Cockpit video of plane crash

Amazing video

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=835_1344412426


No fatalities. Dudes were filming five minutes after the plane went down.

So much for picking your place to crash. Bad things can happen very quickly before you have time to react. In this one the first clue was the long take-off roll -- after taking off one time they touch down and do it again. IOW the plane was overloaded for the conditions present IMO.

...density altitude (the lack of respect/understanding for/of) can be a killer. Glad this turned out okay.

Was that a computer tablet in the pilots hand? (I only saw it in the slow motion at the end.)

Take off roll was way too long. Clearly overloaded for the conditions. Abort or turn back. Turning back is difficult when the plane does not want to fly.

Very lucky people.

Craig T.

The "computer tablet" looking thing looks like the aileron/elevator control (aka the steering wheel)

An abort would have been appropriate. When the aircraft settled following the first half of the take-off, the pilot should have taken the opportunity to rethink the situation and stay on the ground.

Forced landing - not 'crash'. Very big difference.

Not being a pilot, I fail to see any distinction at all when it comes to this video. This was a crash, IMHO.

I thought the post-crash reactions interesting and telling. I can understand the dazed look of trying to comprehend what just happened. I can even understand the idea of trying to document the crash scene. What I can't understand was the lack of empathy and assistance for the pilot. The one camera operator looked like he was more interested in documenting the injuries to the pilot's face than giving him first aid!

Yeah, that sure looked like a reasonable approximation of a crash to me. I'm not a pilot either, but I've spent a fair bit of time in small aircraft, and I didn't get a sense these guys had their act together. And I agree, the lack of concern for their buddy didn't give me warm fuzzies either.

The older I get, the more particular I get about who I fly with. I want the chance to get even older!

I'm sorry, I wasn't being clear!

Post no.2 here links to a thread I had previously posted asking for comments about choices of where to make a forced landing - using the words "picking your place to crash".

There's a difference between a "crash" and a forced landing. In my thread was asking about places to make a forced landing, not about places to "crash".

Why is this important? Almost everyone who doesn't fly light aircraft wrongly believes that any in-flight emergency immediately results in the aircraft diving at increasing speed head-first towards the ground and is followed by an inevitable "crash". In truth, while it's not impossible for that to happen, it's not a common scenario. As someone who frequently uses light aircraft as a method of transportation I have had to do a considerable amount of difficult advocacy in that respect with people who are close to me, like my Mother-in-law.

I'm 100% sure that what Russ intended in Post no. 2 was just light-hearted, but I'm sensitive on the subject. I was attempting to take a responsible attitude to pre-flight planning and it undoes some of the education we pilots have to do for my MiL, or someone like her, to see it linked to by the words "picking your place to crash".

As far as the video goes, four big dudes in a plane with only four seats is certainly suspicious as far as overloading goes. But that's just speculation.

NTSB preliminary report:
http://www.ntsb.gov/aviationquery/brief.aspx?ev_id=20120701X65804&key=1

Semantics -- I always considered a forced landing as one where you pick a farmer's field or an empty road and put the plane down safely and walk away, with the plane resting on its landing gear but not on a runway. Some place much like the field the acft in this thread tried to take-off from. Landing an acft on a runway has often resulted in a crash (oops, missed it by that much).

Your thread was about choosing between a lake, river or tree tops for your forced landing, with a very high likelihood (IMO) of your Cessna 182 coming to rest much like the aircraft in this thread's video. Not on its gear and not in flyable condition.

It's a forced landing right up until your wing or prop makes contact with the first tree or sinks in 10 feet of water near shore (or not). The wording on your NTSB report will look much like this one in Guatemala with the words, "crashed during a forced landing" evident. Potato tomato If your forced landing results in the acft never flying again, that's a crash.

FWIW, $.02

I guess I misunderstood the point you were making in post no.2, after all. Could you spell it out for me please?

Nope, between the two threads I've already said enough. The video speaks much louder than I ever could.

Yoke mounted clipboard.

I didn't see any evidence of an "air pocket" but I did notice that the pilot had pulled the yoke pretty far back. I'm not sure if that aggravated the situation or if he knew that they were going in and wanted to bleed off some energy. Doing so either put them in the trees or kept them alive.

A commercial pilot flying Part 91 means that the pax were probably friends or family.

Comments from the pilot himself:

http://m.aopa.org/training/articles/2012/120814youtube-crash-pilot-was-going-to-abort.html


I

That would a reasonable thing, perhaps even a good sign. Lots of data for pilots comes that way these days - more easily updated than paper - and tools for (mis)calculating various things like weight limits and density...

He does mention a miscalculation. He's probably taken off enough in that plane to believe he understands its actual performance vs calculated numbers, and with a long runway he was probably thinking it ought to work and there's plenty of runway left to try a little more...

He probably doesn't get a trouble on a short runway because he'd abort quickly. That longer runway seduced him into eating into margin.

Even if the correct performance data showed he was good to go, in the AOPA article, they point out that the video shows he had left the mixture control in the full rich position. That's a HUGE error that at a density altitude of somewhere around 7 to 9 thousand feet would lose him a BIG BIG chunk of available power.