Cessna 414 down in Yorba Linda

The did a frickin split S. Everything I've ever seen about an upset incident like that is that you don't pull through, you roll back to wings level, then arrest the descent. I'm just glad it didn't come apart around them.

From what I have read about this they performed the correct recovery, positive G through the whole maneuver. But, I have never flown a swept wing aircraft so IDK...
 
I have some kick butt Bose speakers hooked up to my little laptop. They really shake the house. I turned up the volume while my wife was in the next room. The sound of the engines at super high rpm followed by the sound of everything hitting the ground rattled me and my wife came in crying.
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I have some kick butt Bose speakers hooked up to my little laptop. They really shake the house. I turned up the volume while my wife was in the next room. The sound of the engines at super high rpm followed by the sound of everything hitting the ground rattled me and my wife came in crying.

Not sure if serious. Bose has never made such a product, lol.


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True, they remained calm, but they were test pilots and probably expecting the stall behavior. Would be curious how a typical line pilot might react in a similar situation not expecting a stall. Cool video, thanks for posting.

I’m not saying it would be expected for the average line pilot to react that well. I am saying we should remember how these people didn’t die and try to learn from it.
 
They were also in VMC, with instruments that did not tumble, and remained calm, cool, and collected, following the procedures.
That departure did not bear any resemblance to anything for which hard-and-fast procedures had been developed. Much like is beginning here, there was second-guessing on the entry, procedures, and recovery, all after the fact.

Not knowing what sort of Gs that thing experienced and what sort of forces they may have had, but the oil sumps aren't intended to work in negative G environments, nor are the fuel tanks on the aircraft.
I can say with absolute certainty that they were not considering the oil sumps and fuel proximity to the pickups during the recovery.

What they had in this case that doesn't compare to spatial-D was a thorough brief and expectations of at least a marginally unusual attitude (though the departure from controlled flight was not expected) and good conditions for the recovery. There are also very experienced test pilots who have experienced vertigo and/or spatial disorientation in IMC, and the results are sometimes as disturbing as the accident that started this thread.

Nauga,
and his small world
 
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To clarify I was referring specifically to the pilot and not so much the plane. At some point the airplane will have a structural failure due to speed, but in general it seems that if the pilot attempts recovery, it's common to pull too hard and thus rip the wings/tail off (in this case both happened at some point, of course we don't know whether there was a LOC first or second). I certainly believe that upset recovery training/aerobatic training would help and that's something I've been wanting to do. If you look at when Wayne Bower's partner crashed their 340 in the late 80s, the plane impacted the ground intact at something around an 85 degree nose down angle. The pilot just got completely disoriented (according to the ATC audio he stated a gyro failure) and whether or not he tried to get out of it, he didn't succeed. But he also didn't rip any of the control surfaces off like what we saw happen in this 414 crash.

The additional problem you have IMC is that if you've gotten disoriented and flipped over/upsidedown and you have steam gauges, you may also be at a point where your gyros have tumbled and are now misleading/useless. That makes matters worse because now you're in the clouds, in an unusual attitude, your AI is useless, and you're basically looking at your altimeter to try to figure out which way is up.

One possible scenario is that he lost control, end up in a steep dive, and then pulled too hard once he got into VMC and realized what was going on. By that point it would've been too late.

I've always liked this video, showing a stall test for a Boeing 717:


If you look, you can see that they lost a lot of altitude, went WAY overspeed, but managed to recover without ripping the airplane apart from what was essentially a straight nose down attitude. They were also in VMC, with instruments that did not tumble, and remained calm, cool, and collected, following the procedures. Note they didn't move too quickly on the controls, specifically to make sure not to rip anything apart.
That is wild to think about practicing something like that in that big of a bird- in it. Not in a sim for it. Your right though. They move with urgency but stay pretty chill.
 
I can say with absolute certainty that they were not considering the oil sumps and fuel proximity to the pickups during the recovery.

I agree, nor should they. My point was once recovered it was worth checking the engines for normal function and those were a few reasons why, none of which were likely directly in the forefront of their minds.

Mostly I shared it as an educational video that I liked and thought had value while on the subject of nose way down unusual attitude recovery.
 
That departure did not bear any resemblance to anything for which hard-and-fast procedures had been developed.

Looked like your run of the mill, garden variety "over-the-top stall" to me. Put any airplane in a bank and stall it on a steady heading--whoosh, over you go.
 
Assuming no medical problems, would aerobatic training increase a pilot's odds of recovering from a knife edge or upside down attitude? I know altitude would have a lot to do with that. Or is your typical GA aircraft just not going to be able to recover from those?

Recovery from unusual attitudes or aerobatic training, and similar is valuable in my opinion.

But, have you ever seen anyone flying a GA airplane do this training, or apply it, in IMC? :nonod:
 
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Why so scary to test unusual attitudes in a transport category airplane? Probably because the engine turbines on that 717 above are not designed for that much gyroscopic loading. The axes of turbine rotation are being changed at such a high rate (degrees/sec) that the connecting shafts inside the engine will allow the turbine wheels to bend/flex so much from gyroscopic loading that the turbine wheels may well physically interfere with the stationary parts of the engine.

Although military engines must be designed for this kind of loading. Otherwise this might be the reason that wild aerobatics are only done on piston engines that don't have large wheels turning at such impossible rpms.

Maybe a military pilot (or ?) could confirm this.
 
Looked like your run of the mill, garden variety "over-the-top stall" to me. Put any airplane in a bank and stall it on a steady heading--whoosh, over you go.
How many all-up and operating MD-XX series airplanes have you seen do a "garden variety over-the-top stall", especially one that ended up ~80-90 deg nose low? With the exception of the airframe in that video, the answer is approximately zero, I'd bet. I'm not questioning your experience, there just aren't many - whether in flight test or fleet ops. This one got a lot of attention as much due to its rarity as the spectacular nature.

Why so scary to test unusual attitudes in a transport category airplane?
Because the flight characteristics of the airplane should mitigate the risk of encountering this extreme attitude, and because they're not designed for the nose-low high rate of descent potentially-overstressing and overspeeding condition extreme attitudes (not just 'unusual') tend to introduce. Even when flown within design limits (or maybe *if* flown within design limits...) it takes a LOT of altitude to recover and is fairly sensitive to technique. The test point in the video was not intended to develop into an unusual attitude.

Nauga,
not entirely armchair
 
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Single pilot IMC in a new big twin, sad

It wasn't new to the pilot. He had owned it since December 2017. The pending registration noted in January 2019 was apparently a name change only.
 
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It wasn't new to the pilot. He had owned it since December 2017. The pending registration noted in January 2019 was a name change only.

Maybe it just came out of a year long annual.
 
Maybe it just came out of a year long annual.

In August 2014, the aircraft registration was transferred to Air 20 Corp in Gardnerville, NV, which just happens to be where the pilot, Antonio Pastini, lived at that time. Some news outlets are stating he still lived there, others give an Oregon address.

It's pretty clear Pastini owned the plane for over four years. I'll just guess he had some PIC time in it before the crash on Sunday.

:rolleyes:
 
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Although military engines must be designed for this kind of loading. Otherwise this might be the reason that wild aerobatics are only done on piston engines that don't have large wheels turning at such impossible rpms.
Jet engines wouldn’t be very practical for high-energy tumbling aerobatics. They don’t have the instantaneous response that pistons do, plus their fuel consumption would be prohibitive.
 
In August 2014, the aircraft registration was transferred to Air 20 Corp in Gardnerville, NV, which just happens to be where the pilot, Antonio Pastini, lived at that time. Some news outlets are stating he still lived there, others give an Oregon address.

It's pretty clear Pastini owned the plane for over four years. I'll just guess he had some PIC time in it before the crash on Sunday.

:rolleyes:

I'd also bet he had SOME PIC time in it.
 
Looks like part of a tree IN the fuselage, right through where the front seats would have been. Talk about adding insult to injury. Sad all the way around.

That Boeing was right wing low and snap rolled left to inverted when it stalled, or are my eyes deceiving me?
 
Gotta outlaw cars and trucks, too....
We had an incredible incident near here just a few years ago in Greensboro, NC. A woman ran a stop sign at a T-intersection, jumped the bank, and went nose-first through the roof of a group home where adults with autism lived. They had pictures of the tail of the car sticking up through the roof. Miraculously, no one was injured.
 
In August 2014, the aircraft registration was transferred to Air 20 Corp in Gardnerville, NV, which just happens to be where the pilot, Antonio Pastini, lived at that time. Some news outlets are stating he still lived there, others give an Oregon address.

It's pretty clear Pastini owned the plane for over four years. I'll just guess he had some PIC time in it before the crash on Sunday.

:rolleyes:
His daughter is saying he owned it for a year, and during that time he replaced an engine and had the plane repainted...that is a lot of down time.
 
Recovery from unusual attitudes or aerobatic training, and similar is valuable in my opinion.

But, have you ever seen anyone flying a GA airplane do this training, or apply it, in IMC? :nonod:

We did a couple of stall recoveries under the hood in training.

I can say that I did have the 310 stall once on me in icing (stall speed got way higher than the bottom of the arc). I lost almost no altitude from it, but I caught it very early (didn't get fully developed) and pushed the nose down quickly, so it didn't progress further than the early stages.

Why so scary to test unusual attitudes in a transport category airplane? Probably because the engine turbines on that 717 above are not designed for that much gyroscopic loading. The axes of turbine rotation are being changed at such a high rate (degrees/sec) that the connecting shafts inside the engine will allow the turbine wheels to bend/flex so much from gyroscopic loading that the turbine wheels may well physically interfere with the stationary parts of the engine.

Although military engines must be designed for this kind of loading. Otherwise this might be the reason that wild aerobatics are only done on piston engines that don't have large wheels turning at such impossible rpms.

Maybe a military pilot (or ?) could confirm this.

I spent a few years at one of the major turbine engine manufacturers. My focus during that time was on bearings, however I learned about the rest of the components as well.

Turbine engines are developed around a certain G loading. The jobs of the bearings include keeping the rotors located in the axial and longitudinal axes. The general design is a ball bearing at the front of each spool and a roller bearing at the aft, sometimes with a few in between. The gyroscopic loading aspect is an interesting one, and that wasn't one that I recall ever coming up in the design theory, but we also weren't designing engines around the use case of ending up in unusual attitudes like that in such a rapid change in attitude so those angular rates of change were always pretty slow relatively speaking. I didn't work military programs so I don't know if that was something that went more into the consideration there.

It is true that the military turbine engines are designed to higher G-loading, especially if they're intended for carrier landings. We did once get asked about taking a commercial engine for an application that would involve high G takeoffs and landings, and the bearings were the primary concern.

Regarding the prospect of the rotating pieces touching the stationary pieces causing a catastrophic failure, I would view that as highly unlikely, even in that situation. The rollers and races are generally made from M50, which is about the hardest stuff on the planet. It will not flex, and its properties don't lend the bearings to instantaneous catastrophic failure. What ends up happening depending on loading is you'll have a crack initiate and the bearing will start to make chips. Hopefully this gets caught in the chip detector before it leads to a catastrophic failure (those always produce some pretty interesting carnage). Even if the various rotors did contact the stators, there's enough energy there that they won't have an instantaneous hard stop. There might be some rubbing.

If that event had been brought to my team, we would've looked at the data, done some calculations... the recommended follow-up would've almost certainly started with a borescope, and might've gone as far as a teardown to replace the bearings.
 
Why so scary to test unusual attitudes in a transport category airplane?

Also because swept wing jets sometimes have interesting stall characteristics. As seen in the video, they may depart in spectacular fashion. Most pilots will never stall a jet outside of the sim. Just too dangerous.
 
Also because swept wing jets sometimes have interesting stall characteristics. As seen in the video, they may depart in spectacular fashion. Most pilots will never stall a jet outside of the sim. Just too dangerous.

My understanding is that you have to do a stall test on Lears after some inspection that involves removal of the leading edges of the wings. And there are only a very few number of people who are authorized to do that test, so you have to bring them in to do it. Obviously it has to be done at a high altitude (in case of a problem) and in good weather.
 
We had an incredible incident near here just a few years ago in Greensboro, NC. A woman ran a stop sign at a T-intersection, jumped the bank, and went nose-first through the roof of a group home where adults with autism lived. They had pictures of the tail of the car sticking up through the roof. Miraculously, no one was injured.
We had a similar one. A woman ran a stop sign at a rural intersection and her car was T-boned by a semi truck. The truck driver was not wearing a seat belt and was thrown from his seat in the collision, becoming a passenger instead of a driver. The truck continued off the left side of the highway and went through the lunch room of a school. The kids were all outside for recess so none of them were injured. (If you hear me advocate that commercial drivers should summarily lose their licenses for driving without a seat belt fastened, this incident is why.)

You can die in a plane crash without leaving your house. You can die in a car crash without getting into a car. If you live long enough, you'll get cancer and die of that. Everyone dies, not everyone lives. Etc. etc. etc. But rational thought never enters into knee-jerk reactions to spectacular incidents that threaten the tribe.
 
Also because swept wing jets sometimes have interesting stall characteristics. As seen in the video, they may depart in spectacular fashion. Most pilots will never stall a jet outside of the sim. Just too dangerous.

And yet, there are other "swept wing jets" that you can control in speed, altitude, and heading to Commercial PTS standards while fully stalled (I did it in the T-38, F-15E, and F-16, but obviously there are others).


There isn't anything *inherently* dangerous about a swept wing stalling; it is the high-AOA and post-stall airflow over the entirety of the aircraft, as well as flight control size/effectiveness, engine power and location, CG/weight distribution, etc, that really determines what the airplane's post-stall behavior and ease of recovery to controlled flight is going to be.
 
And yet, there are other "swept wing jets" that you can control in speed, altitude, and heading to Commercial PTS standards while fully stalled (I did it in the T-38, F-15E, and F-16, but obviously there are others).


There isn't anything *inherently* dangerous about a swept wing stalling; it is the high-AOA and post-stall airflow over the entirety of the aircraft, as well as flight control size/effectiveness, engine power and location, CG/weight distribution, etc, that really determines what the airplane's post-stall behavior and ease of recovery to controlled flight is going to be.

As I said some. Tactical aircraft are a totally different category. We were talking transportation type aircraft. Stalling a 150,000 lb airliner is a little different than turning and burning in a 50,000 lb fighter.
 
How many all-up and operating MD-XX series airplanes have you seen do a "garden variety over-the-top stall", especially one that ended up ~80-90 deg nose low? With the exception of the airframe in that video, the answer is approximately zero, I'd bet. I'm not questioning your experience, there just aren't many - whether in flight test or fleet ops. This one got a lot of attention as much due to its rarity as the spectacular nature.
Well, you said, "That departure did not bear any resemblance to anything for which hard-and-fast procedures had been developed."

All I'm saying is, "When you stall an airplane in a full-aileron/rudder sideslip you can expect what you got--especially in a swept wing (negative dihedral) airplane." I'm not trying to diminish the drama of the result.

I noticed the PF got the stick forward, neutralized the controls and reduced power. All that is SOP.

So, why the heck were they doing cross-controlled stalls anyway?
 
My understanding is that you have to do a stall test on Lears after some inspection that involves removal of the leading edges of the wings. And there are only a very few number of people who are authorized to do that test, so you have to bring them in to do it. Obviously it has to be done at a high altitude (in case of a problem) and in good weather.
Yes, to calibrate the AoA vanes. I've known a couple of pilots who have found themselves upside down doing these tests.
 
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How many all-up and operating MD-XX series airplanes have you seen do a "garden variety over-the-top stall", especially one that ended up ~80-90 deg nose low? With the exception of the airframe in that video, the answer is approximately zero, I'd bet. I'm not questioning your experience, there just aren't many - whether in flight test or fleet ops. This one got a lot of attention as much due to its rarity as the spectacular nature.

Because the flight characteristics of the airplane should mitigate the risk of encountering this extreme attitude, and because they're not designed for the nose-low high rate of descent potentially-overstressing and overspeeding condition extreme attitudes (not just 'unusual') tend to introduce. Even when flown within design limits (or maybe *if* flown within design limits...) it takes a LOT of altitude to recover and is fairly sensitive to technique. The test point in the video was not intended to develop into an unusual attitude.

Nauga,
not entirely armchair
But you you get the t-shirt? :eek:
 
And yet, there are other "swept wing jets" that you can control in speed, altitude, and heading to Commercial PTS standards while fully stalled (I did it in the T-38, F-15E, and F-16, but obviously there are others).
When demonstrating high-AOA flight, are those planes' wings fully stalled (wing has exceeded its critical AOA) or do they just have an obscenely high critical AOA? It seems to me that the wing is still generating enough lift to overcome gravity and the plane is just deep into the back side of the power curve. But maybe that's not the case and you're riding on top of engine thrust. Sincerely curious question from a guy whose only exposure to fighter jets is trying to go deaf from the sound.

(Thread drift is fun.)
 
When demonstrating high-AOA flight, are those planes' wings fully stalled (wing has exceeded its critical AOA) or do they just have an obscenely high critical AOA?
It's more complicated than that. Critical AoA is a simplification that works well for non-swept wings with no leading edge extension. Also, its the airplane generating lift, not just the wing. The lift curve for tactical jets is generally determined through at least 180 degrees (+/-90) angle of attack.
 
Its roughly the same distance from KFUL to the crash site as it is from my house to KEAT. Yet when I hear an aircraft flying over head, say, the Horizon flights from SEA to EAT, I can only hear the plane for about 15-20 seconds. Yet in the audio only clip, you hear the plane for almost 50 seconds before the obvious sound of a rapid descent (~55 seconds). He's supposed to be climbing and heading east. Did he know something was wrong and turn back to towards the airport after that pop at 23 seconds???
 
Its roughly the same distance from KFUL to the crash site as it is from my house to KEAT. Yet when I hear an aircraft flying over head, say, the Horizon flights from SEA to EAT, I can only hear the plane for about 15-20 seconds. Yet in the audio only clip, you hear the plane for almost 50 seconds before the obvious sound of a rapid descent (~55 seconds). He's supposed to be climbing and heading east. Did he know something was wrong and turn back to towards the airport after that pop at 23 seconds???
It sounded like normal circling to me. YMMV.
 
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