A Fairchild Merlin VI, N577MX, with 5 people on board crashed shortly after take off from Malta Luqua international airport this morning.
It was caught on camera in it’s last seconds.
Appears to me that he is almost inverted and at the same time he has turned about 90 degrees of track.
Looks to me as if we might be looking at a Vmc accident here. The Metro/Merlin is not unknown for this kind of thing. Very difficult to control in case of an engine failure at low speed.
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20161024/local/aircraft-crashes-in-luqa.628979
The Manx2 crash in Cork was also inverted. Unfortunately the excellent article which goes in-depth into the background of the Cork crash (dodgy company with the AOC etc, descent below minimums, one engine that was known to have faults and respond differently than the other) is 404-Not found.
That looks nasty :(
Loss of control after engine failure after takeoff is a major risk for light twin aircraft…
Horrible. This plane was chartered by the French armed forces for maritime surveillance work along the Lybian coast. It belonged to CAE aviation (http://www.cae-aviation.com/en/homepage/) and I guess it was maintained and flown at a very good standard (other than that Spanish Metroliner which operated for Manx and crashed in Cork).
I have flown the Metroliner for a short while. It is quite difficult to handle in engine-out conditions, but certainly not impossible for a well trained and current crew. This aircraft was on the American register and AFAIK they have no requirement for flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders on part 23 aircraft (European operators do have that requirement) so I fear that it will be very difficult to investigate the cause of this accident.
NB: I remember that our Metroliner frequently had issues with the flap mechanism. It consists of the tiniest little hydraulic actuator sitting somewhere under the fuselage with very short travel, moving the flaps via some mechanical parallelogram contraption. This Ed Swearingen may have been some kind of aerodynamic genius, but coming to details he was the worst tinkerer in the whole industry. The tiny little ailerons of that plane are not able to counter asymmetrically retracted flaps at typical climbout speeds. The Metroliner is the only aircraft that I have flown to this date which occasionally required full deflection of ailerons and rudder in normal operation – nothing would have been left to cope with abnormals.
