November 2011 Archives

That Brent Hampton will spend Thanksgiving on Thursday with his wife and newborn son in Portageville, Missouri, at all is testament to the toughness of an Air Tractor. I'm not promoting the company, I'm just amazed for the second time this month at the ability of this metal workhorse to give pilots a second chance.

Earlier in November, I wrote about an AT-402 in Texas that hit wires and came to rest inverted back in August, with the pilot walking away.

Then this week, I found the final NTSB report on a should-have-been-fatal accident involving not one, but two Air Tractors that collided in midair on 18 April. One pilot in an AT-502B walked away with no injuries, the other, Brent Hampton in the AT-802A, was just about healed from a variety of broken bones and was enjoying his one-week-old baby when I talked to him by phone on November 22.

Oddly enough, the guy in the other Air Tractor was Brent's father, Buster Hampton. The two, along with Buster's other son, run Hampton Flying Service.

Here's what happened, according to the NTSB. Buster Hampton had just departed KIEW (New Madrid airport) to the south in his Air Tractor AT-502B turboprop loaded with chemicals. After turning to northeast at his cruise altitude of 500ft, he came face to face with Brent in the AT-802A coming back empty from a spray run.

"Impact marks and the location of the wreckage indicated the spray boom on the AT-502B (Buster's plane) contacted the windshield on the AT-802A while the right wheel hit the left side of the vertical stabilized," says the NTSB. "Both the right main gear and the vertical stabilizer were located in a field near the collision site. The horizontal stabilizer remained attached to the AT-802A (Brent's plane)."

Buster's Air Tractor, with right gear missing, continued to fly and he returned to the airport where he safely landed. "Prop strike due to [landing gear] leg missing," he wrote in the accident report.

Brent can't remember what happened next. NTSB says his plane "cleared a 5ft-tall fence prior to contacting the terrain". The aircraft hit the ground in the middle of a gravel road then slid 150ft before hitting a telephone pole and splitting in two (nose separated from tail). Brent says the cockpit remained intact. His helmet got knocked off at some point in the accident sequence.

"It busted me up pretty bad," Brent tells me. Bad in this case means "nine or ten" broken bones, including limbs and pelvis. He says he's healed now but hasn't yet gone back to get his flight medical reapproved, in part because of the new baby. He says he'll get back to flying crop dusters for Hampton Flying Service in January.

"I'd be dead if I were flying anything else," he tells me.

While it took the Waco Classic Aircraft Corporation months to construct John Weber's beautitful brand new Waco YMF-F5C (N415WW, s/n F5C-8-126), as shown in this time-lapse video on YouTube, it took Weber only seconds to deconstruct it in Moriarty, New Mexico on 16 October.

Weber and a passenger, one Charles Conquergood, were on a long cross-country, moving the Waco from Anderson, Indiana to Carefree, Arizona when the deed was done at the stopping point in Moriarty.

"After a good three-point landing [at Moriarty], the aircraft started to turn, and I applied what I thought was a small amount of rudder," said Weber in the NTSB accident report.

Control of his lower appendages had been compromised, however.

Being that the Waco is an open-cockpit aircraft, Weber had to dress appropriately.

"Weather was quite chilly so pilot and passenger wore multiple layer of clothes including heavy insulated coveralls," he wrote, adding, "Pilot at the last moment decided to wear heavy insulated steel-toed boots."

While keeping his feet warm, those boots exposed his Achilles heel when he applied that "small amount" of rudder on landing.

"The aircraft abruptly swerved the opposite direction. I pressed hard on that rudder and the airplane turned over," he says. "It is apparent to me that I was applying brake rather than rudder." Neither man was injured but the plane is listed as "destroyed" in Weber's report.

In his recommendation for how the accident could have been prevented, Weber tells it like it is:

Weber continues with some good advice, however: "In the future be sure that any footwear or clothing does not interfere with proper 'sensing' and operation of the controls. Had I been wearing light footwear, I am sure I would have been able to detect teh back pressure from the brakes."

I would not like to be a participant in an aircraft crash, but if I were forced to do so, I'd want to be riding in an Air Tractor.

Exhibit One: A healthy stream of comments, many by ag pilots, to my YouTube post about the landing crash of a militarized AT-802U variant in October 2010 have nothing but praise for the sturdiness of the type.

Exhibit Two: A just-posted NTSB preliminary report about a turbine AT-402 in Uvalde, Texas on 13 August, further illustrates the point.

It's not real clear what happened, but the excitement started with the pilot messing with his on board GPS (most of us have never done that, right?...) while cruising along pretty low to the ground.

"As he attempted to troubleshoot the [GPS] problem, engine torque dropped momentarily, then returned to 1200 pounds," the NTSB states. "Shortly thereafter, engine torque dropped again and the pilot decided to make a precautionary landing on a road."  The FAA inspector later said he was unable to determine the reason for the drop in engine torque.

A typical story would have ended with the pilot landing in a field or on a road, but...

"While on final approach to the road, the pilot looked inside the cockpit momentarily and when he looked outside, he noticed a set of power lines crossing the road," the NTSB continues. "He was able to avoid them."
 
"The pilot then saw a second set of power lines and while manoeuvring to avoid them, inadvertently stalled the airplane. The right wing dropped, striking the power lines. The airplane spun around and impacted terrain in an inverted attitude."

Despite stalling at low speed, which for an AT-402 is about 60mph, hitting wires and slamming into the ground INVERTED, the pilot walked away with no injuries. Amazing.

Here are pictures of the aircraft during recovery by AvClaims.

Piper Aircraft may have second thoughts about its shelving of the Altaire single-engine business jet once they see this video. Of course, by the time this lad gets out of college, the market might just about be ready for the product.

German company e-volo says it has successfully flown its manned 16-rotor electric multicopter in the southwest of Germany in "late October".

Test pilot Thomas Senkel flew the fly-by-wire copter for 90 seconds for the flight.

According to the company:

The automatic attitude and directional control are taken care of by multiple separate and mutually monitoring onboard computers, controlling the engines with the precise rotation speed necessary to fly this tri-axis device. A simple joystick allows the pilot to control the aircraft via a fly-by-wire system. Whether during vertical takeoff, in flight, or landing, the pilot has to pay little attention to minimum speed, stall, gas mixture control, pitch control or one of many other things that make conventional flight as challenging as it is.

This electrically driven system is quiet, clean and economically cost efficient. A one-hour flight would cost something near to 6 Euro for electricity. In addition, the device holds few parts, which could wear out, making maintenance intervals and cost low and far between.

Kevin O'Grady of Dublin, Ohio probably wished he had been in the other Dublin on Saturday, October 15 rather than at Packer Field (5E9) trying to fly his 1964 Piper PA28-235 (N8746W).

Unable to start the low-wing single the usual way (battery ON, mixture RICH, prime, pump throttle, yell "CLEAR", engage ignition switch), O'Grady decided to hand-prop the aircraft. He suspected the "starter drive gear was not engaging the propeller ring gear," according to the NTSB report on what happened next.

NTSB: "As he rotated the propeller, the engine started and the unoccupied airplane proceeded across the airport, colliding with a hangar."

Here's O'Grady's diagram of the action.

The aftermath in person was much messier than the paper cartoon.

In O'Grady's words: "While rotating the prop, the engine started causing the aircraft to race across the field striking a hangar, destroying the aircraft, shearing off both wings and coming to a stop".

Along with the PA28 getting hammered (picture below), a Stearman B75N1 in the unlucky hangar received damage to both its wings and its engine.

Post-crash forensics revealed the flaws in Mr. O'Grady's procedure: He had turned off the master and "thought" he turned off the magnetos, but realized when looking at the wreckage that he had in fact:

• left one magneto ON
• left the mixture and throttle in the FULL ON position
• Left the parking brake OFF

The good news? No people were injured (pride excluded), and a toy Stearman in the corner looked to be unharmed, as were the cool nose art pix on the wall.