Interesting Article

[Cat Driver]

Like the guy a week or so ago who tried to go flying with a flat tire. I mentioned to im he had a flat tire, and fighting against my inherently evil nature, I volunteered the services of a jack and an aircompressor to potentially remedy the problem. No, no, he would decide, his airplane, he's the pilot. So he surveys it, then with a shrug attempts to just giv'er. He makes about 3 feet. Gets out, looks at the tire. Tries again. Then repeats this process several times. I think he got about 12 feet before the tire was peeled off of the rim. Then just abandons the airplane in place and speeds off.

Such an individual should be charged with reckless and dangerous operation of an airplane and his license should be revoked.....permanently.

[akoch]

I had a flat tire. Which I discovered only after attempting touch and go. Went practicing from CYPK to CAP3, and on touch and go noticed that the airplane tended to turn sideways more than usual. I figured that was a flat tire, but I had to land either there or back at the home airport. Went CYPK, landed on what I thought was the good side as much as I could. But it did not really feel much different for landing and roll out. Taxiing though was a bit wired pulling it one side. Turned out a defect in the inner tube that ruptured it. Thank you Goodyear.
So I think I ended up with a couple of take offs and two landings with the flat. But I did not get an impression that it was such a big deal on a small airplane line mine. Noticed it only because I was actually paying attention. Might be way different on a heavy and fast one.

[Colonel Sanders]

Turned out a defect in the inner tube

There's an awful lot of us that have been bitten by
that in the last few years.

[Cat Driver]

We had both our tubes go flat in the new Husky in less than fifty hours from new, both tubes were manufactured with weak bonds.

[Cat Driver]

delete

[Shiny Side Up]

Such an individual should be charged with reckless and dangerous operation of an airplane and his license should be revoked.....permanently.

I don't think some paper (or lack thereof) would stop such an individual. Wouldn't be the first person out there flying without a license, or during a suspended one.

[Cat Driver]

Such an individual is not above the law, once identified and known to have lost his license it is a simple matter to have the RCMP waiting if he goes flying without a license...

....the aeronautics act is federal.

[Shiny Side Up]

The last person I know who TC caught flying without a license was slapped with, wait for it... a whopping $100 fine. While its a nice sentiment you have there, the RCMP just don't have the resourses to do such policing unless they have a specific problem individual on their hands. Neither does TC have said resourses. Much the same as how the collective police forces of this country don't keep all of the unlicensed drivers off of the road either. They catch a few now and then, but its just drops in the ocean.

In the example above, the fellow in question is free to beat the crap out of his airplane as he pleases, only if he managed to leave the ground in such a state is he then breaking the law. Should he have his license taken away? Probably. Could he legally have it taken away? In this case not so much. AFAIK, you can't be charged for attempting to break the CARs, with the unless they decide to go for 602.01 and even then in this case they'd have a tough time making it stick.

[Shiny Side Up]

Relevant to the topic at hand as it may have diverged from the opening post. From Oct 2011 Flying magazine.

I can swim, Leander said

A 21 year old Alabama man began taking his flying lessons on Oct 30. He got his student pilot certificate a week later, at that point reporting six hours of flight experience. In his application for the third-class medical, he did not mention that he had used a prescription antidepressant when he was 18, and had been treated with a series of other medications for a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, a recently discovered ailment mainly of disruptive or unfocused schoolboys. For the past few months he had been taking daily does of Adderall, an amphetamine "study drug" with the paradoxical property of stimulating the enervated while calming the overstimulated.

The student pursued his flying lessons assiduously. He made his first solo flight in the pattern on Dec 20 and his second on the 23rd. An instructor endorsed his log book for solo flying within 25 miles of the home airport, with limitations: Daytime only, no passengers, wind not to exceed 10 knots, maximum crosswind six knots, cieling above 2300 feet and visibility no less than six miles. the instructor also explained these limitations verbally.

At this point he had logged 26 hours, a quarter of them at night. He had not yet recieved any cross country instruction.

On December 23, the student pilot bought himself a 37 year-old, recently annualed Cherokee 140.

The evening of Dec 24 was forecast to be stormy, with wind and rain. An instructor, observing the student fueling his newly aquired airplane a little after noon, told him that he "needed to be through flying for the day" because of the weather. The student agreed and said he would put the airplane away.

At 2:50 the airport security camera recorded the pilot returning, and about five minutes later an airplane that appeared to be his taxied to the runway. The camera caught no more commings or goings of the pilot or his airplane, but it did note the pilot-controlled runway lights going on at 9:58 pm. The student pilot had been planning to visit his girlfriend at her parents' home in Atlanta the following day, Christmas, but decided to fly to Atlanta that night instead. He spoke with her between 8:45 and 9:45. She tried to dissuade him. She told him that the weather was bad and that it was raining hard. There was a high wind advisory for the area.

He replied, :"I'm a pilot."

He said he would land at 11:30. When he had not arrived by 2 in the morning, his girlfriend called the authorities. The next afternoon the wreckage of the Cherokee was located in a national forest 35 miles east of the departure airport. There was no wreckage path; The engine buried in the ground, symetrical crushing of both wings and lack of damage to the tailcone and empenage and to the surrounding trees indicated that the airplane had come down in a vertical dive, probably had stalled and spun. Investigators found nothing to suggest a pre-impact failure of the engine or the flight controls.

The weather at the departure airport on the evening of the flight had been windy but VFR, with five or six mile visibility, overcast around 3000 feet and gusts up to 20 knots. At Atlanta, there were 30 knot gusts, but the cieling and visibility were better. At Anniston, Alabama, the weather reporting station closest to the accident site, the wind was gusting to 25 and the visibility occasionally dropping below 3 miles in rain and mist. There was no evidence, however, that the pilot had sought a weather briefing from any of the usual augurs.

The accident occured in a hilly area, where, with a strong east wind blowing, orographic rain and fog were probable. Witnesses from the vicinity of the accident site reported heavy rain and high winds. A fire department officer at Anniston had recieved a number of calls regarding blown down power lines earlier that evening.

The autopsy of the pilot found residues of amphetamines and alchohol in his blood and tissues. Investigators obtained phamacy records that revealed that his most recent Adderall prescription had been filled the day before the accident. Five of the pills were already gone, implying that the young man had been taking them at twice the prescribed rate. Detritius recovered from the wreckage suggested, without however confirming it, a minor orgy of self medication: an emptied can of Red Bull energy drink. An ashtray full of cigarette butts, a water bottle containing chewed tobacco, four unopened cans of beer in a duffle bag and four other beer cans, scattered about, which were too badly damaged for it to be determined whether or not thay had been opened.

Despite the fact that the student pilot had only just soloed and was not authorized to carry passengers, his girlfriend told investigators she had flown with him several times. She described him as a good pilot who could fly in instrument conditions and "with or without the GPS." He was however, "hard headed." His flight instructor supplied a slightly less flattering account, saying he was pretty good at night flying and "terrible" on instruments. He was "overconfident," and buying his airplane had perhaps magnified his "attitude that he could do anything". His driving recod suggested a protracted, but perhaps not untypical, male adolescence: three speeding tickets, and one for running a red light; two accidents, fault unspecified; and a 60 day license suspension for "mutilating, defacing or reproducing" a driver's license.

From a certain point of view, some ammount of irrational optimism might be seen as useful for a pilot. After all, he expects to be suspended aloft, like a saint or a character in a martial arts film, by invisible forces. certainly the eariest pilots were, for the most part, a daring devil-may-care lot, for whom ordinary life was, as a poet wrote of a First World War airman, a "waste of breath/In balance with this life, this death." But times have changed. The chief virtue of a pilot is no longer reckless courage; its cautious good judgement.

By any measure, the young man's decision to fly that night was a reckless one - wildly, rashly, irretrievably reckless. One senses in him - to the extent that one can sense anything through the prism of an NTSB report - a judgement buffeted between tempestuous impulses, and the medicines that were supposed to regulate them. Can such a judgement fairly balance the urge to make a flight and the conditions that mitigate against it? Can it even be relied upon to see the need for balancing them? This novice pilot seems, once he made up his mind, not to considered any alternative. The advice and warnings of his instructor, the admonitory notations in his log book, might as well have been inscribed on a buried cuneiform tablet. They were not a part of his mental world. It was not so much a disregard of the regulations that doomed him; it was a disregard of the sense of the regulations.

In fairness to the young pilot, it should be said that this kind of accident is not uncommon. It is by no means confined to amorous youths with ADHD and a student ticket. Licensed piplots with neither instrument training nor suitable equipment regularly take off in darkness, fog and rain, only to hit a tree or hillside within a few miles of the airport. It is difficult to imagine what they were thinking. But perhaps there is some underlying sense of glory in facing terrible odds. The grand gesture, ending badly, looks like folly to the modern eye. But, after all, if Leander had stayed home that night, we never would have heard of him.

Now in that incident, it does raise a lot of questions about how the training was taking place (for instance, how did the student manage to sneak the plane to take up his girlfriend?) but certain things stand out and are indicative to how people make decisions.

[akoch]

If it was not so crazy, one would have thought it is made up. Oh man.

Well, to answer the question - since the guy got his Cherokee, who would know unless he got ramp-checked or got into an accident? Otherwise him taking somebody up on a student permit would go under the radar. Just like a teenager going for a drive on his dad's car when no one's looking.

[Shiny Side Up]

Well, to answer the question - since the guy got his Cherokee, who would know unless he got ramp-checked or got into an accident?

He bought the Cherokee on the 23rd, died in it on the 24th. Not a lot of time to be giving rides in it as indicated. At least not without notice - it seems like his instructor caught up with him on the 24th as well. That would infer that he had somehow managed to aquire the use of another plane, or was using the rental.

[akoch]

Ah, I missed that. You're right, we can only speculate then how lax the rules are at the rental/school place he went to. It did mention that he had a number of night hours. Not typical for a low time student. Perhaps this is when it was easier to go without drawing attention to himself. I couple of schools I have experience with here would not let you do that and they were certainly watching what was going on, where you go etc. Even to a point of using the on-line real-time flight tracking I only learnt of it later on.

[Shiny Side Up]

Things are somewhat different in the U.S. for instance night training is part of the syllabus for the PPL down there. It is unusual that he had so much night training before his solo though. One of the things that has become so restrictive of flight training is due to incidents like this which sadly are not unique. There's a certain level of operational control that must go on up here which isn't mandated down there. That said, its not unusual for students to assume that they can carry passengers, regardless of how the rules have been explained to them. I'm not sure why that would be considered reasonable in anyone's world view - sort of defeats the point of the whole process - but with today's "customer is always right" attitude which is so often perpetuated, student/customers always think that its going to be Ok for the rules to be bent or broken in their favor.

That there is somewhat of the real problem when it comes to decision making, a lack of sense that there is a reason that the world shouldn't always work in one's favour. You run into it all the time - you only have to observe a traffic intersection with new snow for an hour or less to see it play out. For that matter you can generally witness it in any place where there is a large group of people.