Unfortunately it is the german pilot who called me for advice two weeks ago …
Sorry to hear the Flyer59. I’m sure that make it feel much closer to home and more personal for you. I hope it doesn’t affect you too much.
It definately wasn’t a day for a VFR pilot to be out flying.
Or maybe something less common happened like air intake saturated by extreme rain, or some other engine failure, or running out of fuel which is really common…
I make no comment on this incident, as I’ve no knowledge of the pilot or his experience. But when a pilot who isn’t used to IFR flight attemps to fly in IMC, but wishes not to make the obvious to ATC, then there are a lot of things that can go wrong.
In such a location he would have to descend to below the Class A (I’m not 100% sure of the location, but I think it might have been under or approaching the 1500AMSL Class A base). In conditions that you’re not used to, trying to deal with icing and a new aircraft, that could create a lot of pressure and little room for error.
If a pilot would be flying much higher earlier (unlikely in this case given the weather), they could easily have the QNH set to 1013 for a flight level. Under the workload they could easily forget to reset it to local QNH. Looking at yesterday’s charts that could have been a low as 980. 1013-980 *30f/hp=990ft. That’s a big difference if you’re operating below 1500ft in IMC. To be clear, I don’t think that happened here….they were not likely, given the weather reports, to be flying high enough to use FL. I put it as just an example of the simple things that can go wrong why a pilot who is ill experienced to fly in IMC attempts to do so at low level. You definately don’t need anything exotic or mechanical.
I understand from the weather reports that that visibility was just 400mtrs. You’re unlikely to see the sea surface in those conditions, looking over the nose, until you’re in it. There is somthing about an overcast and poor visibility (by this I mean less than 8km) that makes the sky & sea very hard to distinguish. Make that 400mtrs and rain (never mind a frozen windscreen) and your chances of seeing a surface is virtually nil. For a VFR pilot like myself, trying to see the surface would be a big temptation in those conditions, that I’d have to consiously resist. An experienced IFR pilot would probably have no interest in seeing the surface.
allegedly the radar track of the accident airplane. It appears to be flying at around 600 m (1800 ft) AMSL and also appears to turn back towards the sea before the signal is lost. Apparently also this is an amateur tracking so they probably did not get it to the last position indicated by AMS FIS who indicated 300 ft as the last return. Flight track would indeed point out to a VFR flight trying to maintain VMC and failing to do so.
The question which Alexis’ linked article would put into my mind is if the Pilot had any Cirrus experience before that flight. If I read the circumstances correctly this may well have been the ferry flight home after purchase? So what would the training status be? At 300 ft and flying possibly high bank turns might also not be helpful.
Although i don’t weant to speculate, I am very sure that it is the German pilot who called me before Christmas for some Cirrus advice. It was an older gentleman, I realized, and very nice, and he told me that he was about to buy a SR20 in England, and we talked about G-reg maintenance and stuff like that. I think he said that he would get checked out in the SR20 in England … the rest of the conversation I forgot …
If there really was severe icing from the surface up to 2500, 3000 feet … and if he flew into that stuff with an SR20 and VFR … then that was a deadly decision.
I cannot say anything else. I did not “know” him, it was just one phone call …
Flyer59 wrote:
If there really was severe icing from the surface up to 2500, 3000 feet … and if he flew into that stuff with an SR20 and VFR … then that was a deadly decision.
From what I´ve been able to reconstruct from the different weather sources, I actually do not think that icing was the main factor, though if there really was freezing rain in the area, it could have been. My hunch from what I have seen is that this is a typical VFR into IMC accident. He was flying below the overcast which got lower and lower. Over the sea it might have been at maybe 2-3k ft, towards land it became progressively low stratus and mist below that. The radar echos (if they are genuine) state that he was flying between 700 and 500 m AGL, which translates to about 2100-1500 ft, last known radar echo according to the recording was at 300 ft, the helo reported 200 ft ceiling. I would expect that the result will be that he flew lower and lower and finally impacted the sea, possibly in a condition where he was caught below the overcast, tried to fly back out but found his way blocked. At that altitude, CAPS would also be useless I rekon.
Flying VFR in this weather was simply not an option at all.
The body of the pilot has now been recovered – Coastguard Blog
Condolences to the family!
http://www.lz.de/owl/20674020_Ex-Claas-Chef-Gernot-Schaefer-ueber-der-Nordsee-abgestuerzt.html
Quoting the aeroclub guy here: “the change of type cannot have anything to do with the crash. Switching from a Cessna to a Cirrus is like switchig from a Vauxhall to a VW…”.
[moved to an existing thread]
Snoopy wrote:
Cessna to a Cirrus
Which Cessna, which Cirrus? There is a big difference between a 172 with steams/125ktas cruise and and a SR22T with glass/210ktas cruise and a FL250 ceiling.
