Beccles Fatal 24 Mar 22
 

Saw this on the BBC News website a couple of days ago but nothing on here?

Beccles light aircraft down

Has anyone any further info?

Just curious........... Type, possible cause, mitigating circumstances?

Rans6...........

Aviation Safety Network has it as a Flight Design CT2K which ran off the runway in to a field of rape on landing. The pilot was fatally injured. Very sad for all concerned.

The land adjacent to the runways at my gliding club in Western Canada is leased to a farmer. Every third year, he plants rape, or Canola as it is more politely known in Canada.

Very colourful when flowering, but our pilots are particularly careful not to run off the runway on those years, because the crop is like a forest of one metre tall trees, with very robust stems about 1 to 2 cm in diameter. Extremely unforgiving.

Interesting. So would you consider it worse than a cornfield for landing?
Sometimes one imagines that a forced landing into tougher crops might provide somewhat of a carrier landing deceleration, yet still a relatively safe landing compared to alternatives with bigger obstacles. Although crops could actually be less dangerous when taller, since they are more likely to be slowing the whole aircraft down instead of just grabbing the gear and trying to flip it. Low lying soybeans can be pretty tough and snaggy for example.

https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/276817 is the link.
Most news reports don't show the airplane, which seems to be in a bit of a dip in the land relative to where ever photographers used their long lenses. But in one news article one can see a gear leg and other bit of structure sticking up, so it seems that the aircraft did flip.

Rape aka canola is nasty enough even to walk through as I've had to do to retrieve a winch line.

It's the one crop where I'd choose to land gear up if I happened to be stupid enough to have to land in it.

A uk Rape crop would have been planted last autumn and overwintered as small plants and only now just now getting going, at this point it is still fleshy stemmed but as the summer progresses it does toughens up and become almost impossible to walk through. Obviously a nosewheel aircraft rolling into it even this early in the growing season would be retarded quickly and likely flip on to its back if going fast enough. Cereal crops at this time of year are not much more than longish grass.

pchapman,
Absolutely not. I think a corn crop would cause far more damage than a rape crop. If I was forced to land in either of them, I would treat it like a treetop landing, that is landing as absolutely slowly as possible.

Note for the Brit majority on here. I'm assuming that pchapman, being in Ontario, is referring to maize, rather than what is called corn in the UK, i.e. wheat.


sandringham1,
It goes through the same stages on the Prairies, but much more quickly, since it is not sown until the spring. It amazes me that a field of little innocuous shoots can grow into an impenetrable thicket!

https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....6ea0a1b32d.jpg


PS You can see why we have to be careful when operating on our grass runways during the Canola rotation year:
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https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....0f309bc874.jpg