PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - This mornings' Irish light aircraft crash
Old 10th Aug 2011, 10:21
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Genghis the Engineer
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Join Date: Feb 2000
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ULH - spats are wrong and you can see a P&M logo on the nosecone.

I doubt it's G-BZOO. Looking at pictures of that particular airframe online it has a purple pod and purple & white wing, whilst the aeroplane in those photos has a blue pod and you can clearly see yellow in the wing.

A rollover accident normally happens on landing where after touchdown the pilot fails to adequately keep the wing tilted to match the crosswind, and the combination of sideways force on the wing, with drag on the wheels keeping it on the runway, rolls the whole aeroplane over sideways. These used to carry a significant fatality risk, normally where the rear seat passenger (or instructor)'s body came forward and broke the neck of the front seat pilot. This pattern was picked up by AAIB around 10 years ago and as a result BMAA and CAA in the UK mandated rear cockpit upper torso restraints - which upset a lot of instructors because it did make their lives much harder, but seems to have eliminated about 1 dead body every 3 years historically.

As an aside, I was involved in that decision, and worked out that we were spending a one-off of about £50,000 of other peoples money across the fleet - to save probably a life every 3 years. One of the easiest airworthiness (and spending) decisions I've ever had to justify.

Another observation of that crash photograph - you can see training bars (rear seat dual controls) in the wreckage, so it seems likely that this was an instructional sortie. Interesting that this was apparently then a British aircraft flying an instructional sortie in the Republic of Ireland where, according to BMAA's website at-least, there's no UK registered training facility.

G
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