I think I grasp the concepts....if not the finer details
Yeah me too hawk37!
Anyway you're welcome and I hope you enjoyed all exquisite detail the board included in this one. Once you slog through all the detail and analysis a couple of times though, the conclusions reached appear reasonable.
The sequence of events leading to this mishap point right back to some flawed assumptions on the part of the flight test engineering department regarding critical AOA in ground effect. They assumed a decrement in critical AOA in ground effect which was less than the
actual decrement applicable for this specific wing. The impression I'm left with is that the mistakes made to enable this accident were in large part driven by organizational pressure to meet the "runway performance guarantee" and to do it quickly. I've always considered Gulfstream to be pretty solid organization and it saddens me to see them fail in this way.
This event will serve as a cautionary tale for all future part 25 certification flight test programs regarding best practices in general and mitigating the corporate version of "go fever" in particular. In this respect, it strikes me that the analysis of this accident shares much in common with those applicable to the
Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia disasters in that "go fever" was a notable contributor to faulty organizational decision-making in all cases. In fact the risk/reward equation comes into play in any worthwhile pursuit and nothing will ever get done without some risk. One just hopes that lessons learned from the study of past events might be transferable to better planning and control of future endeavors and their associated processes.
And for ordinary pilots? Just don't go yankin' the thing into the air!
westhawk