feel when contemplating the fact that other pilots have no compunction in suggesting that you deliberately speared the aircraft and yourself into the ground?
There used to be the quaint view that almost all incidents were the product of a number of factors – the Swiss cheese metaphor. We supposedly grew out of the ‘blame the pilot’ attitude. But what do we frequently get on PPRuNe? Pilots leaping to the keyboard to blame the pilot, alone.
You and others quote passages from ATSB reports as if they are holy writ and ASTB has never produced a work of fiction either because of a lack of competence or for expediency. You must have the attention span of a goldfish. And everyone’s an expert on 172s.
People who rule out maintenance induced failure, based just on what you quoted and the fact that the aircraft had been flying before it crashed, evidently haven’t been the owners of aircraft and learnt the many creative ways in which maintenance personnel can line up holes in the Swiss cheese. I’ll just relate one example out of many over the decades, to try to make my point.
I owned a Bonanza that became the subject of CASA’s mandatory control cable meddling AD. I paid $10,000 to have the perfectly serviceable and rigged control cables replaced. I subsequently discovered that one of the ruddervator cables had been rigged around the fuel drain stub under the fuel selector. That cable was rubbing directly against the metal stub. I’ll dig up a photo and post it.
Evidently, the person who did the cable replacement did so negligently. Evidently, the required independent inspection was either not carried out at all or was carried out negligently. Evidently, the person who did the test flight failed to perform, or performed negligently, the required pre-flight inspection. All signed off, good to go (with a $10,000 invoice).
That Bonanza could have flown another 1,000 hours. Or maybe just 10. Or maybe just 1. But when something eventually went wrong, it would have gone very badly for the unfortunate pilot in the seat at the time. My educated guess is that the cable would have eventually sawn through the side of the fuel drain stub, resulting in immediate drawing of air rather than fuel into the EDP and, therefore, causing fuel starvation and engine failure. The consequent sudden change in ruddervator cable tension would cause ‘something’ very strange to happen. What – who’d know without doing an actual test. But muggins in the left front seat could have found themselves in a very dangerous situation, very suddenly. And if that aircraft had speared in, all those control cables would probably still have been connected to their control surfaces.
I could go on, for pages, describing the various creative attempts on my life by maintenance personnel, but won’t for now.
But for all of the pilots out there who think it’s a good idea to leap to the keyboard to suggest pilot-alone causes for incidents: You are your own worst enemies. When it’s your turn to be micro-managed by Avmed or have a hatchet job done on you in some investigation, you’ll hopefully finally understand why.