Originally Posted by
Piltdown Man
Obviously you are not joking but I have a question? Are you more (in)competent missing something from a written checklist or one from memory? And with a very simple and old aircraft such as a Moth, who should write the checklist? So called experts or people with real experience who have flown hundreds of hours in the things? Also, I'll suggest that around the world most simple piston engined flying is done without written checklists. Such things are replaced by simple mnemonics and apply to virtually every simple piston aircraft from Moths to twins with wobbly props and retractrable gear. There has to be a reason for that, but each to their own. But for aircraft like Moths with open cockpits and open control runs I really do not like the idea of a lump of card, paper or plastic being loose.
Returning to this prang, what I can't understand is how a wrongly set trim caused such a kerfuffle. The trim on a Moth is not that powerful and is easy overridden. Something else happened here.
PM
I'm not here to say what type of major screw-up is more incompetent than the other. Either way, one can forget something significant. I have flown a lot of aircraft using a checklist and a few, including a reasonably complex T-6 using a mnemonic instead of a checklist for some portions of flight.
Either way, I suggest that there are certain critical items be double or triple checked after the checks are complete. That will one day cover for the inevitable screw-up of missing a critical checklist of memory item depending on how you operate.
As for the wrongly set trim not being enough to cause the accident...that seems like a reasonable analysis to me. I suspect that there was poor soft field takeoff flying skills involved as well. If the aircraft leaps into the air at a speed just above the stall, lower the nose and if required, use some muscle power to do so. In other words, two poor flying techniques combined probably led to the accident(which of course was mostly the fault of the woman in the car).