Dan wrote:
“When the engine loses power the plane starts to fall”
UdoR wrote:
this sounds more like real engine trouble, because with wrongly set mixture power doesn’t drop sharply,
Correct. And if I look at the propeller in those pics, I would be V E R Y surprised if it turns out that it was turning at the time of impact. Blades which contact the ground while turning don’t look like this.
Why the engine has stopped, nobody can say at this moment. Neither do we know the position she was when it happened, nor altitude. These few factors make one heck of a difference on how this accident needs to be rated.
The most important thing is that she apparently did not panic, not try to turn away in a steep turn or something like that but put the airplane down in such a way that nobody got hurt too much.
Perhaps it’s a similar story to a student at my local club. This student – actually, they had already passed their licence, but hadn’t flown in more than a year – wanted to go flying with an instructor. So off they went, pulled the Archer III out of the hangar, saw around 10 gallons in both tanks but as they were intending to fly for a couple of hours, they filled the left hand tank.
They carried out the air work and after an hour and 15 minutes, they returned back to the airfield to start circuit bashing, landing without flaps etc. About 5 miles out, at 2000ft MSL – 1800ft AGL – the engine died. The instructor heroically called “my machine” and proceeded to perform an emergency landing into a cornfield. Once down, they were collected and brought back to the club, whereby everyone was congratulating him on his heroic deeds, buying him drinks.
Meanwhile, the recovery of the aircraft was being organised. In order to transport it back to base, the aircraft’s wings needed to be removed. What a surprise when they noted that the right hand tank was pretty much empty, the left hand tank was brimmed to the top and the fuel selector was – yes, you guessed it, on the right hand tank.
Attempting to run an engine on air alone is never a good thing. After that, there was a legal dispute about who should pay for the insurance excess (2k) – the student claimed that the instructor should be liable as he was first overseeing the actions of the PIC and had also taken over the plane without allowing any fault finding; the instructor claimed that the pilot was asked to change the tank – a comment the student disputed….
So, it could be sods law that at the point she needed power, the fuel in that tank ran out….
UdoR wrote:
Ok now this sounds more like real engine trouble, because with wrongly set mixture power doesn’t drop sharply, it’s simply decreasing over time.
If you had cruise power and then set full power it could happen – although with my experience with Cherokees that shouldn’t happen with full rich mixture even at FL100. Of course at that altitude you would not get maximum possible power with full rich.
I guess in 2 years time we can read the report 
Or perhaps it will only be in Italian?
I think those among us who are realists have pretty much signed the report off already.
By the looks of it the report will come in the form of an article in Vanity Fair Italy, in combination with a home story.
Another stellar Netflix truth original perhaps.
