Holy moly Batman!

Indeed XXX.

And not that I am saying flying that far overweight is a good idea, the reality of physics is that with a good runway length, sufficient power it will take off OK and fly OK, ignoring the structural things for the moment, so long as the CofG is OK.

When you burn off 160kg of fuel, I can only assume the CofG will have moved a long way aft, and even on the back of the curve or slightly past it, it would still fly OK, but you have NO ROOM for sloppy flying. All the speed margins and so on need to be higher. From flight testing at gross weights and aft CofG I can tell you the controls are very different.

Dark night, long day, not current, and pegging the normal IAS on approach.....quite likely the IAS was insufficient to keep the out of trim overweight beast aloft. And was proven.

And for anyone reading this suggesting I think it is OK........read again!:= PPrune always brings out the Nazi's. That machine was 15% over, like a ferry flight permit would allow, so it would do it, but you are kidding yourself if you think it is a good idea any other time. And you would have to load and fly it like a ferry pilot would.

Youngsters take note. Or perhaps old fella's, who fly on average 25 hours a year.

Very sad set of circumstances.

Good analysis Jaba. I missed this thread the first time around but there are some gems of wisdom, well done everyone who contributed! Book marked and saved for further reading :ok:

Yes, going on the report, the overloading was one thing, but they certainly point to the aft c of g (probably out of range) as a contributor.

Added to that was the lack of night recency, on top of a relatively small number of night hours in general given the number of years he'd held his rating.

I haven't flown the type, but it seems astonishing that someone would be happy to put around 250 extra kg on board like that.

MTOW of the Saratoga roughly 1640 kg's.
1028 empty.
612 payload.
405 litres (292 kg's).
320 for pax.
6 POB @ 80kg's = 480 kg's.
90 kg's extra in there somewhere.

You've got to wonder how it had so much weight on board based on the numbers that I hope I have right!

15% over-weight.

Weight issues aside, another example that proficiency is everything in aviation.

The papers wrote it up as an overload that caused the accident...

Different to my reading of the report.

Exactly, it flew all day overloaded more ..... It was mishandled when the task of night arrival and an unusually aft c of g required a totally different approach strategy.:uhoh:

I suppose it was overloaded, past it's cofg limit to make matters worse:ouch:

It's more the attitude of someone who would put 250 extra kilos on that worries me.

I have heard that he was 'bullied' into doing the job and there was a fifth passenger (the child) at the airport when he was only expecting four.

If he was so heavy, how did he manage to fly the hour to Bre, land, fly back via the long way and make it all the way to finals for 19? I understand it would diminish responsiveness slightly, but I think the ATSB were just looking for a more obvious silver bullet. A lack of recency would be a much more logical conclusion IMHO.

When the bright lights of Moree were behind you, things would get awful dark looking to the south. I was talking to a pilot (experienced NVFR) yesterday who had to land on 19 without aircraft landing lights once and explained that he ended up going around and coming in on 01 for the visual horizon that the town offered.

You're spot on Jabba. :)

I too, as a greybeard, (even got called a pelican the other day), concur
100% in the timely and timeless caution.

p.s. nasties, jaba? Yep! (thinks . .. . . as a 'nasty' wasn't Sellars as Strangelove in his wheelchair biting his black leather gloved hand so as not to throw a Nazi salute rather pants wetting?)

Moree "Black Hole"
 

Whilst others have pointed out that this aircraft was operated to Brewarrina and then back to Moree again whilst overloaded by as much as 250Kg and with a probable out of envelope aft CofG the primary cause of this accident seems to me to be lack of recency in Night flying.

I am a firm believer in keeping current in all aspects of the privileges afforded by one's licence and ratings. I am concerned that irregular use of Night VFR and IFR ratings available to PPL holders is a recipe for disaster, especially the Instrument Flying rating. Having on numerous occasions crewed for pilot crew, with thousands of hours experience, during simulator rides when they have come back from long leave I have observed many Instrument Approaches flown in the exercises. I well recall that the initial few approaches were often not well flown.

This, I think, illustrates clearly that any pilot holding an Instrument rating or Night VFR rating should regularly practice those skills. The very infrequent use of these ratings does not maintain competence.

I didn't realise landing lights lit up the ground and runway so effectively from 500ft...if your friend was so experienced at NVFR a landing light failure would have made very little difference to his approach path. Might have affected his flare judgement a little, but the surrounding lights wouldn't have helped him with that anyway.

Moree isn't any more of a black hole approach than many other aerodromes around Australia. There are many that are far worse. Me thinks this bloke in Moree would have eventually ended up hitting the trees somewhere else anyway given his lack of recency and an obviously deficient night approach technique.

Hands up who places each pax on the scales every time? :ooh:

Moree is NOT a black hole approach from either end. I've been into there at night on hundreds of flights in varying Wx conditions.

Agree with Aimpoint in this instance. There are many worse airports for night approaches.

HMAS Grafton springs to mind as a typical "black hole approach", but it had a VASI last time I was there. Now has a PAPI. Plus it had 90m spacing on the edge lights which gave conflicting illusions with the VASI, too.

Can we assume, the aircraft weight had nothing to do with the end result unless it was a proven direct link in the chain of events. The only link I can think of is low and slow and lack of response to any power input. But then again, was the aircraft at full throttle at impact?

Try Quirindi for a winter time black hole approach. Try then a take off from the same aerodrome, same time, into nowhere except blackness.

Recency is the key word.

How about, too low and it hit the trees!

I find (and others have also said similar) that I need to call out the heights verbally under NVFR as its very easy to rely too much on the eyeball and the nett result for me is being too low generally.

Not having a crack at ya Old Mate (Fella) but there's 'current' and there's 'current AND competent'

Currency, in my opinion, is not enough. Competent is a neccessary extra :ok:

Jack, classically good reply, Here Here !!!!!!

It is why we really need competency based training and continuing competence via AFR used properly.