Les Norton
Despite the fact that the process under which those aircraft were issued their Type Certification was conducted in excess of thirty plus years ago those airframes are getting very tired now
Define tired? Is it how old it is or how many hours on the airframe or a combination of both? A 26 year old airframe with only 6000 hours is well within the manufacturer’s tolerance of an airframes life cycle.
I’ve had three engine failures in light twins in my time and without exception they all performed as the manufacturer quoted in the POH. One of the aircraft (a BN2 with 10 POB) in PNG had 22k on the airframe and the others had 10k+. All occurred in the tropics in ISA+10-15 conditions.
morno
Define “inexperienced” or did you me “less experienced”. I could make the same derogatory comment to you but I won’t because it detracts from the debate at hand. For the record I actually don’t have a problem with Jamair’s post. I do have a problem with people labelling all piston twins as junk when that’s quite clearly not the case.
remoak
That can be debated until the cows come home and we would never reach a consensus here. My personal opinion is a Pan Pan call is generally more appropriate with an engine shutdown in a twin rather than a May Day call.
It is the PIC’s decision as to the relative suitability of an aerodrome for a division after an in-flight engine shut down. My guess is the PIC, considering the nature of the problem at the time decided BK was more suitable. This was probably reinforced by the fact he had just departed from there and knew the actual weather and the forecast for RIC was average and was also probably substantiated by what he saw outside his window.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing and I’m sure if the PIC had the chance to do it over again he would probably and I would hope do things differently. I think we all need to put ourselves in his shoes and imagine for a minute how we would have handled the situation knowing what he knew at the time rather than what we know now.
As for the shallow fog debate, let’s just agree to disagree. My experience has been that just as I’m flaring the visibility deteriorates substantially to the point it can be dangerous. Remember we are talking about fog here not mist and all that it entails with regards to horizontal visibility.