PPRuNe Forums - Airplane falls at Santos (Brazil) with presidential candidate aboard

Hello there,

sorry for bringing up this relatively old thread.

It just happened that yesterday I stumbled into an old news about the final report. It was published 17 months after the accident, and the final conclusion was pilots fault due to fatigue, pilot disorientation and bad weather.

Meanwhile, looking at the video footage clearly showing the airplane in a very steep rate of descent makes the CENIPA conclusion somewhat strange.

One thing that kept bugging me is that there was absolutely no mention in the report of the nose down issue of the Citation 560 when retracting flaps above 200 KIAS. In the wreckage the flaps were up, after an failed landing attempt, showing that the flaps have been retracted. They would not have tried to land without the flaps, thats just obvious. They must have been retracted during the turnaround, probably trying to reach a faster speed since they had a very special guest in the flight.

in the link is the news, that can be easily translated to english with google

G1 - Conjunto de fatores motivou queda do avião de Eduardo Campos, diz FAB - notícias em Política

and the final report

http://www.potter.net.br:8080/Public...014_PR-AFA.pdf

There were some similar incidents with the citation, one of the in Switerzland. If you look at the incident in switzerland, where the pilot could recover flight controls, the aircraft behavior is very similar.

I am not saying that the final report is wrong and the accident happened due to an airplane error. But, at the same time this flaps up issue was extensively known, the Co-pilot was very unexperienced

Nevertheless, isnt it very weird the final report not having a word about the flaps-up nose down behavior of the Citation?? Blaming entirely on the pilots and not saying a word about that makes no sense to me.

here is a brief part of the final report from the switerzland incident:

By exceeding the speed for the extended flaps, the set angle of the stabilizer produced a
heavy pitch-up force which had to be counteracted by the autopilot. The automatic trim
reached his “DOWN” end stop.
The retraction of the flaps and the simultaneous change of the angle of the stabilizer
resulted in a high pitch down moment.
The aircraft pitched immediately nose down at a high rate. The PF pushed the autopilot
disengage. Immediately he retarded the throttles and extended the speed brakes. During the
descent a speed of 304,7 KIAS was reached at 5000 ft QNE. The maximum speed at this
altitude is 260 KIAS. The flaps had been shortly extended again at 286 KIAS and retracted
again at 296 KIAS. In accordance with the information of the PF he was able with help of the
manual trim to recover the aircraft so that at 3288 ft QNE it was flying level again.

and the full link:

https://www2.sust.admin.ch/pdfs/AV-berichte//1807_e.pdf

what you guys experienced pilots can say about?