Crash By Daggett Airport

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This accident occured two weeks ago in the plane I fly. The plane is a total loss, but by the grace of God both ocupants survived. The CFI is still in the hospital and the student pilot hasn't been available to speak with. Anybody familiar with the area have a clue what could have gone on? By the looks of it, they flew a working airplane into the ground, which is a shame considering the experience of the CFI.
 
Unregistered said:
This accident occured two weeks ago in the plane I fly. The plane is a total loss, but by the grace of God both ocupants survived. The CFI is still in the hospital and the student pilot hasn't been available to speak with. Anybody familiar with the area have a clue what could have gone on? By the looks of it, they flew a working airplane into the ground, which is a shame considering the experience of the CFI.
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Do you have a reference fit thus accident? Hard to comment without any details.
 
Sorry for the injuries. But meh that is one we have been doing since the beginning. And will continue to do. History also suggests none of us, no matter our experience, is immune from doing the same.
 
This scares me because I just don't understand how it happens.

At my home airport, it is a badly lit runway surrounded by black void.
There is 1 road north of the field and I make sure to cross it at 900 MSL and that gets me to the runway a little higher than I would chose to be in daylight.

Now at another unfamiliar field with the black void... Aside from just keeping an eye on the altimeter, I am not sure what else to do.

Seems like this shouldn't happen but because it does and I don't understand how, it freaks me out a little.
 
ClimbnSink said:
Sorry for the injuries. But meh that is one we have been doing since the beginning. And will continue to do. History also suggests none of us, no matter our experience, is immune from doing the same.
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Maybe overly cautions, but if there's a plate available, fly the approach if it's night and you've never been there before.
 
Yeah I fly out there. It's surrounded by a lot of steep desert terrain to the West that just disappears at night. You really need to treat night flight in that area as IFR until you know you're high enough to clear the terrain.
 
After moonset in the desert. It gets D A R K. Unbelievably dark.

And there is nothing east of that airport except for I-40 and a couple of mines. Well, and a VOR in the bottom of the valley. That might have been a good idea to use. Lots of terrain in the area as well.

Barstow to Torrance is a long flight to be doing at midnight with an unrated pilot. And if that airplane was based at Torrance, it's unlikely the pilot (or maybe even the instructor) is all that used to flying in incredibly dark areas.
 
I think Galen Rowell and his wife died in a similar nighttime flight at a desert airport. DARK. No point in looking outside the cockpit.
 
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It's a shame this happens so often. A cheap GPS with terrain alerting would prevent it.

ForeFlight - we need audio terrain warnings - are you listening!?

(Not that they were using foreflight, but I'm thinking it would really help reducing the likelihood of these accidents.)
 
Also, these guys are incredibly lucky to be alive. CFIT is usually fatal.
 
dans2992 said:
It's a shame this happens so often. A cheap GPS with terrain alerting would prevent it.

ForeFlight - we need audio terrain warnings - are you listening!?

(Not that they were using foreflight, but I'm thinking it would really help reducing the likelihood of these accidents.)
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The aircraft was sporting a state of the art glass cockpit with a moving map display. One glance up and they would have known the height of terrain below them. I imagine they were probably busy preparing for landing that they overlooked the fact that their descent was a bit quick and since the airport was the only lit thing for miles it appeared closer than it actually was. It is so easy to say we wouldn't ever make this mistake but clearly two pilots did.

Be careful out their guys and use this, along with the multitude of other NTSB reports to learn what not to do.
 
I wasn't saying I'd never do this. After learning to fly in the Midwest and moving out west, I am super paranoid about night CFIT.

Do you know if their terrain system had audio alerts?
 
I think even more important than 'terrain alerts' is to peek at a chart ahead of time & plan your night flight. Lets say you are going to a somewhat unfamiliar field at night, VRF, you could fly over the field at or above pattern altitude, check the lights' orientate yourself, then enter the pattern. So what if it adds 5 minutes to the flight.

Just to back up, going at night calls for a little more planning than the average day flight. In the Midwest it's easy to fly above ALL obstructions, out West it may take more navigation to stay withing safe corridors. Just like the plane that hit Superstitious Mtn in AZ a few years ago.

Nothing wrong with doing what we all did as a student, look over the route of flight on a chart before we actually go.
 
sourdough44 said:
Nothing wrong with doing what we all did as a student, look over the route of flight on a chart before we actually go.
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Nope. Nothing wrong with that. Though there are some optical illusions that can get you BAD if that's all you do.

If you don't KNOW where the terrain is, fly an instrument approach. They were specifically designed to get an aircraft down to several hundred feet (or maybe as low as 200 for precision approaches) without hitting terrain or obstructions when you can't see anything. They come with step-down altitudes and courses tied to a navaid or GPS fixes.

You MUST trust your instruments or you will get disoriented.
 
sourdough44 said:
I think even more important than 'terrain alerts' is to peek at a chart ahead of time & plan your night flight. Lets say you are going to a somewhat unfamiliar field at night, VRF, you could fly over the field at or above pattern altitude, check the lights' orientate yourself, then enter the pattern. So what if it adds 5 minutes to the flight.

Just to back up, going at night calls for a little more planning than the average day flight. In the Midwest it's easy to fly above ALL obstructions, out West it may take more navigation to stay withing safe corridors. Just like the plane that hit Superstitious Mtn in AZ a few years ago.

Nothing wrong with doing what we all did as a student, look over the route of flight on a chart before we actually go.
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My point about the terrain alerts was not to bypass doing what you mentioned, but rather to give another "out" where one planning mistake = death. It's nice to have a backup and the technology is readily accessible.
 
I hadn't heard of this accident - my parents live within a few miles of the airport and I'd lived there most of my life before moving out here to OK. It can get wicked dark out there, and there are some pretty tall hills on both the north and south sides of the area. I-15 and I-40 are more or less near the airport though, and there are almost always trucks heading off towards Needles from there. It's a pretty key identifier, but past that, there's almost no houses out that way and it's a lot of open desert. I'll ask my parents and see if they'd heard anything.
 
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