I wrote about this Lancair Columbia accident almost one year ago.
A Columbia Lancair LC41-550FG, also Columbia or Cessna 400, registered as N2520P crashed in Kernville L05, killing all six (6) persons aboard. The NTSB report concluded that the aircraft was not only over gross weight but with 6 people in a four-seat aircraft with added baggage, the Columbia 400 was simply transformed into a fully loaded death trap.
The report states the following:
“The pilot received his private pilot certificate on July 26, 2002, and his instrument rating on May 28, 2005. A records review revealed that the pilot had not attended either the Lancair/Columbia factory flight and ground training program, or the company’s recurrent training program. Subsequent to purchasing the airplane the pilot received Lancair 400 training from a certified flight instructor. The flight instructor was not factory trained, nor was he a Lancair/Columbia factory trained instructor.”
The entire report can be found here: http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/brief2.asp?ev_id=20070911X01375&ntsbno=SEA07FA247&akey=1
Just image now how would a flight instructor who checks out an individual in a new airplane make sure that such idiotic and completely criminally negligent behavior does not occur?
Would a “factory training” have prevented this accident? Would they have found something in the accident “pilot” that would have pointed to reckless behavior and complete disregard for rules, regulations and common sense?
Factory training would have certainly helped the flight instructor be more informed, better trained and maybe more confident. But then again, the flight instructor’s information/training or confidence are not what caused the accident here.
You can now understand why many flight instructors, if they have not quit the business altogether, simply quit giving flight reviews and aircraft checkouts. You put your signature and your reputation on the line for people you hardly know and can only judge by what little flight and ground instruction time you have with them.
Then you release them into the wild. You release them to go ahead and be free to completely disregard everything that they were ever been taught. Free to be criminally negligent, downright close to manslaughter.
Crazy world.
Recently a very well known and respected flight instructor in Southern California wrote:
Want a flight review or an aircraft checkout and I was not your primary instructor? Go fish.
More and more flight instructors are starting to feel the same way.
A crash of an experimental aircraft killed innocent people on the ground when a homebuilt Velocity went down in North Las Vegas.
Now officials wonder whether experimental aircraft are to be banned from urban areas to avoid the sort of tragedy that occurred there.
The aircraft had reportedly only five hours total time and had some engine work done. On the test flight the plane did not gain altitude and crashed, killing the pilot and an elderly couple on the ground.
You can read the NTSB preliminary report to get the details.
You can get a free account, but please join AOPA (you really should already be a member if you are even thinking about flying) and access these great courses on their website.
Throw away those text books you bought in college, Eclipse is showing us how to really do it!
Reports have it that Eclipse Aviation will lay off 650 employees, some 38 percent of what they have left.
Eclipse’s CEO Roel Pieper reports that this is their strategy for “operational excellence”.
I hope this guy does not come around here and sack everyone in order to make us REALLY efficient. Boy, we have a lot to learn, Roel, please show us, would you?
In a recent Daily News Los Angeles front page article, a flight school demonstrates a new low.Age that is.
A ten (10) year old had been taking flight lessons for the last four weeks amassing some 23 flight hours. Six years away from being of legal age to solo a powered aircraft.
Daily News’ Dana Bartholomew took this as a welcome front page story, and here we are
today, right in the middle of the down low and dirty muck called “to what end am I willing to go to market my product or service”.
The most positive statement the writer could dispatch from the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association AOPA is that since it is not illegal, it must be ok?
The far reaching results of this “one-upmanship” are even listed in the article citing the well publicized deadly accident of a 7 year wannabe aviator and record breaker.
The fact that no ten year old child has the complete cognitive ability to calculate the possible consequences should something go wrong, nor could be making this a conscious choice does not enter the equation. Isn’t this the reason why underage persons are not allowed to do a lot of things that they are physically able to do?
So, since the Daily News thinks it’s great and might get us front page space as well, AND the AOPA thinks there is nothing wrong if it not illegal (are they still ticking right over
there?), some of our readers have sent in new spectacular ways to promote aviation:
- First off we will outdo the competition by placing an infant on the glareshield of our plane and flying around for 24 hours to beat the record (or whatever the record is!). That will level the playing field.
- Air racing. There are those Red Bull air races that even get us some TV time!!
Let’s get a two seat plane and strap a first grader in and tell him to hang the **** on to his hat!
Here are more risky suggestions from our readers, but let’s increase the risk a little, this
way we might be able to national!
- Wing walking is an old art. We will sell “Wing Crawling” to the Daily News! Hey AOPA! Nothing illegal there!?
We have to stop here since our readers decidedly went overboard here. We actually do not recommend any of these things to anybody. An no, we do not think that just because it is NOT illegal you should do things that clearly defy logic, common sense or common ethical behavior.
If our society is down that low that everything goes that is not exactly spelled out to be
illegal, maybe we ought to pack it in.
Then again, who knows, maybe there will be the lively chatter of toddlers on the radio waves in the air some day, something about “youngest formation flight ever”, look out!
