One reason for a site such as this is to relay information that might be of help to those who might get into similar situations. Life seems is a series of correcting mistakes and making assumptions which sometimes turn out to be wrong. I am not qualified to comment on business jet aircraft, but I suspect it can occasionally be a challenging way to travel. The airplanes are owned by people who pay dearly for convenience, their convenience, and while their airplanes are sometimes state of the art, they are often flown to smaller airports and out of the way places. Accidents happen more than I had expected when I started looking into this particular one, and I am not aware of why that problem exists.
My wife recently sat next to a business jet pilot on a commercial flight and she was discussing with him some of the incidents that made their life style “interesting”. It turned out that he spent considerable effort to avoid flying a famous woman to any destination because she was so difficult to satisfy. But the inverse of that situation is having an owner who is such a good guy you don’t want to disappoint him.
Flying a B767 from ORD to LAX in January for a major airline is a pretty easy job because there are many people helping at every stage, so even when the WX sucks there is little to expect in the way of surprises; you have been through this many times before. The many simulator rides have prepared you for most of the problems so it is only the unusual ones that make you earn your pay. Instructor pilots are not paid to be nice guys.
Not so when you are taking a new boss from South Dakota to Pennsylvania in a January snowstorm
and you are the guy filing the flight plan, doing the walk-around, checking the maintenance, the fuel load, the weather, and whether the meals made it to the airplane OK.Oh, and maybe you have never been to ABE, but note the ILS is notamed out, and the other pilot just moved east from sunny California, so he isn’t certain what a cloud looks like.
The Hanscom Field accident seems to have two areas of interest and the NTSB will hopefully discover and soon publish at least some of their findings on this. One involves some problem with the controls, and the other a delayed decision to reject the takeoff.
An unexpected problem with the flight controls is the lead up to the accident, and the failure to reject in a timely manner apparently led to the conclusion. The Gust Lock and hydraulic pressure could lead, again apparently, to a problem with the controls, but why the rejected takeoff was delayed might be more difficult to discern.
This was the fourth leg of a four leg day, and maybe on the inbound leg they were running a little late for an important meeting and rushed to get the Boss to this meeting. The Gust Lock lever is in such a prominent place in the cockpit that it would be almost impossible to miss, but let’s say you rushed it on engine shutdown and locked the controls before the hydraulic pressure fell to zero. Then before Engine Start you properly set the Gust Lock lever to OFF. Could there be some trapped fluid doing unanticipated things?
I do not understand the lack of a control check before TO, if it’s true, and wonder if the looking in the mirror part to check the rudder works well at night.
Meanwhile, take your time, use the checklist, and anticipate something going wrong, because it will.
Better to arrive late than not to arrive at all.