6/7 Kitfox fatality Wyoming

gkainz said:
Did anyone else go "huh? Wha?" at "crashed into the lake and burst into flames almost immediately" ...
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Can happen, burning water was one of the swimming exercises one had to master in Navy swim training.
 
Bill Jennings said:
Can happen, burning water was one of the swimming exercises one had to master in Navy swim training.
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yeah, I had to do DWEST (water survival training) including the Dilbert dunker and the helo dunker every year ... but the potential of hitting the water at 2-300 knots with 12,000 lbs of JP-5 compared to a kitfox bursting into flame after "wobbling a bit and impacting the water" (my paraphrase) just doesn't seem close enough for me to even consider post-crash fire as a probability. But, apparently it was, and is.
 
gkainz said:
Did anyone else go "huh? Wha?" at "crashed into the lake and burst into flames almost immediately" ...
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Sure looks burned in the pictures. I believe I see wheels, he may have tried to land on the grass next to the lake and skidded into the shallow water.
 
gkainz said:
Did anyone else go "huh? Wha?" at "crashed into the lake and burst into flames almost immediately" ...
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Gas is lighter than water, it floats on top. So the impact could rupture a tank, there could be a spark or some other source of ignition and there could be fire
 
luvflyin said:
Gas is lighter than water, it floats on top. So the impact could rupture a tank, there could be a spark or some other source of ignition and there could be fire
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obviously more than "could" ... "did!" and I'm not arguing that it did or didn't burn ... just struck me as odd that I fail to think about the possibility of a post crash fire combined with a ditching. I was pointing out my flawed thought process.
This does sound more like an uncontrolled crash than a controlled ditching - of course we all know how accurate eye witnesses are in describing these kind of events.
 
gkainz said:
obviously more than "could" ... "did!" and I'm not arguing that it did or didn't burn ... just struck me as odd that I fail to think about the possibility of a post crash fire combined with a ditching. I was pointing out my flawed thought process.
This does sound more like an uncontrolled crash than a controlled ditching - of course we all know how accurate eye witnesses are in describing these kind of events.
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I don’t think there is much room to argue seeing as how it’s in the lake burned to a crisp.
 
luvflyin said:
Gas is lighter than water. So the impact could rupture a tank, there could be a spark or some other source of ignition and there could be fire
Click to expand...
gkainz said:
obviously more than "could" ... "did!" and I'm not arguing that it did or didn't burn ... just struck me as odd that I fail to think about the possibility of a post crash fire combined with a ditching. I was pointing out my flawed thought process.
This does sound more like an uncontrolled crash than a controlled ditching - of course we all know how accurate eye witnesses are in describing these kind of events.
Click to expand...

Gotcha. Yeah, it doesn't happen often
 
I looked at post-crash fires of homebuilts last year. Out of homebuilt types that had 50 or more accidents in the ~20 year spread of my database, only one had NO post-crash fires.

It was the Searey...an amphibian. Seventy percent of the accidents were on water.

Ron Wanttaja
 
Maybe they were water skiing the tires.
 
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