Skycatcher Down

I hoe the pilot was okay. Do you remember when Penn Central had an airline (which experienced a bad crash)? I hope that Cessna continues to pursue the LSA.:blueplane:
 
skyflyer8 said:
Again, never fly the A model of anything.
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I thought the CE-150 was the "A" model? :frog:

We're on the list for number 15 off the line. While it's neat to be near the front of the line, where newly designed airplanes are concerned it's not quite a comfy. There's still that semblance of being a guinea pig. :eek:
 
unfortunate, glad the pilot got out OK. ill be interested to hear the cause, and really hope that it doesnt delay the program.
 
A friend of mine showed me that article and used it as justification that fixed wing aircraft are unsafe.

I pointed out to him that this is a prototype. There's a reason that there's still testing going on. Furthermore, until the cause of the accident is disclosed (if it is disclosed) it could be something simple that could happen on any of our airplanes. If it was related to the design of the plane itself, it's important to note that it is a prototype, and these kinds of things do happen in development. Obviously, we try as best we can as engineers to make sure that it doesn't happen, but we also WANT these things to happen during the development stage. If it happens while we're developing, hopefully we can identify whatever problem exists and fix it before it makes it to market.

If I was thinking about buying a Skycatcher (which I'm not for a number of reasons, mostly that it doesn't fit what I want out of a plane), I wouldn't let this discourage me from buying one.

I'll pull an Officer Barbrady: "Move along people, nothing to see here." ;)
 
Must of been melamine contamination in the fuel supply...
 
I sure hope that "pop" wasn't the spar.....'cause as weee know, you can land the thing without an engine.....
 
Richard said:
Sir Francis Chichester flew into power lines at 7,000 msl when in Japan on his circumnavigation. No parachute either.
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big difference between japan and kansas.

i wonder if a pop and sparks was an attempted BRS deployment. i guess we'll find out soon enough.
 
tonycondon said:
big difference between japan and kansas.
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Y'all ever flown in Kansas? They got TV towers that stick up half a mile above the surface, with guy wires that extend a long way out. Hit any of that, and I'll bet you get a "pop" and sparks. And from 2000 AGL, you can bail out.
 
we've got a set of 4 of those 10 miles south of the airport.
 
Ron Levy said:
Y'all ever flown in Kansas? They got TV towers that stick up half a mile above the surface, with guy wires that extend a long way out. Hit any of that, and I'll bet you get a "pop" and sparks. And from 2000 AGL, you can bail out.
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There is a 1253' AGL tower a ways south of where they reported the crash. Seems like he would have had to have flown a ways north if that were the case.
 
Ron Levy said:
Y'all ever flown in Kansas? They got TV towers that stick up half a mile above the surface, with guy wires that extend a long way out. Hit any of that, and I'll bet you get a "pop" and sparks. And from 2000 AGL, you can bail out.
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Actually the tallest antenna structure in Kansas is 1501 feet...which isn't anywhere near half a mile. :) It is also on the NW side of Wichita, not the NE.

The tallest tower around the crash site is about 1200 feet and I suspect if they took out a radio tower the media would be *all over that*.
 
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Arrrrr.... LSA's will be the death of GA. There's a storm brewin, I can feel it in me bones. Soon the FAA will be a takin arrrrrrr tickets and limiting us to LSA. Argh, I see a kite in me future.........












:)
 
Anthony said:
Arrrrr.... LSA's will be the death of GA. There's a storm brewin, I can feel it in me bones. Soon the FAA will be a takin arrrrrrr tickets and limiting us to LSA. Argh, I see a kite in me future.........




:)
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Time to reef in the sheets me bucko! Arrgh!
 
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tonycondon said:
i wonder if a pop and sparks was an attempted BRS deployment. i guess we'll find out soon enough.
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That's not a bad guess, Tony.

From a friend, this morning:

More news on the crash. Another article said the test pilot was 70 years old. I find that interesting not so much in the fact that he was piloting the aircraft but more in the fact that he had to bail out of a spinning aircraft. That's a young man's game.

http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/gene...otype Cessna SkyCatcher Crashes&channel=busav
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docmirror said:
http://www.aopa.org/aircraft/articles/2008/080918skycatcher.html

AOPA is saying an unintentional flat spin from 10,000 down to 5,000 where the pilot departed the plane. Bad mojo, I don't care if it is just flight test. No recovery from a flat spin in 5000' is reason to go back to the CAD drawings.
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This is the paragraph from that article that caught my eye. I don't think it bodes well for the future of LSA regulation as it stands now!
The NTSB, which does not usually investigate flight-test accidents, has not only assigned an investigator, but has sent him to the Cessna factory from the NTSB office. It is part of a broader look at the new LSA category by the NTSB that started in October 2007 and will end in January 2009. The NTSB wants to better understand the industry and assess whether manufacturers are meeting agreed-upon industry standards.
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docmirror said:
AOPA is saying an unintentional flat spin from 10,000 down to 5,000 where the pilot departed the plane. Bad mojo, I don't care if it is just flight test. No recovery from a flat spin in 5000' is reason to go back to the CAD drawings.
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From that article, it sounds like that's what they're doing. I'll be interested to see what changes come out of it.

As to the NTSB looking at it, hopefully this won't mean an end to the LSA market. Ideally, they'll just start doing an investigation of the companies, find a few minor things to be corrected, and move on.
 
Ted DuPuis said:
From that article, it sounds like that's what they're doing. I'll be interested to see what changes come out of it.

As to the NTSB looking at it, hopefully this won't mean an end to the LSA market. Ideally, they'll just start doing an investigation of the companies, find a few minor things to be corrected, and move on.
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The NTSB has no authority in this matter... it can only make recommendations. The NTSB often makes recommendations that the FAA ignores. So the issue is really how committed the FAA is to a program with lessened government oversight.

Ron Wanttaja
 
SCCutler said:
It's a sad thing, but this is precisely why test flying is done, isn't it? To push the envelope and see where the weaknesses and miscalculations are?
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This was exactly my point initially. Believe me, all good engineers want any and all failures to occur during testing, not in the field. Ideally there will be no failures, but we all know that reality differs from paper.

That is why this failure doesn't really concern me. If this was a month after production had started, it would highly concern me.
 
Ted DuPuis said:
This was exactly my point initially. Believe me, all good engineers want any and all failures to occur during testing, not in the field. Ideally there will be no failures, but we all know that reality differs from paper.

That is why this failure doesn't really concern me. If this was a month after production had started, it would highly concern me.
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This reminds me of a story that I heard recently. I'm going to paraphrase somebody that paraphrased it to me, but it was a quote by a famous european race car designer/engineer. He said something along the lines of "the perfectly engineered race car will fall apart as soon as it crosses the finish line."

Hopefully Cessna didn't pull their engineers off of the NASCAR circuit. :)
 
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