In Coburg today a 172H D-ECJN crashed during landing training. Instructor did not survive the crash. Must be something in that, because it’s just unbelievable that this happens in traffic circuits.
If you look at the picture in the newspaper, it looks like there is a track on the ground from the guy taking a picture to the plane. If that is the track the plane made at the ground, it was parallel with the papi lights and almost a 90 degrees angle with the runway.
That definately looks weird to me.
RikB wrote:
That definately looks weird to me.
It does, but if the airplane made that track it would have had to travel backwards.
Just some circuits like in any of the thousands of circuits done in PPL training. I think that’s maybe related to the old question: how far do you let the student go? In any case, this should have been solvable, there’s just too much energy dissipated in the plane. The 172 flies at ~40 knots, this looks like a lot faster, where you should have been able to climb away.
Taking the FR24 data with a big grain of salt, it appears they were doing 50kts at the end. Looking at the picture in the link with a completely destroyed firewall-forward section, perhaps a stall after a botched go-around? According to FR24 they were over the runway.
Right wingtip damage. Spin? Or did wingtip make the dragmark, then spin? The wheel fairings look undamaged.
Loss of directional control by student slamming on power, leaves runway, instructor isn’t able to get it flying?
I wonder what the instructor actually died of, given that the cabin seems to be largely intact? My guess would be a head injury.
Saddened.
I’ve seen this before, I was among those who pulled my buddy from his crashed 150 with similar cabin condition. He died from the sudden stop. The coroner later told us that he had stopped at about 200G, not survivable. The stop can be so quick, that the seatbelts don’t have time to break, because they stretch.
The forward deceleration forces of this crash were immense. It is noteworthy that the tailboom is badly wrinkled in compression and perhaps some bending, but there is no evidence that the tail itself touched the ground. The tailboom wrinkled by inertial forces only. Yes, the travel path was off axis to the runway, and the airplane appears to have spun around as it slid and stopped. So the airplane probably hit the ground very nose down, not level, and perhaps yawed, which could be the result of a partly recovered spin as it hit.
Shoulder harnesses present and used?
Snoopy wrote:
Shoulder harnesses present and used?
Probably, but the standard single point shoulder harness installed in Cessnas is a little better than none, but not the best. Your torso is more than half your body weight, and being restrained by one strap, imposing most of its restraining force on your collar bone. I have the broken collar bone with Meccano in it to prove that a four point harness is superior. I also ripped the lap belt right out of the plane. But, no matter how you are strapped in, or whether you stay strapped in, you can still stop a plane so short, that the crash loads can be unservivable.
I checked out a new owner in his brand new Decathlon last week. The harnesses in that are three inches wide (which I’ve seen before) and actually have ratchet straps to ratchet yourself down into the seat once you’ve bulked up!
I was wearing this lap belt (and the single point shoulder harness attached to it). (that’s not my arm in the photo):
