Loss of control.

[Cat Driver]

The spiral dive recovery near the ground thread has spirial'ed into the ground and wandered way out of control.

My question is how can anyone with a pilot license lose control close to the ground as long as the ground is visible?

[lownslow]

Steep turn gone wrong while sightseeing?

LnS.

[photofly]

Head down in a map (or the CFS) for too long?

[modi13]

Falling asleep. There's a TSB report from a few years ago about a group of students on a night flight near Toronto falling asleep and spiralling into the ground.

[trey kule]

Well Cat, I thought maybe this thread was going to mean you at last fessing up that your decision to wear diapers instead of pajamas was not a fashion statement[img][/img]

I am glad you mentioned the ground being visible as I have witnessed more than a few lose it right after takeoff into the clag. And I think the TSB reports note a few who decided to do a turnback in clouds.

But with the ground visible. It is a bit hard to imagine, but I have been around long enough to know that if there is something at all stupid that can be done in an airplane, no matter how impossible it seems, there are pilots who will attempt it.

What can we learn from it.. Common sense, fear, and stupidity will not hold some people back.

[KK7]

My question is how can anyone with a pilot license lose control close to the ground as long as the ground is visible?

Definitely, it's hard to say how such a thing can happen, but I'm sure it has happened before, although I have no proof of such an event.

All I have are different scenarios...
Numerous years ago when I was instructing, I had a student that up to this point appeared to be ready for solo and was doing quite well. I was throwing all sorts of things his way, he handled it marvelously and so on. We were practicing a circuit and on the turn from base to final, which was supposed to be a right turn, he suddenly turned to the left. As the plane turned left, just before I took control due to the fact we would have entered a spiral dive if I hadn't, he was in the process of cranking the yoke all the way to left, probably to the stops if I had let him. When I recovered we must have been in a 45 degree (I'm guessing - noting the amount bank wasn't one of my priorities at the time) left turn where we should have been doing a normal turn to the right from base to final.

In the discussion with him afterwards what had happened, according to him, was that he guesses he suddenly forgot which way to turn the yoke to make the airplane bank to the right. Although he knew now that it was ridiculously stupid, he thought at the time he had to turn the yoke left, to turn right, and when the plane started turning left, he turned the yoke further left thinking he was correcting it - and it goes downhill from there. I thought this was a particularly scary incident, not just for him and I, but for flight training in general. If this guy, who was doing so well, and he was not an idiot, he was working on a PhD in Gas Dynamics, could all of a sudden FORGET how to control the aircraft after he already proved he could handle the airplane well... if I had sent him solo one circuit earlier as I was contemplating and I wasn't there when he had is brain fart - well I don't need to mention what happened. Anyways, I digress.

I managed to avoid the spiral dive at low altitude, but if I had reacted one second slower, we would have been much more into a spiral dive.

History is laden with spiral dive accidents, both from low time pilots to licensed pilots with over 15 000 hours with a huge variety of experience. Granted most of them are not in day VFR, but often in night VFR.

I'd like to point out that although all of us here may agree that it should be impossible to end up in a spiral dive if you avoid it first, each one of us from new pilot to super experienced like Cat, are subject to making human errors, because, well, we're human. Nobody usually intentionally puts themselves into situations that will likely kill them, but it happens all the time. So we might ask "How stupid does one have to be do such a situation/ignore this limitation/etc." but it happens to the best of us, and history is full of people more experienced and smarter than myself who have gotten into bad situations that we would all agree here is stupid to be in - because they made a mistake.

[f650]

One way that pilots have lost control in VMC close to the ground is not a spiral, but a low level stall/spin called a Moose Turn.

[Big Pistons Forever]

I would say the majority of close to the ground loss of control accidents start with a stall, which then will often progress further into a spin entry followed by impact with the ground. Common scenarios are;

1) Cross Controlled base to final turns

2) Low speed go arounds (usually following a too late go around decision after a big bounce)

3) Departure stalls after pulling the nose up trying to clear an obstacle on a too short field

4) Stall/spin on the turn back after an EFATO

[trey kule]

Cat's original post was about low level spirals. Now I dont claim to remember everything about aviation anymore,but a stall/spin and a spiral dive are quite differest..Actually at opposite ends of the flight envelope.

Nobody usually intentionally puts themselves into situations that will likely kill them, but it happens all the time

??? I have seen it every year since I started flying in the sixties. the problem is they think their skill and ability is superior and nothing unplanned will occur. Even these days , a few times a year a pilot has to be talked to....and we are not a big company.

[Big Pistons Forever]

I realize Cat Drivers original question referred to spiral dives, however I wanted to point out that MO it light aircraft pilots are in general not in spiral dives when they loose control close to the ground, they have stalled the aircraft. This is however just a gut feel and if anybody has any relevant accident data I would be interested in seeing it.

[KK7]

I realize Cat Drivers original question referred to spiral dives, however I wanted to point out that MO it light aircraft pilots are in general not in spiral dives when they loose control close to the ground, they have stalled the aircraft. This is however just a gut feel and if anybody has any relevant accident data I would be interested in seeing it.

Not to propagate digressing from the subject, but I'd tend to agree with BPF. In my own research of accident investigations, in VMC stall/spin tends to be more prevalent, while in IMC spiral dives to the point of unrecoverable are more prevalent.


And just to clarify something I said earlier, which I think was really poorly written:

Nobody usually intentionally puts themselves into situations that will likely kill them, but it happens all the time

This is terrible grammar, I'm sorry... The latter part was meant as "unintentionally".

[Shiny Side Up]

There's two places I see experienced pilots occasionally try to put their airplanes into spiral dives.

1) Head in cockpit syndrome. New goodies are terrible distractions for some pilots. Not so bad if it happens to be in a draggy stable Cessna which don't get ahead of people, but faster ships, guys forget that they can run away on them. A nifty autopilot sometimes compounds this problem, since they don't spend much time actually controlling the aircraft.

The real secret here is learn how to use the gizmos on the ground before trying to fly. Seems pretty ridiculous to be trying to find something in the manual while you're trying to fly, or experiment with what that button with the strange symbol does.

2) Mountain flying. People have poor depth perception I find. Some seem to get claustrophobic almost flying there, some on the other hand seem oblivious they're flying straight into the terrain. The scenery is a big distraction and people have a tendancy to steer where they look. Compounding the problem is the fact that the horizon isn't where their normal picture is at if they're used to flying over the flat. They often have a tendancy to fly the airplane already nose high or low depending on the terrain they're facing, and being distracted often don't notice when they're unintentionally climbing or descending.

The short answer to the question is distraction. Unintentional spiral dive entries are considerably rarer than unintentional stalls (which can also happen in both of the cases above), but still do occur. Its a violation of priority number one: fly the damn airplane.