At The Time
Hopefully the investigation team to this sad event can get to the bottom of it quickly & with exact reasons so we can all learn from this.
Some good posts here so maybe we are all learning already.
What we train for & what we do in an actual situation can at times be totally different. I know of guys with 1000's of hrs on type get in a Sim for their 6 monthly check & shut down the wrong engine. Not saying this is the case here just an observation as to how we humans behave under duress.
Why we do something totally opposite to what we know is unknown & I reckon we shall never fully understand the human mind.
I've seen/heard of guys who have an engine fire (under Sim conditions) thrash around like a shark out of water just after T/of to shut down the engine. Shear madness! What you end up with is a high risk of shutting down the wrong donk, going from a fire with both engines still turning & climbing close to normal to a SE operation at low ALT on now one donk still with the fire! Just some Eg's how we can all react under stress.
This particular case where the Mojave lost an engine for whatever reason ended in tragedy thru like all accidents do it's a chain of events.
Okay what we seem to know so far is that the A/C started out with around 7000 ft left with one engine still running most likely fully serviceable at first. Whether that engine deteriorated during the next few minutes is still unknown. As has been mentioned here Vyse is just a book figure used under ideal conditions etc. It's for want of a better word the best L/D ratio to clb an A/C on one donk. Seeing as Alt wasn't a consideration here meaning that the guy was well above terrain the use of any excess pwr was needed only for maintaining level flt or to reduce the ROD to a Min. The A/C's grnd Spd as mentioned in the prem report was all over the place so no constant Spd was maintained during the subsequent decent for whatever reason this was probably the guys downfall. Something was amiss there.
More known facts. It's fairly obvious that given the dist to run to BK the height at the start of the sequence it was very doable but we don't have ALL the facts here yet.
With one engine left & quite possibly failing due the continuous high pwr setting left the pilot with a higher ROD than expected, this situation would have been overwhelming to him am sure, would have been to all of us.
Was Rich an option? Sure but going past Rich was I would say probably a good idea due wx...AT THE TIME, he made that decision right there & then, no turning back. I bet most of us would have done exactly the same thing, continue on 'cause remember at the time he was still high & not in a no win situation.
He would have had some commercial pressure on him ( nature of the beast) even if personal as in he wanted to get back to BK for reasons we shall never know so BK was the only destination he would have had in his mind, again AT THE TIME.
The guy didn't express the severe nature of the emergency thru a Mayday call, this usually means two things. He's fairly confident that he was going to make it or he was overwhelmed with what was going on under his ass & simply was prioritizing the situation meaning aviate nav & comms. We all 'default' to some level of handling a risky scenario.
When it became obvious that he wasn't going to make BK then raw instincts kick in. Bugga the rules & or trying to save face if indeed he was even thinking that but like him we are again all human so where am I going to put this thing down. At that very point in time when the situation became B&W (crash was minutes away) the stress levels & decision making went haywire, would for all of us especially in GA where training isn't as often or thorough as the Airlines
Now faced with a failing other engine (at a guess) & very low airspeed & very low Alt this guy just went along for the ride to the very end. I'm not saying he didn't keep trying to land safely but faced with virtually zero safe options we would all under the same circumstances just be part of the blur that he was faced with. This event would have been accelerating beyond belief at this point in time!
Nobody will ever know what this guy was thinking during the whole event other than what we know thru R/T etc but it must have been surreal for him & I gotta feel for the guy as he is no diff than the rest of us, fallible to all the things that we humans do under duress.
Right or wrong we all make mistakes in an ideal world we would be perfect specimens but aviation is one frontier that is far from perfect meaning we have to adapt & do what we can AT THE TIME:0).
We all await the last page to this story, the story for these two that is now closed so we can 'read' it learn from it to make our book of life last longer.
Wmk2