2 killed in plane crash west of Daytona Beach

Dave Theisen said:
I'd hate to be the one out thinking, "oh crap, that's the plane I looped"
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Probably more truth in that than we’ll all ever know.

A friend and CFI said the only airplane he ever found a busted wing spar during pre-flight on, was one of these giant puppy mill schools.

Student said the wing looked funny, he steps back and realizes the right wing wasn’t the same angle as the left.

Nobody ever ‘feesed up to over-stressing it. He left the school.
 
SkyDog58 said:
When I first heard about the wing coming off and that it was being reported (at the time) that it was two students at ERAU, I ashamedly instantaneously and wrongly assumed that they were yanking and banking a bit too hard and overstressed it. Now hearing it was on climb out with a CFI candidate and a DPE, I wonder if it was overstressed on previous flight(s) and just finally gave way or if it was due to the corrosion issue or a different and undiagnosed structural issue. Regardless, a tragedy for the families, the school, and GA in general.
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I would think turbulence would put a much greater stress than yanking and banking will.
 
teejayevans said:
I would think turbulence would put a much greater stress than yanking and banking will.
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Depends. Maneuvering flight exposes the airframe to sustained load. Plus there can be some significant loads recovering from a screwed up aerobatic maneuver when someone falls out of it because they don’t know what they are doing.
 
I was looking through the recent flights on flightaware for this tail#, this one was strange, maybe the data was bad, but that looks like maybe an encounter with a t-storm at the beginning of this one Monday 4:45pm:
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Or, bad data, or they were just practicing stalls near a t-storm?

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labbadabba said:
I thought the examiners for CFI rides had to be from the FSDO...
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FSDOs are starting to get out of the flying business per a HQ memo from late last year. My local office only does CFI rides if no DPEs are free.
 
I read about accidents to try to educate myself as to the cause. Someone recently suggested a forum for accidents/incidents. I would like to see a forum for investigation of accidents/incidents. Showing root cause and follow up including AD's, service bulletin's and related information. Including training subjects. Just a thought.

This accident is sad for all involved, family, friends and the GA community. The only good that can come from this type of accident is finding the cause and helping others avoid such a tragedy.
 
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exncsurfer said:
I was looking through the recent flights on flightaware for this tail#, this one was strange, maybe the data was bad, but that looks like maybe an encounter with a t-storm at the beginning of this one Monday 4:45pm:
View attachment 61576

Or, bad data, or they were just practicing stalls near a t-storm?

View attachment 61577
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Take anything FlightAware shows you in regards to radar overlay with a grain of salt. The image on historical flights is often the last radar capture when the flight ended. So it may look like the aircraft flew straight through a supercell when in reality it was 20+ miles away.

So here this storm could have very well have developed after the plane was on the ground back in DAB.

https://flightaware.com/live/flight/ENY3911/history/20180403/2200Z/KDCA/KLIT

Look at this flight path in regards to the radar image. In this case, the image is actually about 30 minutes early. The line was actually over the Memphis area when we passed through it on my commute home. The storm that looks like we clipped was gone, and the huge storms just inside Arkansas were the ones we were skirting during our southwesterly heading.
 
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ARFlyer said:
Take anything FlightAware shows you in regards to radar overlay with a grain of salt. The image on historical flights is often the last radar capture when the flight ended. So it may look like the aircraft flew straight through a supercell when in reality it was 20+ miles away.

So here this storm could have very well have developed after the plane was on the ground back in DAB.

https://flightaware.com/live/flight/ENY3911/history/20180403/2200Z/KDCA/KLIT

Look at this flight path in regards to the radar image. In this case, the image is actually about 30 minutes early. The line was actually over the Memphis area when we passed through it on my commute home. The storm that looks like we clipped was gone, and the huge storms just inside Arkansas were the ones we were skirting during our southwesterly heading.
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Good point. I added the table data to see the sample frequency of data, probably just practicing emergency descent or stalls I guess.
 
It's tough seeing that wadded up ball of aluminum. Damn.
 
teejayevans said:
I would think turbulence would put a much greater stress than yanking and banking will.
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Only if the airplane is lightly loaded and/or you're flying through it too fast.

It takes a lot to bust up an airplane. And the Cherokee has been around a long time. If it was susceptible to this sort of thing it would have a miserable track record and reputation, and lots of patch-up ADs. It doesn't. And this airplane wasn't that old, although it probably was flown regularly and often in the school fleet.

The investigators will figure out exactly what caused it I am certain. Previously overstressed, damaged, abused, corrosion, whatever. It'll come out in due course.
 
Just as an aside, the maintenance operation in the hangar attached to my office has a large flight school client. What comes in the shop is a source of cheap entertainment for me. In the last few weeks I've seen a 172 with a badly wrinkled firewall and a second where the student drove the wing leading edge into a light pole while taxiing up to the fuel pumps and bent the spar. He hit the wing leading edge at half span, nowhere near the tip. I figure he must have been taxiing up the sidewalk on the opposite side of the pumps from the ramp in order to get that close to the light standard. There is no shortage of creative ways students and renters seem to abuse airplanes. That's in addition to a renter who drove an Arrow into a taxiway light, clipped off a tip of one blade, took off and flew over 100 nm to his destination airport. They saw what happened and sent another plane to chase him down. He couldn't understand what was wrong with a "little more vibration than usual".
 
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GRG55 said:
Just as an aside, the maintenance operation in the hangar attached to my office has a large flight school client. What comes in the shop is a source if cheap entertainment for me. In the last few weeks I've seen a 172 with a badly wrinkled firewall and a second where the student drove the wing leading edge into a light pole while taxiing up to the fuel pumps and bent the spar. He hit the wing leading edge at half span, nowhere near the tip. I figure he must have been taxiing up the sidewalk on the opposite side of the pumps from the ramp in order to get that close to the light standard. There is no shortage of creative ways students and renters seem to abuse airplanes. That's in addition to a renter who drove an Arrow into a taxiway light, clipped off a tip of one blade, took off and flew over 100 nm to his destination airport. They saw what happened and sent another plane to chase him down. He couldn't understand what was wrong with a "little more vibration than usual".
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Plus there are plenty of people, especially young people, that can convince themselves they probably didn’t hurt anything to justify not facing the consequences of self reporting a screwup. I will be surprised if the reason for failure is not an unreported excedence that occurred prior to the accident flight.
 
labbadabba said:
I thought the examiners for CFI rides had to be from the FSDO...
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dmspilot said:
Varies based on the FSDO involved and their workload.
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ARFlyer said:
FSDOs are starting to get out of the flying business per a HQ memo from late last year. My local office only does CFI rides if no DPEs are free.
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Our FSDO reserves the right to do CFI initials if they want to, but in reality we haven’t seen CFI initial rides done by the FSDO around here in a very long time. It takes a while to get a DPE assigned. We waited about three weeks for official word on mine.

DPEs do have to have a separate authorization inside the DPE ranks to do them, and not all DPEs qualify. While not a surprise to me, it was something I learned talking to a few DPEs.

In fact there’s limitations on new DPEs as well, and they’re limited to certain rides until they’ve put in a certain amount of time and rides as well. I believe it’s Private rides only for a while and FSDO QA follows up with candidates for a number of those seeking any indication that anything is being done wrong before rides for higher certificates are allowed.

Interesting hearing some of this from a new DPE as he went through the process.

There was also a big push within the DPE ranks to demand more actual PIC sole-manipulator time for multi-engine DPEs, at least in our FSDO. There was concern that they needed more I guess.

Didn’t really get into that one in any detail, just know a lot of them were asking operators of multis for help with reasonable rental rates for staying “current” after FAA said they’d like them to do more. Most DPEs don’t own twins they can just hop in and rack up some hours. Many here do own singles or partnerships in singles.

Minor eye opener for me to realize they have their own ranks and rules inside the DPE cadre also, as a budding CFI. When you’re just a lowly Private candidate it’s easy to assume they all can do everything. “The examiner” is just this god-like creature who’s coming to evaluate you. Ha. Later you realize they’ve got “stuff” to deal with, too.

Been interesting to talk to someone who’s applying to do that also. The logbook stuff going back decades sounds distinctly “not fun” to gather. But interesting.

My generation and beyond has a bit of help the current group never did. Electronic logs. Need to know how much night instruction time in multis you have? Just click a button and run a report, if you’ve kept your electronic logs up to date. No digging through paper logs you locked up in the fire safe in the sixties. :)
 
Any chance with the weather in Florida last summer it ended up getting a bit flooded and was somehow neglected? Hard to believe a well oiled machine like Riddle would be putting airplanes with extreme corrosion back on the line.
 
Pilawt said:
Could impact from a drone be enough to separate the wing ... ?
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If the drone was large enough, say a Predator or the like. A Global Hawk would definitely ruin one's day.

The spar carry-through structure and spar attachment on a PA-28 is pretty stout. The wing side of the attachment is even tougher with the fuselage side of the fore and aft attachment points failing before the wing fails. Corrosion in the wing? all bets are off of course.
 
Since we're (again) partaking in an exercise of completely uninformed speculation, I'm betting that fragments of the Chinese space station brought it down.
 
Z06_Mir said:
Any chance with the weather in Florida last summer it ended up getting a bit flooded and was somehow neglected? Hard to believe a well oiled machine like Riddle would be putting airplanes with extreme corrosion back on the line.
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From what I’ve heard, ERAU takes maintenance very seriously.

I think it’s more likely someone previously was screwing around and over stressed the airplane and didn’t tell anyone.
 
denverpilot said:
One thinks the current “go over the airworthiness status of aircraft used for checkrides” can only get worse also, depending on if they find a maintenance discrepancy or not. Sadly for the rest of us, the investigation finding an honest to goodness maintenance screw up would be better than not. Because DPEs are going to get even harder instructions to assure airworthiness if not.
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Instructions or not I'm sure some will do it on their own. I think I'd be likely to look over Arrows with a finer tooth comb after this
 
denverpilot said:
Probably more truth in that than we’ll all ever know.

A friend and CFI said the only airplane he ever found a busted wing spar during pre-flight on, was one of these giant puppy mill schools.

Student said the wing looked funny, he steps back and realizes the right wing wasn’t the same angle as the left.

Nobody ever ‘feesed up to over-stressing it. He left the school.
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Something like this happened a couple years ago at TTD. Someone notices the wing looks funny when preflighting. I think it was an instructor, but not sure. What they found out is the day before someone had flown it to CZK, an airport notorious for breaking airplanes. It had done a very hard landing and bent a wing. That was it for that plane. They started parting it out.
 
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I doubt it was an impact that caused that wing to depart, an impact with that much force would have crumpled the wing, the photo of the wing in the field show that it is still pretty in tact.
 
So how do PA28 wings work? Continuous spar from wingtip to wingtip? Or is there a 'carry through' spar with nuts and bolts an stuff holding everything together? Is there any word yet on how much of the wing fell off? Detach at the root?

EDIT: Answered. See @Clark1961 's post #59 above
 
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denverpilot said:
Probably more truth in that than we’ll all ever know.

A friend and CFI said the only airplane he ever found a busted wing spar during pre-flight on, was one of these giant puppy mill schools.

Student said the wing looked funny, he steps back and realizes the right wing wasn’t the same angle as the left.

Nobody ever ‘feesed up to over-stressing it. He left the school.
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We had something similar at the local flight school. It was an Arrow. Had a hard landing at some point that resulted in very apparent distortion to the upper skin on the wing.

Sad thing was that it likely flew several times after (including at least one flight by the chief instructor) without anyone noticing/reporting it.
 
luvflyin said:
So how do PA28 wings work? Continuous spar from wingtip to wingtip? Or is there a 'carry through' spar with nuts and bolts an stuff holding everything together? Is there any word yet on how much of the wing fell off? Detach at the root?
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I am almost certain the PA28 has a carry through spar with bolts holding everything in place.

Sent from my SM-G950U using Tapatalk
 
luvflyin said:
So how do PA28 wings work? Continuous spar from wingtip to wingtip? Or is there a 'carry through' spar with nuts and bolts an stuff holding everything together? Is there any word yet on how much of the wing fell off? Detach at the root?
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Post 59 covers the spar question.
 
denverpilot said:
There was also a big push within the DPE ranks to demand more actual PIC sole-manipulator time for multi-engine DPEs, at least in our FSDO. There was concern that they needed more I guess.
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I'm betting that rule is from the crash that killed a DPE in Arkansas a few years ago. They lost the left engine on a 310 and Vmc rolled it into a fuel farm on the airport. The ATP student got lucky and survived.

Talking with my FSDO friends there were several new nationwide checkride rules put into place after that crash. They haven't even finished the NTSB investigation which has been going on for over two years.

It was a huge deal when it happened. Most of us who had done checkrides with him got told we could be called in for 709 rides.
 
The new rumor on this one is the airplane had a “hard landing” the day before and then was supposedly “inspected” that evening before the fatal flight.

Ugggggly.
 
denverpilot said:
The new rumor on this one is the airplane had a “hard landing” the day before and then was supposedly “inspected” that evening before the fatal flight.

Ugggggly.
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Arrrgh, no words, this aviation stuff is terribly unforgiving.
 
The plane was doing t&go's at the time of the wing separating. The student was a Navy veteran studying on his GI bill. His name has been released but nothing else about where he was from. The DPE's name has not been released. I, too, heard about the hard landing reported above.
 
denverpilot said:
The new rumor on this one is the airplane had a “hard landing” the day before and then was supposedly “inspected” that evening before the fatal flight.

Ugggggly.
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That's going to be bad for whoever performed the inspection. That is why I would never want a job where peoples lives are at stake. If I screw up at work, it might annoy a few people, and that's about it.
 
timwinters said:
Since we're (again) partaking in an exercise of completely uninformed speculation, I'm betting that fragments of the Chinese space station brought it down.
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Wrong, had to be Russians.
 
Hard landing inspections can be insidious. I can imagine the mechanics at ERAU get the opportunity to do lots of them... to the point of it being routine.
The perception of what meets the standard of a hard landing is also very subjective. I would expect they get reports of hard landings and complete inspections when there was most likely no need for one. A situation where a mechanic is looking without seeing seems like a reasonable probability.
I wonder if they have the aircraft equipped to collect data to corroborate reports of performance issues, exceedences etc...

If the reports are true there will most likely be a system failure in the mx program uncovered. There will also be some people in the mx program that will have long lasting repercussions in their lives. Just the thought of this whole situation gives me a heavy heart for everyone impacted by the accident.
 
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