OSH - T-6 goes into Lake Winnebago Saturday 7/29 morning

Juan's drama and exaggerations aside, looking at those logbook pages makes me wonder how many stalls she did in that airplane?

She logged 7 hours in the T6 before the checkout, but they were all cross countries with single landings. The 1 hour 'checkout' was mostly pattern work. 5 landings doesn't leave much time for any airwork.

I just looked back at my logbook. My CFI signoff was 1.8 hours. Typical checkout - steep turns, stalls clean and dirty and a bunch of full stop landings.

I think Juan exaggerates the characteristics of the T6. It is not a monster, but it is not very forgiving of complacency or poor technique.

Juan kind of misses the fact that by 1945 the Army was using T6s for the Basic syllabus. My grandfather went straight from Stearmans to the T6.
 
Doc Holliday said:
Nope.

But......... If someone has insurance then decides to operate outside of the insurance requirements, then that's a problem.
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Only a problem if they want to collect on the insurance. Some people have insurance only as required by club rules, hangar lease, etc.
 
Fearless Tower said:
Juan kind of misses the fact that by 1945 the Army was using T6s for the Basic syllabus. My grandfather went straight from Stearmans to the T6.
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The Army Air Corps also lost an estimated 14,000 aviators to training accidents before they left the US. Training risk was acceptable in the interest of getting pilots into the fight.
 
Stipulated. Point being, military trainer attrition/use-case history has zero relevance on the topic of operation said old timey radial by neophyte recreational hands today.

This was just another fairly banal and repetitious accident of inexperience, couched on a sugary dollop of affluenza comorbidity for good measure. Ingroupers can go cope harder if they don't like Chat bringing up the socioeconomic angle; but even that is a tangent.

That censorious human reflex against those who highlight/speak of the imprudence of others in mixed company, is exactly the reason why safety and accident boards are decoupled in [.mil] mishap investigations.
 
Fearless Tower said:
How was she even insured in that airplane?

She logged the 1 hour flight herself indicated that her husband was the one doing the checkout, but none of the T6 time is logged as dual and no CFI signoff.

When I bought my T6, I had 10 hours of dual in type logged and my insurance required a CFI signoff.
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mine was even more strict. they required 10hr from a CFI that they approved.

fearless is on point about the T-6. it is not a monster, and the reputation is somewhat overblown. however, it does have a unique stall spin characteristic and if you are going to fly one, you really need to understand it, and the proper way to recover. the standard recovery of ailerons neutral must be used, if you try recover with aileron, it will bite back quickly.

i was told some great advice when i bought mine. less than 100mph and 2G's, don't go there unless you are doing it intentionally and know exactly what you are doing. it will bite fast and hard.
 
Insurance companies vary widely. I do insurance T-6 checkouts, have an approved 10-hr course. Have one, and also travel to other people's. But I've known several companies that only required a 1-hr checkout for the pilot, and that's it. I never did that, I did it to proficiency, not time, whatever that number was. It was never 1 hour. You can't even go over everything in one hour, let alone get proficient at it. One guy who went elsewhere and did a 1 hr checkout ended up selling the plane after he about lost it twice on landing. Another who went elsewhere to get his one hour ended up getting 30 hrs in it anyway.

In the 16 different T-6s I've flown so far, there are also many different handling characteristics in the stalls. A very few stalled straight ahead and mostly uneventfully unless you did the wrong thing. They were Harvards although I don't trust that that holds true across the board. Most would drop a wing pretty fast. A few would flip over and go inverted, all these just on a basic slow and easy entry to a clean straight ahead power off stall. So,..it depends. They all get interesting on uncoordinated or accelerated stalls.

Devyn had spoken with a T-6 instructor at Oshkosh and they'd discussed getting together for additional flying in it. I am sad that she didn't get to do that in time.
 
FlightofTwo said:
Insurance companies vary widely. I do insurance T-6 checkouts, have an approved 10-hr course. Have one, and also travel to other people's. But I've known several companies that only required a 1-hr checkout for the pilot, and that's it. I never did that, I did it to proficiency, not time, whatever that number was. It was never 1 hour. You can't even go over everything in one hour, let alone get proficient at it. One guy who went elsewhere and did a 1 hr checkout ended up selling the plane after he about lost it twice on landing. Another who went elsewhere to get his one hour ended up getting 30 hrs in it anyway.

In the 16 different T-6s I've flown so far, there are also many different handling characteristics in the stalls. A very few stalled straight ahead and mostly uneventfully unless you did the wrong thing. They were Harvards although I don't trust that that holds true across the board. Most would drop a wing pretty fast. A few would flip over and go inverted, all these just on a basic slow and easy entry to a clean straight ahead power off stall. So,..it depends. They all get interesting on uncoordinated or accelerated stalls.

Devyn had spoken with a T-6 instructor at Oshkosh and they'd discussed getting together for additional flying in it. I am sad that she didn't get to do that in time.
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Over 40 years ago we had a orthopedic surgeon that owned a T6. Him and a Grumman test pilot from town crashed right off the beach and died. Speculation suggested a stall spin too close to the ground.

Rumor was that at the time T6’s had a nasty stall IDK.
 
bonefishpete said:
Over 40 years ago we had a orthopedic surgeon that owned a T6. Him and a Grumman test pilot from town crashed right off the beach and died. Speculation suggested a stall spin too close to the ground.

Rumor was that at the time T6’s had a nasty stall IDK.
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Generally speaking, a T6 stalls like a Bo. Depending on how fast/abruptly you do it, you'll usually get a buffet before the break. Then one wing typically will drop first, but not always. These airplanes have seen so much use, that they don't all behave 100% identically. My T6 actually is less abrupt than others I've flown. But it can still surprise you if it happens when you weren't expecting it.

The issue I see is if you're surprised by it and either don't recover quickly or somehow botch the recovery and a spin develops, even proper recovery technique can eat up a ton of altitude.

I was just reading through an old Army T6 manual this weekend that covers aerobatic maneuvers including spins. Spins were part of the standard syllabus in the T6. The Army manual specifically tells the student to not do any intentional spins below 7000' and tells the student to bail out if they haven't recovered by 3000.
 
FlightofTwo said:
In the 16 different T-6s I've flown so far, there are also many different handling characteristics in the stalls. A very few stalled straight ahead and mostly uneventfully unless you did the wrong thing. They were Harvards although I don't trust that that holds true across the board. Most would drop a wing pretty fast. A few would flip over and go inverted, all these just on a basic slow and easy entry to a clean straight ahead power off stall. So,..it depends. They all get interesting on uncoordinated or accelerated stalls.
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That's an interesting observation. My airplane is a US built Harvard II and like the other Harvards you describe, it mostly stalls straight ahead, more benign than other T6/SNJs I've flown, at least on power on stalls. My airplane's power off stall with flaps gear out is more abrupt.
 
Good article on spinning the T-6. Love the opening line.

www.t6harvard.com

Spinning the T6 - Scully Levin

SPINNING THE AT-6 The first aircraft I ever spun was the AT6. This was way back in 1964 when I was a 17-year-old Pupil Pilot in the South African Air Force. At the time that I started my flight training, the AT6 Harvard had already been in service as a trainer with our […]
www.t6harvard.com www.t6harvard.com
 
Fearless Tower said:
Here's Juan's video.


I refuse to give DG clicks
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Brown is getting just as bad. Look at the leader page on this video. He features a photo of the smashed wreckage fished out of the lake with a shot of the young woman that paid for a mistake with her life. He has joined the rest of the sensationalists.
 
Fearless Tower said:
Juan's drama and exaggerations aside, looking at those logbook pages makes me wonder how many stalls she did in that airplane?

She logged 7 hours in the T6 before the checkout, but they were all cross countries with single landings. The 1 hour 'checkout' was mostly pattern work. 5 landings doesn't leave much time for any airwork.
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On the topic of hours logged, the NTSB report states "According to the pilot’s flight logbook, at the time of the accident she had accumulated 687.8 total hours of flight experience, including 33 hours in the accident airplane make and model."

I don't know how many T-6/AT-6/SNJ/Harvard aircraft showed up at Oshkosh in 2023, but 2025 saw about 50 of them.

Assuming 50 T-6's flew into Oshkosh in 2023, I wonder what the spread of total time and time in type was for all 50 pilots, and where Devyn fell in that spread.
 
fasteddie said:
Assuming 50 T-6's flew into Oshkosh in 2023, I wonder what the spread of total time and time in type was for all 50 pilots, and where Devyn fell in that spread.
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Can't answer regarding the pilots flying T-6s at Oshkosh in 2023, but I did run an analysis for the T-6/SNJ/Harvard accidents in the NTSB database through 2019.

Total Accidents: 196
Median total time: 3,800 hours
Median time in type: 202

191 accidents listed the pilot certificate type:
Student: 1
Private: 60
Commercial: 71
ATP: 59

(Wondering about the Student? 25 hours total, all in the T-6. Aircraft owned by Neil Granley, which should give you a hint. SEA82DA162)

Max/Min Times
Max total time: 65,000 hours
Min total time: 25 hours (the student above)

Max time in type: 10,000 hours
Min time in type: 1 hour. This one was interesting. "Warbird Experience" flight, passenger fell down when exiting the aircraft and broke their leg. The "1 hour" case listed doesn't seem to be the passenger (different sex). My guess is that the pilot had experience in other models of T-6s. ERA12CA291.

Ron Wanttaja
 
wanttaja said:
Max time in type: 10,000 hours
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Ed Haywood said:
This guy is probably embarrassed.
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No doubt, but not for the reason most of us would think of. It was a midair.

A flight instructor was having his student practice hovering and "hovering auto" maneuvers in a Robinson R-22 in preparation for his upcoming flight check. They air-taxied to the runway and announced on the common traffic advisory frequency that they were departing. They made a "quick stop" and then announced that they were "on the go." The pilot of a T-6G said that she announced that they were departing. The helicopter was over the grass and slightly to the left of the runway when its main rotor blades struck the left wing tip of the airplane. The helicopter spun around and struck the ground. The pilot of the other airplane remained in the traffic pattern and landed. A video of the collision showed the helicopter visible to the extreme left of the airplane’s nose, forward of the left wing, just as its pilot reported "on the go again." The helicopter appeared to be in a nose-low attitude flying just above the taxiway to the left of the aircraft. The T-6G appeared to be in a level flight attitude just left of runway centerline. The​
helicopter impacted the ground and the T-6G flew a left-closed pattern, returned and landed on the takeoff runway.​
CEN09LA149

One accident lists the pilot has having 119,612 hours time-in-type. However, since the pilot is listed as having 19,530 hours total time, I assumed that was a time-in-Typo......

Ron Wanttaja
 
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