minus one rental option, or, someone flew it through some trees

exncsurfer

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exncsurfer
I thought this was crazy, so I'm sharing. Anyway, I went to reserve my favorite rental plane the other day and was told it was going to be down for a few weeks due to damage caused by a renter. So, I'm thinking, hmm, I guess someone landed hard and damaged the nose gear or dinged something taxiing, something along those lines. I went in to look at one of the other options and got to see the damage. Apparently someone flew this thing into something in the air. There is damage (dents, etc) to the main gear covers, scrapes down the fuselage, pretty major dents in the horizontal stabilizer on one side. I think they said there was a dent in the prop. No damage to the wing on that side so it was apparently above the objects. So it seems like someone must have had a close encounter with some tree tops? Birds would have left some evidence I guess. The dents seemed pretty clean, I couldn't see any evidence of what the objects could have been. Then, they flew the plane back hundreds of miles, parked it, and didn't tell anyone. Maybe it happened on the ground, who knows, i guess taxiing into some brush shorter than the wing could've done it, but either way, flying it back in that state seems pretty crazy to me.

disclaimer, all of this is hearsay, well other than the damage I saw, haha
 
Be interesting to find out the whole story, even if you can’t share.

Always enlightening about certain members of the species’ behavior.

Someone north of nearly broke the tail off a 182 on a frozen snowbank well before the threshold of a runway and didn’t notice.

The next people to go to fly it noticed the tail was literally snapped.
 
That's crazy, pilots thinking no one will know if they just park it and split.
 
Where I was renting in Long Beach a pilot extended the flaps at cruise speed on a 172 and wrinkled the flaps up. Very ugly. It wasn't discovered until the next pilot went to fly the thing. I'm pretty sure the guy that destroyed the flaps knew that he screwed up and didn't say anything. One of the pitfalls of renting is that you never know what your gonna get.
 
Went out one morning to preflight my rental. Walked by another plane. Didn't quite look right. Looked again. Left wingtip pretty wrinkled up, about a foot or so. That's not good. Hey - son of a ! Left elevator tip similarly scraped and bent up!
Went back in to tell them. The staff couldn't believe it. The previous renter not only didn't report it, but apparently later denied it was him.
What do you have to do to scrape the wingtip and elevator tip on a Cessna 172 - and not completely crumple the airplane?
 
Went to fire up a c-172 a couple years ago and found the nose gear, firewall, engine mounts, and cowl all mangled.
"The twins" had rented it the night before, wheel barrowed (sorry for the verbification) it into the runway, and just tied it up and never said a word to anyone.
That morning, after I reported the damage, the owner went to call them and found out they had booked a couple of seats on the first flight back to their homeland.
Oh, and their insurance was bogus.
 
So at no point did he think that his takeoff roll was getting a little long? :eek:

...

And his approach a little short? :eek:

There’s a couple of interviews of the pilot of the first one floating around the Internet. They explain their messed up thought process that day and mistakes they made.

Don’t think there’s any interview articles of the second video’s pilot.
 
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