The AM Forum

When living in Spain I had an ultralight airplane, an Avid Flyer, which I enjoyed immensely. I sold it when I moved to Costa Rica. I just got the message that it has been crashed during practice flights. One pilot, an experienced airline pilot, has died, the other one, a young mechanic , is in hospital. I knew both pilots well. I am still shocked by this message. A photo attached.
Seeing this crash, an engine fail is doubtful, the stall speed of an Avid Flyer Stall is very low and almost excludes a heavy crash like this.  Shocking...

Wow. :(

Could it have been a catastrophic mechanical failure??
Metal fatigue, etc...

                 _-_-

I don't think so Bear, the Avid Flyer is made of a steel that doesn't fatigue, chrome molibdeno. That airframe is good for 50 years or more. The pilot was a good and experienced pilot, so a wingstall during a curve isn't an error he makes. Perhaps maintenance, loss of control due to cable break, a bolt that came loose in the control, I don't know. The Avid Flyer is known to be a very reliable plane

So sorry to hear that shocking news.  It will be interesting to see what the failure mechanism was that caused the issue.  Hopefully they will find that out.   

I had my first Ultra Lite flight a few years back and loved every minute of it. 
My flight was down at the Massey Air Museum near Galena, Maryland.  I know one of the owners of the airport, in fact he is the son of late Jack Williamson of B&W fame.

http://masseyaero.org/

Joe-W3GMS

   
 

Sad to hear when talented people like that are killed, sometimes due to mechanical failure - no fault of their own.

I'm a pilot (VFR) and once owned a Piper Arrow. (complex aircraft)  Had a lot of fun.  As a novice 200 hour pilot,  I really didn't fully realize how dangerous I was until much later on. I remember taking low level flights over NYC for sightseeing, night flying and getting lost... I would do it a lot differently today.

One thing I thought was a brilliant idea was when emergency rocket powered parachutes that attached to the airplane itself were advertised....and could soften the landing in most any kind of major failure that would normally take you out.  (Parachute thrusted up like a jet ejection seat works to operate at low altitudes)   I saw this in the 90's and figgered it would be mainstream by now, but it doesn't seem to have caught on. I would surely have one installed on my airplane today, if I still flew.

Other than expensive, why is this not a common practice today?  Why would the average aircraft owner pass on such a great risk to reward ratio?

T

I am not sure about the chute. I had one, but took it out of the plane. It had passed all limits of time, so don't even know if it still was operational. There is no rocket, they are launched by gas pressure. But it was quite heavy, almost 30 ponds. Chutes did perhaps cause as much accidents as they prevented by inadvertent opening. I remember a fatal accident when someone did pull the chute when he could not brake to stop at the end of the runway. The plane was pulled off the runway and smashed down, the pilot died. One of the designers of the apollo fox died because he wanted to return to the runway after a take-off and had an engine failure. An experienced pilot. The plane didn't have sufficient altitude and speed and had a wing stall during the turn with the same results as in the photo of my plane.  I had once an engine stop as well, that you simply land in the direction you are flying. NO turns. Fortunately, the prop kept spinning, regained fuel pressure and I could restart and returned to the field. A bad landing without an engine is almost always a whole lot safer than a tip stall during a turn with too low a speed.

Look closely.....Not my plane

My Pa-12 on a gravel bar in Alaska

The plane in this picture is 200 ft under water...This is the printout from our side scan sonar when we located this 185 cessna in Upper Two Lakes Alaska...We never did get it off the bottom....and No I didn't put it there..We were hired to locate it and bid on the salvage but it wasn't worth the cost of retrevial....

Nice bush plane, but needs some maintenance ;D

Must be a real pleasure flying in Alaska with those bush planes.

A weird Photoshop effect or is it missing a prop blade?

I don't know what happened to the prop blade...but it is my guess that most of the trashy look on this plane is just a paint job made to look like that...Those cowlings are aluminum but look rusty brown  The structure of the plane looks good ...

The people at the bar chairs behind the left wing also faded away...

The Cirrus line of aircraft is required to have a parachute system in order to have an Airworthiness Certificate. If the system is inoperative, the plane cannot be flown. Scary.

Having a parachute can give pilots a false sense of security. For example, they cannot be deployed at normal flight speeds, and when they are used, there’s no control of the plane. It will come down, hard, wherever. This could involve getting caught in power lines, the edge of a building, or in water. In many cases, it’s far more desirable to have control even with an engine failure.

Exorbitant price aside, a parachute system requires excellent judgement skills in an emergency.

VERY interesting points.

Yes, I can see how loss of control would be a huge negative factor - missing the chance of regaining control once deployed. I now see why they never really caught on.  

Terminal velocity is 200 mph and parachutists can survive the shock. Maybe a more sophisticated airplane parachute design would sense the airspeed and then gradually open based on this reading. A "cut cord" feature might be helpful too, but then we are possibly in a stall or spin. It would be a panic for sure.

As far as experimental craft, I was once looking at gyro-copters. They seemed to be a reasonable compromise compared to a helicopter.  The thang that scared me was that normally pushing the stick forward in an airplane increases speed and could prevent a stall. But if this muscle memory was applied to a gyro, a forward stick would slow it down and possibly stall. Surely a source of gyro accidents.

I finally came to the conclusion that the safest aircraft is a parachute with a 2 cycle motor fan. If flown in an open area like out west, it seems hard to get into trouble since they will usually just float to the ground.

As for hot air balloons, I could never understand how someone could lift off and have no idea where they would end up...  no directional control. Are these people nuts?  What if the wind picks up big, like a T-storm... What if there are no roads where the balloon comes down?  :-)

T

I’ve been fortunate to have crewed many times for a balloon pilot/friend. This involved helping with the assembly and launch, driving the chase vehicle, and getting everything packed into a trailer afterward. The randomness of balloon flight is perplexing to me as a fixed-wing pilot, but he’s enjoyed many safe and successful flights with careful planning based on wind direction and good altitude control. The abundance of parks and fields make ballooning in the New York City suburbs a possibility.

Aviation of many kinds also allows for some exiting 2M work when thousands of feet aloft. Putting out my call on 146.52 rarely gets a response unless it’s followed by “... aeronautical mobile”. That often creates a pileup as if I were on a sandbar in the South Pacific! *

* hamateur radio topic tie-in added for legitimacy

Indeed chutes didn't really caught on, as you say also the price is quite high. And the weight in the aircraft matters as well. In an non-controllable spin, should be fine, but a pilot should practice stalls and, when he is more experienced, spins as well. This should not give panic situations. More sophisticated chutes will be totally prohibitive in price .
N1BCG explained true reasons very well in my opinion. And a well maintained ultralight aircraft is a very safe aircraft if flown with common sense, without doing stupid things like circling low at low speed etc.
We had at our field in Spain a few accidents due to that, pilot error because they did like to show-off. Also accidents because the governement refused to put HV lines at the end of the runway below ground. Pilots from other fields visiting didn't know they were there and had accidents trying to avoid at he last moment.
There are quite a few gyrocopters here in Costa Rica. They can stand more wind and turbulence than a ultra light. but have there problems as well. Especially dangerous when you lower your speed too much, you can loos control 
The real reason why a gyrocopter can fly is that they are that ugly hat the earth repels them.... ;D
With respect to balloons, I understand that they completely silent flight, the view etc is very nice and appealing. But also not my cup of tea due to lack of control.

https://cirrusaircraft.com/innovation/airframe-parachute/

Sailplanes anyone?
They have them with small pop-up gas engine props...

I disagree. I woke up one morning at a folk festival to what I thought was a dragon outside my tent! Turned out to be a hot air balloon about 30 feet overhead. When the flame is on, it's *very* noisy. The directional control would worry me too.

My CGS Hawk has a BRS ballistic parachute which has a rocket that pulls it out very rapidly. Attached to the frame of the cabin with kevlar slings, it's able to deploy at up to 135 mph (35 mph over Vne) and carry the total aircraft weight of 1050 gross. It's out of date, and as I look at refurbishing the craft, I wonder if I'll want to spend to reinstall it. Or save the 27lbs. When I first got the plane, it was a good piece of mind thing. I look at it as something one would use if you had a structural failure like a wing spar failing. I was going to re-rig mine so that pulling the handle also grounded the magnetos to shut the engine down. Mine is mounted on the boom just behind the pusher prop. They caution that a spinning prop is ok IF the engine isn't driving it.

Clark, you're right about 2 meters from high above. Always fun!

Terminal velocity for most skydivers is between 120-140 mph, depending on how they are dressed. They can achieve 200 mph when 'tracking', shaping the body like a lifting body - they get nearly 1:1 ratio and move right out - you can see it when they break formation to pull.

Powered parachutes looks like a gas. I guess they can hit thermals and collapse the chute though, or just get a rough enough ride that nobody has fun. Mostly they fly at dawn and dusk. At fly ins they are called the 'Two Stroke Alarm Clock' because they are turning up at the crack of dawn while the air is calm.

PA0NVD - I'm sorry to see the crash of your aircraft. My condolences.

Always interesting to see how many hams are pilots too.

I remember seeing those ads, I think in General Aviation News & Flyer.

Nico, Sorry to hear about your friends.

Brad

Thanks Brad and everybody for the nice words
When we know the reason of the crash, I will post

RE the parachute plane safety system.


One deploys and saves a stunt pilot in this video.


https://reddit.app.link/82MA1is1BN

--Shane
KD6VXI

Boris Popov who founded BRS was my hang glider instructor back in the late 1970s and BRS had the next hanger when I spent the 1980s working out of South St. Paul airport for a ferry company.

They did the larger aircraft testing with a Cessna 150 when they expanded from ultralight aircraft.

I had a BRS in my ultralight Weedhopper in 1999. Luckily I never had to use it.

In the years I flew in Spain, never heard of someone saved by a BRS in the fields I visited, but one pilot did die by using it wrong. It is quite an extra weight at a grasshopper

I found a pic of my Avid flyer just after  I restored it. Memories, memories....  :'(