Angel Flight down in NY

Mike I

Mike I

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Mike I
Sad news...

http://apne.ws/10SGdzv

EPHRATAH, N.Y. (AP) — A small airplane operating as a volunteer Angel Flight crashed in upstate New York on Friday evening, killing at least two people, authorities said.

Fulton County Sheriff Thomas Lorey said the flight's two passengers were found dead and investigators are searching for the pilot, who is missing. Officials did not immediately identify the passengers or pilot.

The Piper PA 34 airplane originated in Massachusetts and crashed about a half-mile west of Caroga, N.Y., just after 5 p.m. Friday, Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Kathleen Bergen said.

Lorey said the twin-engine plane crashed in a wooded area in Ephratah, about an hour west of Albany

"The bulk of the plane is in the water, in a pond, completely submerged and we have to wait until daylight to put divers in," the sheriff said.

Larry Camerlin, president and founder of Angel Flight Northeast, a nonprofit group that arranges free air transportation for sick patients from volunteer pilots, said the organization was "tremendously saddened" by the tragic news of the crash.

"We all offer our thoughts and prayers to the families of those affected," Camerlin said in a statement. "Our volunteer pilots are the most compassionate and generous individuals who donate their time, aircraft and fuel to transport patients and loved ones for free to essential medical care that would otherwise not be readily available to them. There are no words that can adequately express our sorrow."

An employee at an ice cream shop in nearby Johnstown who refused to give her name said she heard what sounded like engine failure and then a loud explosion, "like a gun shot."

She said she went outside and "there were pieces of airplane coming out of the sky."

The FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board will investigate the crash, including what the weather conditions were like at the time of the accident.

At the time of the crash, in Rome, N.Y., visibility was 10 miles, there was slight rain and winds of about 13 to 14 mph, according to National Weather Service meteorologist Brian Montgomery.

The flight departed from Hanscom Field in Bedford, Mass., and was headed to Rome, N.Y., before crashing about 57 miles to the east, near Caroga, according to Bergen.

Camerlin's statement said that since Angel Flight NE was founded in 1996, the group has set up free air transportation and medical care for more than 65,000 children and adults on about 60,000 flights covering a total of more than 12 million miles.
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Lots of convective activity in Western Mass and NY yesterday. Possible cause if witnesses saw the plane had broken apart? :dunno:
 
I flew Buffalo to RI in a Columbia at 8k. there was no convective activity other than some little speed bumps.
 
n20junkie said:
I flew Buffalo to RI in a Columbia at 8k. there was no convective activity other than some little speed bumps.
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What I saw on Radar yesterday agrees with what you say. Skew T does show temps below 0 C at 8K and aircraft was at 8300.

It's a very sad situation, I'll just wait to see what the NTSB says.
 
An employee at an ice cream shop in nearby Johnstown who refused to give her name said she heard what sounded like engine failure and then a loud explosion, "like a gun shot."

She said she went outside and "there were pieces of airplane coming out of the sky."
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This witness makes me scratch my head on what happened.
 
EdFred said:
This witness makes me scratch my head on what happened.
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Non-pilot witnesses are notoriously inaccurate. The loud pop could be the time delayed percussion of impact with ground. As to pieces falling out of the sky, this witness time-lapse recollection can be all jacked up.
 
AdamZ said:
What I saw on Radar yesterday agrees with what you say. Skew T does show temps below 0 C at 8K and aircraft was at 8300.

It's a very sad situation, I'll just wait to see what the NTSB says.
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And PIREPs of icing not all that far away:

RME UA /OV SYR135040/TM 2134/FL110/TP CRJ7/TA M05/IC LGT RIME

ROC UA /OV SYR270010/TM 2217/FL050/TP DH8A/SK TOPS FL100/TA M04/IC LGT CLR ICING/RM FL050 - FL080
 
This airplane has some interesting history and seems to have sustained substantial damage during a hard landing in 1999:

http://www.ntsb.gov/aviationquery/brief2.aspx?ev_id=20001212X19625&ntsbno=NYC99LA195&akey=1

http://dms.ntsb.gov/aviation/AccidentReports/hhwcjmbjdvbvuyruow1vsu451/Y05252013120000.pdf

No idea if this was the same pilot but it does seem to be the same airplane. I'm a bit puzzled by the fact that the pilot had 78 hours in the accident airplane but had received his multi-engine rating the day prior?

I look forward to reading the results of the investigation into the crash on Friday. It does look like there may have been an in flight structural breakup...
 
Such a sad tale ... Condolences to the families. I wonder about the structural integrity of that aircraft, and if it did break apart midair, how often does something like that happen?
 
Rayden said:
I wonder about the structural integrity of that aircraft, and if it did break apart midair, how often does something like that happen?
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It can easily happen in a thunderstorm or in a spiral dive. But if the plane isn't subjected to catastrophic stresses, structural failure is rare.
 
When my 340 crashed the NTSB told us that a spiral dive is a high-speed, high-G maneuver but stable and they expect to find all the parts in the hole.
acrophile said:
It can easily happen in a thunderstorm or in a spiral dive. But if the plane isn't subjected to catastrophic stresses, structural failure is rare.
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wabower said:
When my 340 crashed the NTSB told us that a spiral dive is a high-speed, high-G maneuver but stable and they expect to find all the parts in the hole.
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It's stable until one of the wings comes off in mid-air. After that, I don't understand what would keep the disintegrated parts close to each other as they fall. Wouldn't the plane be tumbling wildly, with different parts breaking away at different times?
 
acrophile said:
It can easily happen in a thunderstorm or in a spiral dive. But if the plane isn't subjected to catastrophic stresses, structural failure is rare.
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Except for when perennially shoddy maintenance, dismisses corrosion and fatigue and leads to a weakened structure that no longer stands to the design load parameters....
 
acrophile said:
It's stable until one of the wings comes off in mid-air. After that, I don't understand what would keep the disintegrated parts close to each other as they fall. Wouldn't the plane be tumbling wildly, with different parts breaking away at different times?
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Well, think about it this way....in a spiral dive, your ground speed is probably pretty low. Unless the breakup happened pretty high up and there were strong winds aloft, I wouldn't think the wreckage from a spiral dive breakup would travel 5 miles.
 
Fearless Tower said:
in a spiral dive, your ground speed is probably pretty low. Unless the breakup happened pretty high up and there were strong winds aloft, I wouldn't think the wreckage from a spiral dive breakup would travel 5 miles.
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In a spiral dive, your airspeed (and therefore ground speed) get very high, eventually exceeding Vne (unless you hit the ground first). That's why the plane tends to fall apart.

So that's pretty much as fast as the plane could ever go. If that's not fast enough to spread the parts around, then what would be?
 
acrophile said:
In a spiral dive, your airspeed (and therefore ground speed) get very high, eventually exceeding Vne (unless you hit the ground first). That's why the plane tends to fall apart.

So that's pretty much as fast as the plane could ever go. If that's not fast enough to spread the parts around, then what would be?
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Hmmm..

If the plane is headed straight down... Then the ground speed would be zero...:yes:

Think about it for a minute....:wink2:
 
Dunno. The accident was the first and only time I ever heard about the maneuver with respect to crashes. They said our plane was traveling more than 300 kts and more than 5g load when it impacted a wheat field 87 deg nose down while rotating right to left. The wreckage scatter pattern was consistent with the description and prop hubs were more than 10' into the frozen ground. They said they found all the pieces in the hole.

acrophile said:
It's stable until one of the wings comes off in mid-air. After that, I don't understand what would keep the disintegrated parts close to each other as they fall. Wouldn't the plane be tumbling wildly, with different parts breaking away at different times?
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acrophile said:
In a spiral dive, your airspeed (and therefore ground speed) get very high
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Uh, no. You are in a dive. How on earth is your ground speed (which is based on your horizontal movement over the earth? Your airspeed and your vertical speed increase. Your ground speed decreases.
 
First off, I feel terrible for the families involved in this horrific crash. I hope the NTSB finds out what caused the crash and someone can learn from it, either from a pilot error standpoint or the Piper factory if it was an issue with structural failure. I am probably going to ruffle some feathers with what I am about to say, but hear me out. I am pretty convinced that this was an in-flight structural failure. When an airplane is spread out over 5 miles there is really no doubt that the airplane came down in multiple pieces. Why it broke up in-flight is really disconcerting to me because this is not supposed to happen. We are trained to avoid weather, we are trained to fly on minimal instruments in the clouds, we are trained to avoid spatial disorientation, we are trained to avoid over speeding/over stressing of the airframe. I am not for a second judging this pilot or his actions. I wasn't there and none of us know what he was dealing with. Structural failure is one of my biggest fears in an airplane, and I hope myself or anyone else here never has to deal with it. I have spent a lot of time and countless nights reading NTSB reports about aircraft involved in these types of accidents. I want to know from these crashes why it happened and what the pilot could have done to not be in that situation. From my conclusions, most every in-flight breakup occurs either from flight into t-storms, Spatial D, or pilot induced over stressing of the aircraft (sometimes in a bonehead fashion). Something else I have seen in these reports are the type of aircraft involved, Piper aircraft, numerous times. Take the Piper Malibu for example and look up the fatal accidents it has been involved in. If memory serves me right the Malibu fleet has been involved in 12 in-flight structural failures. Now, look up the Piper PA-28 fleet of Cherokees, Arrows, Warriors, etc on the NTSB site and search fatal accidents over the last 20 years or so and it is down right scary. Page after page you will find way too many in-flight wing and tail separations. Look at the Seneca, although not near as many, it has had it's share of problems as well. I understand that they have built thousand and thousands of Pipers and this kind of thing happens when pilots make the wrong decision, but if you compare it to other fleets(Cessna for example) there is no comparison. I am not trying to make this a Piper vs. Cessna debate, I am concerned that there is possibly a weak link somewhere in the Piper family of airplanes that has yet to be seriously addressed by the factory or by the FAA. I could pick on Beechcraft as well, as they have had their share of structural issues, but have seem to have fixed most of those problems with AD compliance and ruddervators being properly balanced, etc. I am honestly not trying to put down the Piper family of airplanes. I think they are for the most part great airplanes. I know they are fantastic training aircraft and are fun to fly. Thousands have been built and are still being produced but if you look at the raw numbers of in-flight structural failures something is not right. I also don't want to scare folks that own or fly Piper's. Most of the accidents I am referring to could have been avoided and most were attributed to pilot error.
 
I hear piper also doesn't have a carriage return key on their corporate keyboards.
 
wabower said:
They said our plane was traveling more than 300 kts and more than 5g load when it impacted a wheat field 87 deg nose down while rotating right to left. The wreckage scatter pattern was consistent with the description and prop hubs were more than 10' into the frozen ground. They said they found all the pieces in the hole.
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Wow. I take it you weren't in the plane at the time!

Do you know whether the plane stayed intact until impact?
 
They said it did, but the biggest piece they hauled off was smaller than than cubicle-size office desk and the area had the look of a post-tornado landscape except the small wrinkled pieces were sheet metal rather than paper.

The two occupants of the plane were my partner and his wife.

acrophile said:
Wow. I take it you weren't in the plane at the time!

Do you know whether the plane stayed intact until impact?
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If it really was convection that caused the overstress, that same action could chuck the pieces around all over the place.
But a high-speed dive, not necessarily straight down, could easily yield a 5-mile long line of debris. Any airspeed higher than Vbg will cause a steeper descent angle (especially with missing wings or parts of wings) and less distance covered, but even a fairly modest 3:1 angle would get you 5 miles from less than 10,000 AGL. The airplane in question, at Vbg, probably would normally get about 9:1. So to be descending at a 3:1 angle, it would be doing what? 3 times Vbg? More? Definitely past Vne... :(


Without a clue as to what piece was found where, though, it's hard to say what happened in this case. RIP.
 
If the wings or empennage separated from the fuselage it is conceivable that the engine was still running so that may have produced enough energy to keep the fuselage aloft but out of control over a considerable distance.
 
Wouldn't either of those just make it come down faster?
DrMack said:
If the wings or empennage separated from the fuselage it is conceivable that the engine was still running so that may have produced enough energy to keep the fuselage aloft but out of control over a considerable distance.
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wabower said:
Wouldn't either of those just make it come down faster?
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Impossible to know probably. It will be telling to see which parts of the airplane are "upstream" and which are "downstream" along the path of the debris field.

One report from the ill fated LB2 fiasco mentioned the wing of a buff that got hit spinning to the ground like a maple seed so who knows how far a separated wing will travel.
 
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wabower said:
Wouldn't either of those just make it come down faster?
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Seems likely but the separated piece(s) (e.g. wing or tail) are likely to descend at a different rate with different horizontal velocities. I think I've read more than one pilot/SD induced inflight breakup that had several miles between all the pieces on the ground.
 
I was thinking about a single, but that might be the case in a twin. I guess they will tell us at the post-mortem.

gismo said:
Seems likely but the separated piece(s) (e.g. wing or tail) are likely to descend at a different rate with different horizontal velocities. I think I've read more than one pilot/SD induced inflight breakup that had several miles between all the pieces on the ground.
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DrMack said:
If the wings or empennage separated from the fuselage it is conceivable that the engine was still running so that may have produced enough energy to keep the fuselage aloft but out of control over a considerable distance.
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Fuel is in the wings....


Really sad seeing this. I know angel flight has had a good safety record.
 
My theory: hub failure on one of the engines causing a prop blade to depart; followed by catastrophic vibration and in-flight structural failure and break up.
Thoughts?
 
donkep said:
My theory: hub failure on one of the engines causing a prop blade to depart; followed by catastrophic vibration and in-flight structural failure and break up.
Thoughts?
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If that occured, I would think the engine would come off the wing before the wing comes off the airplane.
 
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