First post to this forum. Thought I'd share the story and video of a recent local tragic event.

web page

I actually saw the smoke while driving home from a job but I didn't realise what it was at the time.

quote:

On Friday, the medical examiner in Greenville reported that the preliminary findings indicated that Jordan death appeared to be accidental,

Difficult for me to reason a cause unless medical. I saw no attempt to correct but time was short being so low. Perhaps someone can tell us if a medical examiner could tell if a stroke occurred prior to the crash?

It's a lousy video but it looks like a classic VMC accident. (Velocity Minimum Control) Which has to do with maintaining control with one engine inoperative.

But of course it's nearly impossible to tell from that video.

Was he trying to bring it back around and too heavy or not enough rudder to keep it flying?

Things went bad fast - violent yaw to left then pitch down. Student was at the controls according to the article. Student was checked out and released from hospital, so medical is probably out. If they were practicing engine-out procedures then a likely scenario is a VMC incident as posted by surestrike. Student could have responded inappropriately to a left engine out simulation and let his airspeed get too low, and combined w/assymetric thrust, spun it in. Clockwise starboard prop rotation wouldn't have helped either.

Well the only thing he could have done from what I saw in the video is to pull the throttles to idle and feather both engines if you have time and go staight ahead. to low to slow to do anything else. There is a reason in light twin flying for the rule of thumb that the second engine is to take you to the smoking hole in the ground.

The above explanations don't make a lot of sense to me. If someone is teaching a student dead engine techniques, why in the world would you do it at such a low altitude when ANY mistake by the student will likely not be recoverable?

quote:

Originally posted by Gatogordo:
The above explanations don't make a lot of sense to me. If someone is teaching a student dead engine techniques, why in the world would you do it at such a low altitude when ANY mistake by the student will likely not be recoverable?

Welcome to the jungle. That is exactly how you train. If you never pull an engine on a guy at rotation then he'll never know what it's like it happens in real life. I've done it with students many hundreds of times. And had it done to me in real airplanes and simulators hundreds and hundreds of times.

Something else went wrong here. We'll probably never know what really happened but we'll have an idea of the general cause after the investigation is complete.