Crash vid

Let'sgoflying!

Let'sgoflying!

Touchdown! Greaser!
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Dave Taylor
Renegade Spirit

It would be nice to know how long the runway is, how long the takeoff roll was. I tried counting fence posts but they zip by too fast.
In any case, it reminds me how an abort point is important and to plan for the worst by looking at the available real estate beyond the runway.

Slightly agonizing watching the pax trying to exit, upside down.
 
Not sure on the takeoff distance, but that seemed like a really long ground roll. And he never got much altitude at all.

Wonder what his weight and balance was.

Edit://

Assuming he got up to 70mph at the end of the runway with reasonably uniform acceleration, the field distance was around 1650ft. He had roughly 32 seconds of ground roll, which seems like a lot in a ultralight.
 
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TripleZ said:
Not sure on the takeoff distance, but that seemed like a really long ground roll. And he never got much altitude at all.

Wonder what his weight and balance was.

Edit://

Assuming he got up to 70mph at the end of the runway with reasonably uniform acceleration, the field distance was around 1650ft. He had roughly 32 seconds of ground roll, which seems like a lot in a ultralight.
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LOL, yeah, they were heavy and he should have shut it down earlier, but at least he drove it all the way into the crash and they walked out.
 
Henning said:
LOL, yeah, they were heavy and he should have shut it down earlier, but at least he drove it all the way into the crash and they walked crawled out.
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FTFY

Yeah I kept wondering why he did not set down sooner. Or really why did he not abort take off when it was pretty apparent that they were too heavy.
 
ScottM said:
FTFY

Yeah I kept wondering why he did not set down sooner. Or really why did he not abort take off when it was pretty apparent that they were too heavy.
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The first time he grimaced on the roll, he knew they were f- and should have chopped it there and taken on the fence. Hope is a wonderful thing but airplanes don't fly on hope...
 
Ref. last two posts, 'why he didn't bail earlier?'. Interesting to contemplate the thoughts of pilots in such situations. (Not that I, or any of us would be much different in the same sitch)

I think that he did not abort earlier because he was flying, and he knew that a high speed abort at the end of the rwy into the fence would have been a known bad outcome. So he keeps going, hoping things will improve - and honestly he could not have predicted the outcome. It could well have turned out like the Stinson? that barely missed the trees on the San Juan islands? - they fly away safely. (vid posted recently).

So, we can be optimists, maybe unreasonably so at times - but it can be difficult to know what to do if we can't predict the future.
 
Let'sgoflying! said:
Ref. last two posts, 'why he didn't bail earlier?'. Interesting to contemplate the thoughts of pilots in such situations. (Not that I, or any of us would be much different in the same sitch)

I think that he did not abort earlier because he was flying, and he knew that a high speed abort at the end of the rwy into the fence would have been a known bad outcome. So he keeps going, hoping things will improve - and honestly he could not have predicted the outcome. It could well have turned out like the Stinson? that barely missed the trees on the San Juan islands? - they fly away safely. (vid posted recently).

So, we can be optimists, maybe unreasonably so at times - but it can be difficult to know what to do if we can't predict the future.
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Exactly, Hope kills more people in aviation than anything else.

Right about :49 he realizes this isn't going to go well, and then you see hope on his face. At :57 it dawns on him that he's f-d himself, but at this point hes comitted to get over the fence, fine, but he flew ground effect too far. There was decent pasture land he could have chopped. When he ended up back on the ground under control, that was really his cue, but he hesitated, probably because it came about the same time as the wire. Once the terrain dropped and he lost ground effect, he was done for. He had at least 5 good opportunities to just chop the throttle and land as he flew on for another 50 seconds. If the plane won't come out of ground effect in 10 seconds, it's not going to come out regardless of hope. That plane was not going to fly with that weight. There was plenty of flat ground between the runway and where he crashed.
 
Ultralight (or near ultralight) biplanes combine several features which put them behind the 8 ball from a performance perspective:

- Low aspect ratio

- High Drag

- Screwed up aerodynamics because of interference between the wings.

- Relatively low power through a small diameter prop.

Add in a heavy passenger and/or high density altitude and you get what you get.

That's why everyone "back in the day" switched to monoplanes when the A-65 came out. You could carry two real people and climb out of ground effect if you had a longer, slow turning prop, a higher aspect ratio wing, and low enough drag, even if all you had was 65 hp...
 
Crashes don't last long, do they? His drive TO the crash sure took a while, though.
 
Matthew said:
Crashes don't last long, do they? His drive TO the crash sure took a while, though.
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No they don't! First Ag plane i put in I measured from where the wheels went in the crop to where the plane came to rest and then figured that in a linear deceleration it would have taken all of 1.3 seconds, and I'll tell you, a lot of stuff went through my mind in that time, it seemed more like 15 seconds.
 
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