October 2010 Archives

Searches for balloonists Richard Abruzzo and Carol Rymer Davis, lost when their hydrogen-filled balloon likely encountered over the Adriatic Sea the morning of 29 September, turned up zilch.

A preliminary report by the US NTSB on the accident shows that the sport most people think of as soft and silent can sometimes turn polar opposite.

Abruzzo and Rymer Davis, accomplished balloonists both, according to the NTSB, were four days into the Coupe Aeronautique Gordon Bennett 2010 international gas balloon race with N801NM (pictured left). "A range of meteorological conditions prevailed over the 4 days of flight that originated at Bristol, England" on 25 September, the agency writes. That's putting it mildly.

"According to the Italian Agenzia Nazionale Per La Scurezza del Volo (ANSV), the last radio contact between the Brindisi, Italy, air traffic control center and the balloon occurred at 0558 (Universal Time, which was about 07:58am local time)," the NTSB says in the report. "The target identified as the missing balloon was descending at a high rate when it was lost." News stories revealed that the "high rate" was approximately 50mph.

The NTSB says the Italian Coast Guard coordinated a six-day search using their ships, US Navy aircraft, and a remotely-piloted underwater vehicle. "No evidence of the balloon or its crew was discovered," the agency says.

What weather brought the plane down?

According to a senior NTSB meteorologist, infrared and visible satellite images at 0600 UTC that morning showed "an area of cumulonimbus clouds developing in the vicinity of the last coordinates" with cloud tops in the range of 25,000ft to 26,000ft.

"The visible imagery indicated some signs of transverse banding on top of the anvil, which also implied strong vertical shears, turbulence, and thunderstorms in the area," says the NTSB.

Ok. I admit that I too got caught up on the frenzy that only a new aeroplane (or a woman in boots) can stir up at the NBAA show in Atlanta last week. This time it's a mystery high-speed turboprop said to fill the gap between the piston Corvalis TT and the twin-engine VLJ Mustang.

Heck, I even aksed our graphics wizard, Tim Brown, drum up a picture of what the supposed new Cessna high-speed single-engine turboprop might look like for an article in next week's Flight International...

The hubbub started at the Cessna press conference where Aviation Week Show News reporter, and my friend, Paul Jackson (of Jane's All the World Aircraft fame), asked Cessna CEO Jack Pelton if he would confirm or deny reported sightings of what looked like a Cessna Mustang, but in a single-engine turboprop configuration (hence the genesis of our picture).

Pelton was coy, saying only that he had heard that there had been such sightings.

Later, AOPA reporter Tom Horne asked Pelton again, and he added quite a bit more colouring to the blurry picture. Here's the video.

AvWeb then reported that the mystery aircraft will in fact have a Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6 turboshaft engine!

A source VERY close to the action now tells me that the mystery aircraft does in fact exist, and has in fact been out flying - twice.

But, he adds, CHILL OUT!

"Things got a bit out of hand and there is nothing imminent on this," he says. "Cessna is flying a technology demonstrator (two flights so far) but it's not a precursor to anything. They are still in early stages of looking at what might fit this market niche..."

What's up with corporate pilots and their attempts at ultra short-field landings?

First we had a Cessna 550 pilot trying to land on the remaining 2,100ft of runway at Manteo, North Carolina at 8:30 in the morning on 1 October. We all know what happened there..

Later the same day, at 1:30 in the afternoon, a Gulfstream IV pilot attempted to put down on 2,250ft of remaining runway at Teterboro. In that case, a crushable concrete runway pad, wisely installed at the runway end by the airport after a previous overrun in 2005, likely saved the aircraft and all 11 people on board. Pictures below were supplied by the FAA. Click on each image to see a larger version.

The red circle in the airport diagram (from www.airnav.com) below shows the location (aircraft was traveling toward the 24 end of the runway) where the NTSB says airport surveillance video shows the aircraft first touched down - at 120kt! The white rectangle at the end shows the location of teh crushable concrete pad.

According to the NTSB report, the 7,000hr captain, who was flying told investigators "at no point did either pilot believe there was not adequate runway remaining to continue the landing.."

The aircraft departed the end of the runway at 40-50kt and travelled about 100ft into the ESCO arresting material bed, making quite a dusty mess, but only damaging the Gulfstream's nosegear landing light. The engines however exhibited "damage consistent with foreign object debris", which sounds expensive. 

UPDATE: Ok, as of late this afternoon, now I know what Cirrus is thinking. See end of story...

Far below the radar, Cirrus has apparently been making its own airframe parachute systems since May this year...

The trademark Cirrus Airframe Parachute System (CAPS), shown above in an actual deployment (from the Cirrus website) and which recently saved lives in both the UK (SR20) and in Virginia (SR22), is now apparently being built internally by Cirrus.

Until May, the chutes were built by BRS, the company that has the only certified chutes in the market, a company that has become synonymous with the term, whole airframe parachute. To date, BRS says it has "saved" 257 lives, almost 1/4 of which have been in Cirrus aircraft.  

I was talking to Cirrus last week (see associated story in Flight International) about  the SF50 personal jet, and was told about the progress being made on a new 2-stage CAPS for the 6,000lb jet.

I "presumed" that BRS was the vendor of the new chute and left them a phone a message to get the scoop directly from the horse's mouth, so to speak.

The call came back just today, and from none other than Boris Popov, founder of BRS. 

"We've severed all reations with Cirrus for a variety of reason," said Popov, not wanting to get into more detail. "Cirrus is a great aircraft company, and why they've chosen to go into the parachute business to compete against the company that builds these is an odd thing to do."

Popov, who has shipped about 4,500 airframe parachutes to Cirrus for the SR20 and SR22, said he stopped shipping the airframe chutes to Cirrus in May.  He hinted that legal proceedings may be the works, as "they sure have a lot of parallel technologies all of the sudden...."

What does Cirrus say?

I spoke with Chief Operating Officer Patrick Waddick late this afternoon. He says Cirrus has a good amount of intellectual property related to the CAPS, and the company owns the rocket facility in Colorado that makes the portion of the system that ejects the chute out the back of the aircraft. Other elements of the parachute were made by subcontractors and integrated at BRS. That work is now being done at Cirrus.

Waddick: "As we looked at a variety of different things for [SF50] jet, and packing for SR20 and SR22, we realized that we were developing more capability in-house" than BRS was coming up with in its own research and development work.

"There's a tremendous engineering capability within Cirrus," said Waddick. "...For the jet, more sophistication was needed."

The NTSB has published its prelminary report on the Cessna 550 that plunged into the shallow water off the end of a too-short runway at the Dare County regional airport in Manteo, NC on 1 October. I put out a short blog on this earlier in the week.

"Examination of the airplane by a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) inspector found that the airplane had landed just past the Delta Intersection about 1700 feet down runway 23, with about 2100 feet of runway remaining," the report reads. "The airplane exited the end of runway 23, substantially damaging the wings, and fuselage."

Wow - that would have been a short-field landing and a half had the pilot pulled it off.

Further, the NTSB says: "Witnesses on the airport stated that they observed the airplane on approach. They watched as it came over the threshold to runway 23 at a steep rate of descent, touching down just west of the Delta Intersection. The witnesses observed the reversers deploy for the remainder of the landing roll. As the airplane neared the end of runway 23 witnesses stated that it appeared that the airplane was sliding a bit sideways. The airplane slid off the end of runway 23 and came to rest about 50 feet into the Croatan Sound. As witnesses arrived at the accident site all of the occupants had exited the airplane and were climbing up the "rip rap" embankment."

Here's some video of the extraction process. Ouch...

I had my first good look at the Cirrus SF50 Vision jet's tail pipe  the evening of 6 October 2010 at an owners gathering in Manassas, Virginia.

Like Piper (click here for previous post), Cirrus has selected a passive Coanda tail pipe for its Williams International  FJ33-4A-19-powered single-engine personal jet. Like Piper, the company wanted to reduce the effects of pitch moments when engine power is changed, a result of having an engine mounted above longitudinal axis of the aircraft. The Coanda effect in effect deflects the exhaust upward in this case, reducing the pitching moment of the engine thrust around the CG.

Cirrus chieft test pilot Mike Stevens tells me the Coanda spout has the equivalent effect of canting the exhaust nozzle by 14 degrees, leaving just a "small delta" in pitch moment on go-around.

Here are a few more pictures of the aircraft, and a short video of a high speed pass by Stevens during a 10-minute demo.

A Cessna 550 Citation jet (N262Y) registered to Colnan Inc ran off the end of a runway at the Dare County regional airport in Manteo, NC on Friday.

According to the FAA incident report, there were two people on board and neither was injured. Here's a clip from the local news station covering.