Plane thief pulls off 'superhuman' landing

[I. M. Esperto]

http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?newslett=1&click_id=13&art_id=qw1032275162266B265&set_id=1


Plane thief pulls off 'superhuman' landing

September 17 2002 at 05:39PM



An unusual thief, one with exceptional flying skills, was still on the lose late on Tuesday afternoon after leaving his booty on the N4 highway near Bronkhorstspruit.

"I can't believe I'm standing in the middle of the road next to my plane," commercial pilot Carlos Garcia Cabral said from the scene on Tuesday morning.

The Cessna 206 Turbo, a so-called "jump-ship", was used every weekend to transport parachutists at Modimolle (formerly Nylstroom) in Limpopo, he said.

It was brought to Pretoria's Wonderboom airport on Sunday for its 100-hourly inspection and taken to the maintenance section. But between 5pm on Monday and 5am on Tuesday, probably around 1am, someone boarded the aircraft and took off.

'It is superhuman'
The flight instruments record that it was flown around for over one-and-a-half hours, Cabral said. Then there was a fuel starvation and an emergency landing was performed on the westbound N4 between Witbank and Pretoria.

The arrogant aviator turned the aircraft off the road, left it there and took flight - without wings this time.

According to Cabral, who is also a flying instructor, this model was not easy to fly.

"I'm dumbstruck. He really knows what he's doing - especially with this model without (engine power) and at night. It is superhuman."

Despite his admiration for his foe's flying skills, he added: "Hopefully we'll track him down."

'God was watching'
Cabral said he was very grateful to have his beloved aircraft back, but was also amazed that there seemed to be no cars around and that nobody was hurt when the emergency landing took place. "God was watching," he says.

After establishing that there seemed to be nothing wrong with the aircraft, Cabral flew it back to Wonderboom, using the highway as a runway like the pirate pilot did.

Police Captain Piletji Sebola said part of the westbound half of the highway was closed for about 15 minutes around 11.30am for the take-off.

Cabral used about 300m of road to gather momentum before taking to the skies. By midday, the runway was a highway again, reserved for land traffic.


MORE.................

[PAXboy]

The N4 does not have lighting but has very little traffic at night and is pretty much straight for long stretches. He might have used the odd car headlight to give him some orientation.

The tricky thing is that the highway has quite a lot of bridges which, also, do not have lights on them!! :(

I wonder, if 'god' was watching over the aircraft - as the owner states - why did he let it be stolen in the first place? Unless he'd checked the pilots licence first. :D

[Flight Safety]

It's possible the man has flying experience that we don't know about yet. If I were the police, the man's demonstrated ability as a pilot (with at least some flying skills) would be one of the clues I'd be checking out.

[Ignition Override]

Could he have flown not just similar Cessnas, but configured a computer flying game to simulate the plane's flight characteristics?

Supposedly, a brand-new US Navy pilot finished at the top of his T-34 training class after he programmed a desktop computer game to somehow fly like the Beech T-34 BEFORE he even started his ground school or actual sorties! (maybe he had the artificial rudder pedals connected, instead of a twist on the stick on my Ubi Soft "IL-2 Sturmovik" game while evading enemy gunners): could he also have studied a Navy T-34 NATOPS Flight Manual before his T-34 training actually began, in order to practice the procedures? Anyone could copy a friend's manual. This very unique situation was described to me by a guy with whom I recently flew.

[arcniz]

Ig Over: Simulation, on a room-size pricey box or a silly little one, can clearly help arrival skills for "controlled" environments like, say, big flat wide open airports with scads of lights marking the useful bits. A basic premise of airports is that they are prepared and ready for aircraft, and even the weird ones have the "look" to them, so that finding a solid flat stretch on an airport comes fairly easily if you can see.

The "naturally" part surely does not apply to randomly selected pieces of roadway, day or night. The only advantage to doing it in real darkness is that you can't see all the things you're about to hit.

Pretty fine smuggler's moon right now.... maybe it was shining over ZA that night. Many a damsel has prospered in dim light, but that is more probably more due to their skill and this to his luck.

If 'God was watching' (per article) and favorably disposed, she could have tossed in 10-15 kts headwind to make it a walk in an empty 206.

[I. M. Esperto]

IO - I instructed in the T-34 for 3 years at NAAS Saufley Field.

The instruction was strictly contact flying. The Gyro Horizon was useless. I think the story is BS.

[InitRef]

Not BS - Esperto!

Take a look here:
http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2000/0207/tech-navsim-02-07-00.asp

[I. M. Esperto]

Init - All I got was a blamk page.

Could you pass it on in a different manner?

[InitRef]

IM E,
the page works for me - must be some browser setting getting in the way.

I have pasted the text of the article here:

From Federal Computer Week:
Navy takes PC game seriously
Simulator software helps train pilots
BY Bob Brewin
Feb. 7, 2000

Jet jockey wannabes play Microsoft Corp.’s Flight Simulator game to capture a sense of what it’s like to pilot a thundering jet. The game’s realism makes it not only exciting to play but also an effective training tool.

To that end, the Navy last month started to issue a customized version of the software to all student pilots and undergraduates enrolled in Naval Reserve Officer Training Courses at 65 colleges.

The office of the Chief of Naval Education and Training has also installed Flight Simulator on high-powered Pentium III PC workstations with 29-inch screens at the Naval Air Station in Corpus Christi, Texas, and plans to install it at two other bases in Florida.

The decision to include the game in the training curriculum stems from the results of a research project conducted by the Navy last summer. Scott Dunlap, head of the Assessment Project Office for the Chief of Naval Education and Training in Pensacola, Fla., said the study found that students who use microsimulation products during early flight training tend to have higher scores than students who do not use the software.

Dunlap credits Lt. j.g. Herb Lacey, now a naval aviator, with jump-starting the Navy’s use of Flight Simulator in its training environment. While a student pilot, Lacey used the customization functions of the commercial software to create the control panel of the standard Navy trainer, the T34C, and to model the landscapes around Navy training fields in Florida and Texas. "We basically took Lacey’s aircraft panels and scenery, dropped that into our microsimulation project and developed a learning methodology around them," Dunlap said.

Flight Simulator allows students to learn and practice basic procedures, such as cockpit control manipulation and navigation, before they get into an airplane.

As expected, Flight Simulator brings with it a lower cost when compared with the multimillion-dollar, sophisticated flight simulation systems the military services have bought in the past.

Bill Lewandowski, manager of the training systems division of Flight Safety International — the world’s largest trainer of professional pilots — said his company uses Flight Simulator extensively to enhance the ground school experience. But, Lewandowski emphasized, microsimulation products cannot replace full-motion, multimillion dollar flight simulators used by airlines and the military. "You cannot replicate that in a PC environment," Lewandowski said.

The Navy’s Dunlap agreed. "We see this fitting in between what you learn in the classroom and the higher forms of simulation," he said. Even with this caveat, Dunlap said the Navy wants to incorporate microsim training into the next-generation Joint Primary Aircraft Training System, a multibillion-dollar training program based on a Raytheon Co. advanced single-engine trainer.

Another related story is here http://www.zone.com/flightsim98/tips/fsimtopgun.asp

[I. M. Esperto]

Init - That explains it - T-34C.

That's the new Turbo prop model.

I flew the old recip.

Completed 75 students. Logged 2,000 hours, accident free.

Seven of my ex-students went on to be Airline Captains, and one, Jim Partington, was the first CO of a Hornet squadron.

After every successul completed solo, the student owed me a bottle. I always invited him over to drink it. Good times, indeed.