Grumman down

Wow! That must have had a lot of energy.

So sad.
 
Discussion on another board sez that this guy had a new G5 installed earlier in the week....as there were numerous flights a day or so ago and this was his trip home. Looks to me like it could have been either a buttonology issue or autopilot.
 
3 miles straight out from the College Park runway, reached 1700 feet.
I live one mile further out, in line also...............

Visibility and ceiling were very bad for flying, but not windy or turbulent. Reports of the plane making a loud noise as it passed over neighbors houses indicates the engine was functioning. He just finished flying across a large wooded park, but there are houses on the other side of the street parallel to his flight. His last airspeed seems to have been 85 mph, reasonable for a climb toward the 7,000 filed altitude.

Very sad for the family of the pilot, but fortunately, no one on the ground was injured.
 
Watching FA a few times, appeared to climb straight out, turn left to the northeast, toward his destination, and immediately spin to the right.
 
Watching FA a few times, appeared to climb straight out, turn left to the northeast, toward his destination, and immediately spin to the right.

Looks like a likely stall/spin/spiral scenario. The GS decreased to 64 kt shortly before entering a right hand spiral and rapid loss of altitude. Probably never figure out the precipitating cause. I wonder if there was an operating autopilot?

Unfortunate and sad.
 
Discussion on another board sez that this guy had a new G5 installed earlier in the week....as there were numerous flights a day or so ago and this was his trip home. Looks to me like it could have been either a buttonology issue or autopilot.

3 miles straight out from the College Park runway, reached 1700 feet.
I live one mile further out, in line also...............

Visibility and ceiling were very bad for flying, but not windy or turbulent...

So we are speculating he had a new attitude (and maybe also heading) display in the panel with minimal time and experience using it, and then headed home in IMC?
 
So we are speculating he had a new attitude (and maybe also heading) display in the panel with minimal time and experience using it, and then headed home in IMC?
or....when engaging the "new panel" with the autopilot in the soup....it went tits up.

We know the plane was flown the previous days....but we do not know who was doing the test flights.
 
If a legacy AP is installed, ops with the G5s can be a little complicated, initially. I just spent 3-4 hours with my G5/STEC combo to learn how it actually works during enroute and approach operations. Its not rocket science, but there is additional buttonology to learn. The manual and supplements are not that helpful. And that's if it all works. Which it didn't until the configuration settings were tweaked. (The install manual ain't that clear either.) Flying the G5s is pretty easy once you know the ropes and the are configured properly.
 
or....when engaging the "new panel" with the autopilot in the soup....it went tits up.

We know the plane was flown the previous days....but we do not know who was doing the test flights.

If he launched into IMC with minimal in-flight experience with the new instrument(s), and for whatever reason that ended up in a LOC, unfortunately he paid a rather high price for the technology.
 
I wonder if the new equipment had flight recording capability. I wonder if any of the data survived.
 
Discussion on another board sez that this guy had a new G5 installed earlier in the week....as there were numerous flights a day or so ago and this was his trip home. Looks to me like it could have been either a buttonology issue or autopilot.

Has there ever been a crash attributed to “buttonology” alone? Just curious. Please, take my license to drill holes in the sky away if I get anywhere close to something like that. I actually need to work on being a better button pusher. Outside that I prefer flying the plane.
 
Has there ever been a crash attributed to “buttonology” alone? Just curious. Please, take my license to drill holes in the sky away if I get anywhere close to something like that. I actually need to work on being a better button pusher. Outside that I prefer flying the plane.
I don't know....but I suffer from buttonology....if I don't fly enough.
 
Has there ever been a crash attributed to “buttonology” alone? Just curious...Outside that I prefer flying the plane.

Given how pre-occupied some VFR pilots get with their iPad, I'm not having much trouble imagining a pilot becoming fixated on the new panel gadgets and letting the airplane start to get away from him in the soup. Or finding himself in one of those "Why is it doing that?" moments. The Grummans are pretty slick and would accelerate fairly quickly I would expect. A lack of experience in that situation, trying to recover with a new attitude display might have made it worse.
 
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Has there ever been a crash attributed to “buttonology” alone?

I would think almost certainly. In the early Cirrus one errant button push could level the plane when you were expecting it to capture your climb rate. Very dangerous if not caught in time.

One day I was headed to Copperhill, TN, after an annual in St. Augustine, I saw delays taking off would have me landing at night, and plugged Dalton, GA into my #2 Garmin to set up a “Plan B”. The plane immediately banked left, seemingly uncommanded, in near total darkness. Really quite disorienting. I can see it leading to LOC if a pilot was fatigued or otherwise preoccupied.

What had happened was I normally had my #1 430 crossfill to my #2, but not vice versa, exactly for “what if” scenarios like the above. But my Garmins had received updates during the annual and unbeknownst to me, had defaulted to crossfill both ways. I can see how a brand new installation could present a pilot with all sorts of surprises.
 
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Has there ever been a crash attributed to “buttonology” alone?...

I would think almost certainly. In the early Cirrus one errant button push could level the plane when you were expecting it to capture your climb rate. Very dangerous if not caught in time...

Your post reminded me of a Cirrus fatal accident because the pilot was unfamiliar with the autopilot and in IMC:

On the afternoon of April 28, 2009, a Cirrus SR22 took off into a 200-foot overcast from Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County Airport. It crashed four and a half minutes later, killing both on board. The pilot acknowledged the tower controller’s hand-off, but never made contact with departure control.

The Cirrus was cleared to take off from Runway 6 with instructions to fly runway heading and climb to 3,000 feet msl. Data recovered from its avionics suite showed that it began turning right almost immediately. The right turn continued through about 540 degrees—one and a half complete revolutions—before the airplane finally rolled out on a southerly heading. It then climbed from 1,200 feet msl to 2,700 feet msl in 17 seconds as its airspeed decayed to 50 knots before it fell back to 1,600 feet msl, reversing heading yet again.

During the next two minutes, it climbed and dropped two more times, reaching a peak altitude of 3,200 feet msl. Pitch angle ranged from 50-degrees nose up to 60-degrees nose down and airspeed varied between 50 knots and 172 kt. Bank angles reached 75 degrees. The final data point showed the airplane pitched 30 degrees nose down and partially inverted, banked 120 degrees over the right wing.

The data logger also recorded that the autopilot was engaged about five seconds after takeoff at an altitude of 940 feet msl, just 61 feet above field elevation. However, instead of altitude preselect mode (already programmed for 3,000 feet with an 850 fpm rate of climb), it was set for altitude hold. This automatically set the altitude bug to 940 feet msl, which the autopilot attempted to recapture as the airplane climbed. The series of inputs recorded during the subsequent oscillations led the NTSB to conclude that “the pilot never adequately regained control of the airplane” while attempting to reset the altitude and heading bugs.

Of course, he had alternatives. The most obvious would have been to disconnect the autopilot and hand-fly the climb. Once he had leveled off at a safe altitude, ATC could have provided vectors if he needed time to sort out the box. And at least three times after control of the airplane had been compromised, it reached altitudes that would have allowed successful deployment of the ballistic parachute. In the confusion of that brief, chaotic flight, however, he didn’t do either one.

He was not a novice instrument pilot, but he was fairly new to the Cirrus. When he had taken delivery of it six months earlier, he had claimed 400 hours of instrument time, unusually high for a 1,300-hour pilot. Almost 80 percent of his flight time was multiengine, and he had previously owned a Beech Duke, so he knew how fast things can happen in high-performance aircraft, but he may have been a little rusty. He had only taken the VFR phase of Cirrus transition training; his registration cited 20 hours of flight time in the preceding year, four of them by instruments. He was probably also new to glass: The Duke was a 1969 model, so it seems likely that most of his instrument time had been flown behind conventional gauges.

Events earlier that same day had offered a strong hint that he wasn’t quite keeping up with the airplane. The pilot and his passenger had arrived about three hours before the accident in weather close to minimums. They had flown the ILS to Runway 24—but only after missing three coupled approaches in which the autopilot captured the localizer but was apparently never armed to track the glideslope. That might have been enough to justify a decision that he had flown enough for one day—and that he needed a little more practice before his next launch into low weather.
 
And another one that may have been autopilot related:

On Aug. 28, 2006, the pilot of a Cirrus SR22 lost control of the airplane during a cruise climb in instrument meteorological conditions. Just 41 seconds later, it crashed into a retention pond, having fallen some 3,000 feet. The pilot was killed; his three passengers survived with serious injuries.

The airplane departed Eagle Creek Airpark (EYE) near Indianapolis and was identified by radar at 10:35 a.m. Track data showed it slowing from 117 KIAS at 1,670 msl to 97 knots at 2,500 msl and 87 knots at 3,000 msl. At 3,800 msl, it was down to 75 knots; at that point the airplane abruptly turned left and descended 2,200 feet in 30 seconds...

...Why would a 2,500-hour pilot, with more than 350 hours in type, fail to recognize an incipient stall? One possibility is that he was flying on autopilot. The NTSB is careful to note that they could not determine whether the autopilot was engaged during the climb. However, they also note that when set to hold a fixed rate of climb, the autopilot—which has sufficient elevator authority to stall the wing—will steadily increase the angle of attack (thereby reducing airspeed) and will not disconnect at either the stall warning or the actual stall. Cirrus training emphasizes use of the autopilot from shortly after takeoff to final approach. If the servos were flying the airplane, the pilot may not have felt it buffet before the stall break—which would have come as a complete surprise if he’d neglected to monitor his airspeed.

Complacency can be deadly in the cockpit. For all their capabilities, the most sophisticated new GA airplanes don’t fly themselves. They still require the full involvement of an alert and attentive pilot in command.
 
The problem with automation is that it has to be monitored. And people are typically better pilots than monitors. Not saying that automation is a negative safety factor in GA, but it comes with strings attached.
 
A couple years ago a guy crashed his Mooney into a house after a departure stall. Everyone walked away.
 
Locally, I hear that the Grumman was owned by the pilots girl friend. She is not a pilot. He was older than most pilots, and I wonder if he was quick to learn the proper use of the technology. I am older, too, and have 5 different GPS's, and transitioning from 1 to another can sometimes have unexpected bumps.

The weather included drizzle, and he flew into increasing rain as he climbed out. The view of the ground would have been diminishing as he made his turn on course. That may have been the actual time he initiated the transition to instrument flight, and the magic box mislead him, either due to little experience with a new device, or improper set up. The Flight Aware data seems to show he was flying smoothly until the turn.
The FA track to College Park was slightly ragged on altitude, airspeed, and heading, indicating reasonably skilled pilot hand flying, rather than an autopilot.

Not much left to salvage, the impact was very high speed. The main parts are all gone, the debris mostly swept up, and the street will open tonight.

Two friends lived within 400 feet of the impact site, but both have moved, so I have no direct source of information on the sounds as the plane came down.
 
Given the departure time, the flight would have arrived at HPN at night, in surface conditions that were 02/01 temp/dew pt spread, and possible icing conditions en route. Couple that with 500/2 departure conditions, and I'm not sure I would have attempted the flight in my Grumman, especially if this was indeed a new avionics suite. It would have been an handful for single pilot IFR for sure.
 
A good policy is always keep your IFR hand-flying skills as up to speed as much as possible, especially when most of your flying is on autopilot.

When departing into IMC, my method is to include hand-flying up to the filed altitude, then; level off and accelerate to cruise airspeed. In my aircraft, the climb out includes: gear up, prop RPM reduction, mixture leaning, heading / altitude changes, leveling off at intermediate altitudes, cowl flap changes, acceleration / trim changes, and adjusting mixture for LOP cruise. Then the autopilot is turned on and George flies the rest of the trip, including any low instrument approaches. If it's been a month or two (or three) from the last IMC takeoff, it's a challenge and really good practice.

At the first sign of the autopilot doing something unexpected or squirrelly, its immediately disengaged and the hand-flying begins. Always.

It's very comfortable getting into the routine of departing by hand and then punching buttons, with the knowledge that if some of the automation misbehaves, reverting to hand-flying is an easy way to keep the wings level until things are safely sorted out.

Rick
 
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