It ends up I did know one of these guys.
The owner of the plane flew into Lebanon, where I've been many times for events and cheap fuel.
The guy I knew there, Jeff Earl "Tebo" Kropf ran the place and was a country style guitar player buddy who I'd spent time with, lunches in town, music, events etc.
Each year Tebo put on a fly around Oregon event where you earned chits for landings at out of the way airports around the state with a BBQ, Music, Prizes and Flour Bombing contest at the end of the summer for the passport holders.
The last time I saw him was at this event.
Tebo was heavy. Probably 270 pounds or more.
I read on a blog that he and this other guy went up to do "some rolls" and they mounted a camera on the plane to record the adventure. They were dead 10 minutes later.
If you have full fuel (The guy had stopped there for fuel) with a 270 pounder on board, you are only 110 pounds short of gross in my RV6. I have a very light version of the 6, only 1040 pounds empty. I doubt the other pilot weighed 110 pounds so they were seriously over gross.
Two big guys in an RV6 with full fuel is NOT recommended by Vans for aerobatics.
Dick only recommends aerobatics single pilot and half fuel. And BTW, it's a hell of alot more fun to fly that way, like your own personal F16.
The RV6 is a completely different machine at gross weight. Completely. I NEVER do aerobatics with full fuel and two on board. It's dangerous and the controls get very heavy...especially in the roll with heavy breakout forces.
When I roll the six, I first pull up, let the speed bleed off to around 100 mph, neutralize the controls and initiate with full deflection held throughout the roll. You can do it from straight and level, but you'll fall out and build speed requiring a high G pullout.
The RV6 only rolls at 270 degrees per second, which is slow when your upside down in a super slick aircraft that builds speed quickly.
By pitching up and slowing down I'm able to add margin to the roll so I'm not over-speeding before getting back upright. I can do the roll this way with very little altitude loss as long as I'm pitched up pretty steep when I initiate.
With the size of Tebo's legs I'm certain the pilot was not able to get full roll deflection because the stick requires a large displacement for full deflection.
Even I have to shove the stick hard into my thigh to get near full deflection and I'm still not quite there. But the plane has deep chord aileron's that provide good authority even in partial deflection.
This is a wild guess, but I think the pilot initiated from straight and level at a less than optimal altitude (it was only 10 minutes later) fell out of the maneuver because of partial deflection, saw the ground coming up fast, then pulled way too hard, way too fast in a plane that was well over gross.
He may not have made it full upright, pulling him into a John Kennedy "Death Spiral," because I also read an eyewitness comment that the plane was in a steep bank when the wing shed.
But even the above scenario wouldn't break a six. They have an extremely robust web spar that's been failure tested to 9G's and no RV6 has ever lost a wing...Ever.
There are so many of these flying, there must be hundreds of thousands of hours flown in them by now.
I'm certain there are plenty of guys out there who have tried their damnedest to break these planes and no one has succeeded yet. But they sure have broken fully certified Bonanza's!
So I kept looking around and found a comment about this particular aircraft:
"A highly modified RV-6. It has an RV-4 wing, smaller shorter..... and a home made spar.
The whole wing came off, not just a part of the wing. The spar appears to have failed.
This plane has been the subject of many discussions. Clearly, those discussion had validity."
So this guy builds a plane for speed and maneuverability using a shorter wing, but weaker spar, then fell out of an aerobatic maneuver loaded well over gross.
You really have to want to kill yourself to do **** like this.
There are guys in this game who have no respect for the hazards and you can't weed them out. We still live in a free country...so far.
I was in the San Juan's awhile back and chatted with an experimental amphibian driver who told me he'd dead sticked his plane 8 or 10 times with all his engine and other mods screwing up on him. You should have seen this plane. A bailing wire, Rube Goldberg jukebox.
He said, you want to see my ballast?
I said...Sure.
He opens up the nose and its filled with big rocks.
The NTSB will ferret this out with Dick's help.
I'll miss Tebo. He was a genuinely great and talented guy. This is really bad news all the way around.
