5 killed in Bloomington crash (Cessna 414)

[Kritchlow]

Night plus fog = death, IR nor not

Really???

 

[Kritchlow]

The Bloomington ILS 20 and ALS are currently NOTAMed out of service. This was the approach they were on. Is this SOP when an accident occurs while a plane was on that approach? Wonder if there was a malfunction of the ILS.

Not sure about this particular case, but yes, that us SOP until it can be flight tested as part of the investigation.

 

[JasonM]

Horrible. Best wishes to the families. RIP!

Night plus fog = death, IR nor not

If it was like this and he tried to set it down, possibly. But it seems as though this airplane didn't crash into the runway, so its likely not from the pilot pushing the limits on that ILS.

 

[3393RP]

It's really tough to see the photo of the remains of the aircraft loaded on a flatbed, knowing the tragic outcome the families are experiencing.

 

[VictorValencia]

Horrible. Best wishes to the families. RIP!




If it was like this and he tried to set it down, possibly. But it seems as though this airplane didn't crash into the runway, so its likely not from the pilot pushing the limits on that ILS.

That video is insane! It appeared that they could not see the runway
until below 30 ft. Talk about experiencing a pucker factor. Great skill
for sure.

 

[nddons]

That video is insane! It appeared that they could not see the runway
until below 30 ft. Talk about experiencing a pucker factor. Great skill
for sure.

Pfffttt. He was left of the centerline. What a loser.

 

[RotorDude]

Interesting hard left 90-degree turn on short final on the ILS, according to FlightAware. Speed keeps decaying from the FAF to the end. Left engine loss?
No mention by the pilot (on LiveATC) of anything amiss in his final transmission outside the FAF.

 

[jordane93]

Very sad. RIP.

 

[RotorDude]

That video is insane! It appeared that they could not see the runway
until below 30 ft. Talk about experiencing a pucker factor. Great skill
for sure.

Not sure about that, since for CatIII you don't hand-fly the approach.

 

[3393RP]

Absolutely. Their track logs are wrong quite often. They can show general trends but I wouldn't use them for anything that needed a detailed analysis - such as the above poster opining that it was likely a stall.

I doubt their algorithms are sophisticated enough to provide anything more than a rough graphic interpretation of the radar data.

I recall a thread in the past where FA showed an accident aircraft accelerating some 200+ kts in the final moments of flight while performing a huge altitude excursion, and it was climbing, not diving. I will try to find the thread.

There have been a few other similar examples. Not that the information is complete junk, but it doesn't appear to be reliable enough to plot an actual flight path. It's just a representation of a data agglomeration.

 

[FloridaPilot]

RIP to the families. Not much to work with, (Details of the crash) so I will not pass judgment.

 

[olasek]

You're assuming it was pilot error.

Not an unrealistic assumption, odds are about 90%.

 

[asgcpa]

Night plus fog = death, IR nor not

Mist rain as well. Wonder what oat was.

 

[nauga]

...you and our other speculation queens here should Continue to pump yourself up by tearing others down.

I was going to hold my tongue in this thread but Tim, you're my new hero.

Nauga,
stepping out of the path of the rush to judgement

 

[Kristin]

Mist rain as well. Wonder what oat was.

[FONT=Monospace,Courier]KBMI 070511Z AUTO 07006KT 1/2SM R29/4000V5000FT -RA FG OVC002 13/13 A2998 RMK AO2 P0000

A makeable approach for a current and proficient pilot who is current on the equipment. Keep in mind that he is aiming for an 8,000 foot runway that is 150' wide. He has all the lighting for a Cat2 approach. He never even got close to the runway. Mere pilot inability to do a decent job of tracking the needles would have likely put the crash site much closer to the runway. I would want to rule out engine failure or pilot medical emergency before looking seriously at pilot error.

One other area of investigation which might implicate pilot error is what the icing conditions were. Though it would appear that they should have been warm air for awhile if there was anything approaching a standard lapse rate.
[/FONT]

 

[RotorDude]

Here are the raw ATC audio files from LiveATC.

Weather (per LiveATC):
KBMI 070456Z AUTO 06004KT 3/4SM R29/6000VP6000FT -RA BR OVC002 13/13 A2999 RMK AO2 T01270127 LTG DSNT E P0000 SLP153

 

[acrophile]

[FONT=Monospace,Courier]KBMI 070511Z AUTO 07006KT 1/2SM R29/4000V5000FT -RA FG OVC002 13/13 A2998 RMK AO2 P0000

A makeable approach for a current and proficient pilot who is current on the equipment. Keep in mind that he is aiming for an 8,000 foot runway that is 150' wide. He has all the lighting for a Cat2 approach. He never even got close to the runway. Mere pilot inability to do a decent job of tracking the needles would have likely put the crash site much closer to the runway.
[/FONT]

Good point. At 2.5 miles from the runway, he should still have been around 1000' AGL. The weather conditions provide no obvious explanation for the crash.

 

[bflynn]

I dunno, there's about a 90% chance overall that it was pilot error without knowing anything. Add in night and fog and that chance goes way up.

They were coming home from the NCAA game. Assistant coach and assistant AD from Illinois State on board.

Does the 414 have counter rotating props?

 

[acrophile]

I dunno, there's about a 90% chance overall that it was pilot error without knowing anything. Add in night and fog and that chance goes way up.

Add in an experienced professional ATP/CFI who crashed miles out on an ILS when he should still have been 1000' AGL, and the night and fog become irrelevant. At that point, the approach was indistinguishable from a daytime approach in calm IMC.

 

[Fitcja]

Keep in mind that FlightAware likely posts ground speed. As such, it's likely that what we see in the stats is less than TAS - so our information is partial.

That said, the plane seems to have lost half its speed in three minutes and then executed a climb before turning to the left. If I were to piece together a hypothesis it would probably include an engine failure when the gear was down and flaps were engaged.

Having a 421 myself, I can attest that these planes do not glide. If you lose an engine at a low speed, energy management is everything. The plane has to be cleaned up quickly and you basically have one chance to get it right because once the plane stalls there's simply no means to obtain enough power in time to recover. Red line has to be avoided at all costs and you may even have to consider counter-intuitive things like deliberately executing a gear-up landing.

 

[RotorDude]

Keep in mind that FlightAware likely posts ground speed. As such, it's likely that what we see in the stats is less than TAS - so our information is partial.

They specifically state the values are ground speed.
In this case, the surface wind was near zero, so likely there wasn't more than about 10kt headwind component on final.

 

[N747JB]

I dunno, there's about a 90% chance overall that it was pilot error without knowing anything. Add in night and fog and that chance goes way up.

They were coming home from the NCAA game. Assistant coach and assistant AD from Illinois State on board.

Does the 414 have counter rotating props?

No counter rotating props on a 414.
Very sad situation for all involved.

 

[Kristin]

I dunno, there's about a 90% chance overall that it was pilot error without knowing anything. Add in night and fog and that chance goes way up.

They were coming home from the NCAA game. Assistant coach and assistant AD from Illinois State on board.

Does the 414 have counter rotating props?

What does "night and fog" have to do with it, other than your apparent personal fear of those conditions? There is a myth that night and fog are the worst conditions to shoot a low mins approach. This myth is perpetrated by CFII's who have never done much flying in a variety of IMC conditions, i.e. they have never had a flying job that required them to go if it was reasonably possible to do so. I would much rather shoot that approach, in those conditions, in the dark, than at twilight or pre-dawn when the lighting is null, and the approach lights don't help you out much. Add snow to null lighting conditions and the approach can be really hairy.

In the conditions reported at the time that the pilot was making this approach, it is very likely that the approach lights could become visible just before arriving at DH making the transition from the gauges to visual control fairly routine.

While pilot error cannot be ruled out, there is likely a lot more to this story than mere human stupidity.

Resist the temptation to trash a 12,000 hour pilot based only on your relative inexperience and fears, at least until a few more facts are known.

 

[TheGolfPilot]

With that kind of fog, I doubt there was enough wind to make that 77kt flightaware groundspeed much more than 77kt tas. I have 0 twin experience. But I can tell you from toying on a simulator that going 77knots in a twin with an engine out (even when feathered) creates a very difficult, possibly even unrecoverable, situation.

I also noticed the groundspeed dropped about 70 knots in a 1:30 period between 1900 and 1500 feet. Assuming they were using an autopilot, a reduction of power is a likely explanation because the rate of descent continued but the airspeed decreased significantly.

It will be interesting to see what the the feds find out but if I was a sick betting man that bet on this being an engine failure with a stall spin. Engine failure followed by a pilot's inability to control the twin, single-engine, in IMC conditions.

Really unfortunate event. My prayers go out to the families of those involved

 

[MyassisDragon]

It often seems that when an incident like this occurs, a link to FlightAware traces are portrayed as a reliable representation of the aircraft's last moments. I don't believe the information to be that accurate.

My condolences to the many friends and family members who will suffer terribly bearing this loss.

I agree, every piece of information we have access to should be take with a grain of salt and I should have prefaced my comment with the words "could have" or "possibly". My post was simply a piece of information I spit out onto the forum board adding to this discussion during my few minutes of lunchtime bliss.

Now regarding the Flight Aware, yes sometimes it is horribly inaccurate en-rout, but I have noticed most times when I am landing (approach) on an instrument flight plan it is pretty accurate (personal perception based on my limited experiences, of course)

For example the picture below is of a horrible approach I had with auto pilot/pilot error. The AP overshot the ILS then over corrected to the right (north) in a steep bank. I recovered asked for vectors back to the ILS and hand flew the plane on second approach. After kissing the ground (300'ceiling 3000tops ) I went home and confirmed on FA what just happened....It was pretty darn accurate.

 

[MyassisDragon]

Resist the temptation to trash a 12,000 hour pilot , at least until a few more facts are known.

Slightly modified, but great advice.:wink2:

 

[Jimmy cooper]

Not for a trained and proficient pilot.

This is true.

 

[olasek]

Resist the temptation to trash a 12,000 hour pilot based only on your relative inexperience and fears, at least until a few more facts are known.

I don't think 'trashing' is the right word, say rather well founded 'suspicion'. In terms of experience I don't think it is relevant how many thousands of hours PIC had, for an IFR accident like this, at least accident data doesn't see much difference whether he had 12,000 or 1,000 hrs. I still recall this accident where two pilots with combined experience close to 50,000 hrs ran into mountain at night in VFR conditions in a G1000 equipped brand new Cessna.

 

[RotorDude]

Interesting. According to the NTSB, no obvious problems have been detected so far in the engines. Scheduled for teardown inspection next week for deeper analysis.
So why did the pilot climb and turn left before reaching DA?
Why did the speed keep decaying?
The official initial NTSB report should be out next week, with hopefully more details, unmangled by reporters.

 

[Kristin]

I don't think 'trashing' is the right word, say rather well founded 'suspicion'. In terms of experience I don't think it is relevant how many thousands of hours PIC had, for an IFR accident like this, at least accident data doesn't see much difference whether he had 12,000 or 1,000 hrs. I still recall this accident where two pilots with combined experience close to 50,000 hrs ran into mountain at night in VFR conditions in a G1000 equipped brand new Cessna.

What "well-founded" at this point? We have very little to go on at this point. What we have points as much to mechanical as pilot error.

 

[3393RP]

Night plus fog = death, IR nor not

Not an unrealistic assumption, odds are about 90%.

I dunno, there's about a 90% chance overall that it was pilot error without knowing anything. Add in night and fog and that chance goes way up.

If you are going to mention statistics try to have a better understanding of them.

There wasn't a "90% chance overall" of pilot error in this accident. This pilot was a member of a specific subset of aviators that has a significantly lower incidence of pilot error crashes than the aggregated pilot population, particularly during operations at night and in IMC.

Fog, which is defined as water droplets at or near the earth's surface, had nothing to do with the crash either, because the aircraft wasn't entering the runway environment. Fog kills people because it masks the runway at a critical moment, not because of hoodoo vapors.

The aircraft went down 2.5 miles away from the airport. Judging from the significant damage to the aircraft combined with an absence of fragmentation and forward speed, the loss of control apparently occurred at an altitude consistent with a stable instrument approach in IMC conditions and a sudden departure from controlled flight.

This was a properly certificated and very experienced pilot that held impressive credentials. His communications with ATC immediately prior to the loss of contact indicated he was confident, in control of the aircraft, and revealed no stressors or concerns with the equipment, weather, or approach profile.

The data available from FlightAware indicates a significant and immediate change in course, speed and altitude followed by a complete loss of communication with ground services in both voice and data transmission.

We can only hope the investigation sheds further light on the reasons for this tragedy.

 

[bflynn]

What does "night and fog" have to do with it, other than your apparent personal fear of those conditions?

...

Resist the temptation to trash a 12,000 hour pilot based only on your relative inexperience and fears, at least until a few more facts are known.

Realized I thought much more than I wrote. In addition to the 90% average that if was pilot error, the percentage of fatalities are higher regardless of the reason. Not bad to fly in, but real bad to crash in.

Night and fog impair your ability to recover from a situation. If you are descending for an emergecy landing without being able to see the terrain, it's luck of the draw how you wind up.

Still not perfectly what I'm thinking, but I'm not typing much more in the ipad.

Better?

 

[olasek]

What we have points as much to mechanical as pilot error.

I don't think so. I don't believe that odds are nowhere near close to being equal. I personally don't believe in mechanical errors (of such magnitude pilot doesn't even manage to report anything to ATC) that just happen during a challenging approach at night and in fog. Possible, yes, everything is possible, but overall highly unlikely. If there indeed was a mechanical problem - still pilot's failure to deal with it is often the biggest problem. If they ran out of fuel or had some partial panel situation I still classify it as pilot's error. And again his 12,000 hours makes zero impression on me, John Collins once proved that once you reach certain threshold (around 1000 hrs) the accident curve stays pretty flat, you are not getting less likely to cause accident.

 

[Gucci Pilot]

Your making an assumption that may not be true. If the pilot had been well trained with lots of hours IFR , and some current, they probably would have landed without incident. Pointing out that people outfly their IFR capabilitys quite often is hardly " pointless".

You don't know if the pilot was current or not. Looking at the flight aware log that plane had flown at least 7 hours in the last 7 days. Not sure if the same pilot flew it all the time but you can't assume he was/wasn't current.

Night plus fog = death, IR nor not

For someone that probably doesn't do much flying in it, that may be your opinion. I'll take fog at night with light winds over heavy rain, and strong gusty crosswinds during daylight any day of the week.

When taking passengers who put all their trust in you, the pilot making the decisions need to think twice about making these kind of flights. Killing yourself is not good but here stakes are much higher.

Not when your paycheck is dependent on you flying. Professional flying and Recreational flying have two completely different mindsets.

I personally don't believe in mechanical errors (of such magnitude pilot doesn't even manage to report anything to ATC) that just happen during a challenging approach at night and in fog. Possible, yes, everything is possible, but overall highly unlikely.

I don't know about that. I've worked some emergencies in the sim and it was a few minutes before I mentioned anything to ATC(the sim instructor). When you are working a true emergency, it can be quite some time just getting the thing under control, cleaned up, climbing away, making sure your pax are strapped in. Telling ATC about your problem isn't high on the priority list. John Q Tower Controller ain't gonna get that prop feathered or magically make that microburst disappear.

What does "night and fog" have to do with it, other than your apparent personal fear of those conditions?....

While pilot error cannot be ruled out, there is likely a lot more to this story than mere human stupidity.

Resist the temptation to trash a 12,000 hour pilot based only on your relative inexperience and fears, at least until a few more facts are known.

Couldn't agree more!

 

[Kristin]

Realized I thought much more than I wrote. In addition to the 90% average that if was pilot error, the percentage of fatalities are higher regardless of the reason. Not bad to fly in, but real bad to crash in.

Night and fog impair your ability to recover from a situation. If you are descending for an emergecy landing without being able to see the terrain, it's luck of the draw how you wind up.

Still not perfectly what I'm thinking, but I'm not typing much more in the ipad.

Better?

Your use of statistics is bogus. You can't use a statistic that lumps all types of operations together and applied it to a particular situation. Further, this is an NTSB statistic derived from a system that defaults to pilot error when they can't figure anything else out.

Additionally, airplanes that fly night IFR are not the ones that you can typically make a decent crash landing in at any time, given the higher stall speeds.

In this case, we know it was dark, but we don't yet know that he was in IMC. We are assuming he was, but I have seen no reports that disprove that the terminal conditions might not have been ground fog with tops at 300 feet.

I know it is tempting to blame other pilots as it can make us feel superior and we don't have to acknowledge that it can happen to us. It is a particularly universal and particularly bad habit.

 

[Kristin]

I don't think so. I don't believe that odds are nowhere near close to being equal. I personally don't believe in mechanical errors (of such magnitude pilot doesn't even manage to report anything to ATC) that just happen during a challenging approach at night and in fog. Possible, yes, everything is possible, but overall highly unlikely. If there indeed was a mechanical problem - still pilot's failure to deal with it is often the biggest problem. If they ran out of fuel or had some partial panel situation I still classify it as pilot's error. And again his 12,000 hours makes zero impression on me, John Collins once proved that once you reach certain threshold (around 1000 hrs) the accident curve stays pretty flat, you are not getting less likely to cause accident.

If you don't believe in mechanical errors, I have to wonder two things. One, how much experience do you have in aviation maintenance? I am thinking not too much. I can tell you that there is a lot of very shoddy work out there.

Second, I think you have an over-rated view of what pilots should be able to handle. You seem to be holding all pilots to an extremely high standard of performance, all the time. It is like blaming the captain of the American Airlines DC-10 that lost the engine coming out of O'Hare in 1979, because some pilots in the simulator managed to recover by retracting the flaps immediately and pitching down to fly just over the tops of the houses. The fact that a particularly prescient or informed pilot can recover from a catastrophic maintenance error does not change that error into a pilot error.

Having been a simulator instructor, I can usually find a combination of faults that will scramble the best pilot.

This may be partially or totally pilot error, but no one knows that yet.

 

[olasek]

Second, I think you have an over-rated view of what pilots should be able to handle.

If the standards are high they were not set by me - does NTSB ring a bell? Read NTSB reports, read some books on GA accidents (I personally recommend 'Aftermath'). Read many accidents reports in every issue of FLYING. Study Richard Collins' accident analysis, analysis of pilot errors, etc.. For every mechanical 'malfunction' there are probably 10-20 pilot errors. I just read the numbers, I don't set standards, someone else set them so high before I was even born. And yes, we don't know what happened there. By the way, I don't suffer from superiority complex (as you imply), I am well aware it could happen to me too.

 

[bflynn]

The 90% statistic comes from the Nall report and I'm not the only one who quoted it. Good, bad or indifferent, 90% of airplane accidents are caused by pilots. Yes, distribution varies by pilot rating and type of flying. I wasn't going to get that specific since it was meant anecdotally anyway.

 

[timwinters]

Gents,

In a nutshell, regardless of "the odds", it's all just unsubstantiated speculation until we know some facts. And many of us think the "wild speculation exercise" that you guys partake in after every plane goes down is quite boorish and counterproductive.

And we pick on reporters but we're far worse when things like this happen. Personally, I find it sad that some must always play this game.

 

[James331]

I agree

With a 12,000hr ATP and what appears to be a FIKI well equipped IFR twin, plus where they found the wreckage, I'll wait till the report comes out, as this one really doesn't seem cut and dry to me.


Brian Flynn and olasek, ether of you two working pilots? Or Multi IFR rated / ATPs?