Reading About Aircraft Accidents and My Bag of Clues

“Why would I want to read about that aircraft accident?  I already know what happened there, it’s obvious—I heard all about it from some guy. Plus, it’s gory—I don’t want to cross over to the Dark Side and stuff.”

Ah, the old “WOM,” or word-of-mouth method of getting news, predating the Interweb.

I once heard a pilot bloviating (P.V., or “papa bravo”) about an accident where the pilot flew into the ground, controlled flight into terrain, “CFIT.”  (Take it easy—everyone lived, though the aircraft was written-off.)

The bloviator (note: “bloviator” has the same etymology as “aviator”)  said he knew exactly what happened.  He said “The guy who crashed forgot to change his altimeter when he descended below FL 180 from 29.92 to the local altimeter setting. The guy was flying in clouds at the MDA, but because he had the wrong altimeter setting—the correct one was 30.20—he was lower than he thought and hit the ground.”

I said to myself, (using both hemispheres of my brain, the top and bottom), “Huh?”  Then I kinda mumble-spoke in what I like to call “co-pilot speech,” or what the airlines call “mitigated speech”—“Uhh, wha…what about that, uhh, saying about altimeters, ‘High to low, look out below….?’”

Because I was thinking that the CFIT pilot had a “low” altimeter setting in his altimeter, 29.92, but flew into a higher altimeter setting airport, 30.20—so how would that cause the aircraft to be at a lower altitude than displayed on the altimeter?  Wouldn’t he be at a higher one?

The storyteller bristled “Just go sit in the cockpit, fool with the altimeter—you’ll see!”  He was offended that I would somehow have the unmitigated gall bladder to challenge the story that he had probably been spewing for years in various hangars, people hanging on every word.

So I did go sit in the cockpit, dreading to see the embarrassing outcome, figuring I was wrong.

But I wasn’t.  I was pleasantly suprised at this rare occurance.

Try it—NO, not being right, I mean go dial the altimeter to a higher setting, watch the indicated altitude go up. It’s fun to climb while sitting in the chocks, and you don’t even have to clear your ears all that much.

Now I was intrigued, and I looked up and read about that particular CFIT accident, because you can find ANY accident or incident on the Internet nowadays.

The cause of the accident was not due to setting too low an altimeter setting into the Kollsman window—but it was still pilot error.  The accident pilot saw the runway lights when he reached the decision altitude (DA), just under a low ceiling, looked back inside the cockpit, then looked back outside, didn’t see the lights and still continued to descend, the snowy plowed field stopping his descent.

Aha!—the real reason for the crash.

And a lesson for me—this time about when to go missed.  To not go below the DA or MDA unless I see the one of that whole pile of ten things I have to see to go below the MDA or DA.  Three of the ten things have the word “threshold” in them, two have the word “runway” in them, two have the word “touchdown,”  and one I THINK has the word “field goal” or maybe “extra point” in it, I’m not sure. But there’s ten.

Accident reports give me something to do, too.

For example, I can chair-fly a missed approach.  “Oh, go-arounds are easy,” one might say, and one would be correct if one had been practicing “go-arounds” or “balked landings” or “missed approaches,” or a combination thereof.

Some pilots say, “I used to chair-fly when I first started flying, but I don’t do it anymore.”

Really?  Why not chair-fly?

Be honest—when was the last time you shot an approach to no-kidding minimums in the weather, didn’t break out, and had to “go missed?”  Was it in the ‘90s?  (The nineteen nineties—we’re not talking balloons here.)

I recently went through simulator training at a famous training company for a type rating, and “It’s simple to do a missed approach” was the attitude of one instructor.  I could tell, because he said “It’s simple to do a missed approach.”

Not for me, I told him.  I had him read all eight-or-so missed-approach steps out to me in class so I could write them down and chair-fly them.  To be fair, he did read them, listed the steps, but was very sarcastic, and acted like this was a waste of class time for him to list out the steps, etc.

I didn’t care—I was the one who had to pass the checkride.

For example, and I could be wrong here, but this is close—to do a go-around/missed approach in the Cessna Citation II:

“power to takeoff thrust,

1. flaps to takeoff and approach setting
2. gear up (with a positive rate)
3. landing lights and ignitions off
4. flaps up at Vref plus 10
5. autopilot on
6. push this
7. push that
8. nick knack paddywhack, key the microphone, this pilot ain’t goin’ home.  Yet.

It’s super busy.   And what if I’m doing a circling approach on top of all that?  Let’s see: “Make a climbing turn toward—what was that again, uh, the landing runway, then…?”

Another thing an accident report may motivate me to do is review how to calculate a VDP—so I don’t go below the MDA until I get to the VDP.  Or so I don’t fly way past the VDP in the weather, break out, see one of the FAR 91.175 list and then make a steep dive at the runway.

Let’s look at the “ILS or LOC Rwy 18” at KFAR:  the MDA is 1260’ MSL, 360’ AGL. My calculated VDP is what—360 divided by 300 equals 1.2 miles from the runway.  If I fly past this self-calculated VDP to, say, 0.5 miles from the runway at the MDA (1260 MSL or 360’ AGL), see the runway, and make a dive for it, what is my glideslope?  I think the technical aeronautical term is “way the heck too steep.”

Just yesterday I shot what the approach plate called “ILS or LOC Rwy 36 at KFAR,” (Yes, yes, “Fargo-like-the-movie.”)  I was doing the “or LOC” part. I calculated my VDP, using 1360 MDA (461 AGL) to be 1.5 miles from the runway threshold.  (Take 461 divided by 300).  So I descended from the 2800 MSL altitude at the FAF toward the MDA—and then the tower called me: “Lancair 214DK, low altitude alert, check altitude, altimeter setting 30.10.”

THAT gets a pilot’s attention, though I shouldn’t speak for all pilots. It got mine, all right.  I was at 1550 feet MSL or so, and the MDA is 1360.  I checked my altimeter setting—correct—double-checked my altitude (nowhere near 1360), then called the tower: “Fargo tower, Lancair 214DK, I was well above the MDA, still am.”

Fargo tower: “Well, we got a low-altitude alert.  Must have been the descent rate.”  Interesting—they have a safety net of sorts to keep guys (and gals) from committing the crime of CFIT.

The VDP: I should think of that as the decision point whether to go missed—then of course execute the missed approach as published (yes, yes, I can climb but no turns before the MAP)—or get vectors.

Instead of me just taking someone else’s word for why a crash happened, I can look on the Internet and find multiple accounts of the accident, and learn “stuff.”

Stuff that I can put in to my “bag of clues” as my IP called it at Vance AFB, when flying T-38s as a student.  She would say, “Put that into your bag of clues, Lieutenant Johnson.” (Other uses of the word “clue:”  I had trouble with the barrel roll in formation—she said to another instructor she handed me off to that I was a “cluebag,” or “clueto” on the formation barrel roll.  This meant “clueless,” I cleverly surmised. Endearing, really, the way the IPs talk about you right in front of you.  I eventually got good at them.  Major Shul, sled driver, RIP, helped me a lot out at Beale AFB.)

These “clues” in my “cluebag” are information that I don’t have to personally experience to learn from.  I mean, how many accidents can a pilot have in one life, anyhoo?  Not really known, but the FAA-authorized limit is “one fatal one if the fatal party is you,” an awkward legal wording, although “fatal party” sounds like a cool band name.

Plus, if I listen to someone tell a story about an accident, there is often misinformation spewed, at twelve gusting twenty, depending on how much coffee the storyteller has drank and how big their ego is—which is often, respectively:

A) a gallon (3.75 European non-American liters)

B)  massive

Often a pilot’s story is based on what that pilot heard.  After twelve re-tellings, it’s surprising that the accident even involves a pilot and an airplane.

In reading these accident reports, it becomes clear that it really doesn’t matter how many hours a pilot has—they can still dork-up and crash, or, far worse, get violated by the FAA.

Hours, hours, hours—we pilots often brag about our hours. And here we have to throw in type ratings, or tailwheel or seaplane endorsements. (Notice that not many people brag about balloon endorsements or drone ones, though I can’t wait to get mine and start telling stories—“There I was, floating over Fargo, and from my wicker basket I could see right into Fargo’s tallest building, an eight-story skyscraper, and…”)

An accident report may read, “The pilot had more than 15,000 hours, and was the company’s chief pilot,” or “The pilot had 21,000 hours, with almost 10,000 hours in the accident aircraft type,” or “The pilot had been flying for ten years, went below the approach minimums…”

It doesn’t seem to matter how experienced us pilots are—former Air Force test pilot, DPE, chief pilot, instructor pilot, airline pilot, crop duster, etc.  And it doesn’t seem to matter about all those licenses and type ratings we pilots like to tack on our names as a kind of “signature block:”

“Norm ‘Sonofagun’ Gunderson:  ATP, CFI, CFII, 757-300 Type Rating,  11,325.2 hours.” (Note the “point-two.”  No pilot is gonna leave point two languishing in a log book.)

Reading about the experienced, high-time pilots who mess up is humbling for me, hopefully.  Hopefully I realize that there doesn’t seem to be a “safe” amount of experience or “magic” number of hours that will prevent me from having an accident or incident or worse—being told to “Write this phone number down.”

A pilot with thousands and thousands (and thousands) of hours can:

• Takeoff on, land on the wrong runway
• Blow right through an altitude
• Takeoff with the control lock on, or the parking brake on
• Skip or miss crucial items on a checklist
• Takeoff the wrong direction from an “intersection takeoff”
• Taxi off somewhere weird, like into a fuel truck or another aircraft or—and this is a good one—a building that “came out of nowhere”
• Have a good old fashioned midair collision
• Stall, spin, crash
• Get complacent—and do most any darn thing

So what motivates me to look up a particular accident?  I want to learn something, some bit of knowledge, some clue for my clue bag.

I just need to hear about an accident or incident somehow—maybe on the news, sometimes someone tells me about it. I don’t want to settle for only someone’s verbal acccount of it in a hangar or at an FBO.  (FBOs are the worst—there I am, trapped in a public place with other people onlooking, the story-teller is going on and on, and the only escapes are the fake phone call or fake bathroom “call,” both of which are well-known ruses.)   Pilots, being human (allegedly), sometimes have an “agenda:” maybe they don’t like the accident pilot, or that company, or that type airplane, or they want to show off their aeronautical knowledge.  Or maybe they innocently have their facts wrong.

So off I go to a computer of sorts, could be an iPad or an iPhone, to read multiple different accounts of the accident.  Which often leads to reading about another accident or incident, and another, on one of several sites or YouTube dudes explaining accidents.

One report I read recently (slightly altered): “The pilot started flying in 1975, knew the area well, and did most of his flying and flight instruction in the area.  He flew into a tower less than 200 feet AGL, killing all three aboard.  He had more than 12,000 hours. He was familiar with the area and had flown near that tower many times, knew where it was.”

Whoa.

Or another recent fatal crash: “The pilot had 11,000 hours in multiple types of airplanes…”

Flying little GA planes is where some really ,really experienced pilots get into trouble.  Airline flying is way safe—come on, we have two engines, two pilots, good avionics (often), coffee makers, even.

General aviation—nope, it’s like riding a motorcycle, odds-wise, I read somewhere.  So I research incidents and accidents.

When I was flying the T-38 as an instructor in the US Air Force, we’d read about accident reports—on paper (this was the Iron Age) and talk about them with our students.  We had to—it was part of the training syllabus. We’d give the student the scenario, and ask them what they’d do, or we’d just read the report to inform them.

Nowadays, with the Internet, a pilot can type in “accelerated stall crash” or “final turn stall crash” or “Lancair crash” or “Citation crash” or “Cirrus crash” or  “chief pilot killed” or “airplane taxis into building,” etc.—and get multiple hits.

Speaking of “airplane taxis into building”—and we are—I Googled that phrase and up came a story about a 747 that taxied into a building—the right wing stuck right into the building.  This stops a plane, the building acting as a sort of chock. With windows.  The story quotes a South African Civil Aviation Authority spokeswoman: “The control tower told them to take one taxiway and they took another one.  They took the wrong one.”  D’ya think?

But it’s easy enough to do—taxiing is way hard, and any pilot that claims that “It’s easy” will lie about other stuff.

A pilot can read about what led to the crash—an overshooting final turn, landing too long and hot on a slick runway, the pilots were tired and in a hurry, on and on. And then I can think about what I should—and hopefully will—do different.

When I was going through pilot training in the US Air Force at Vance Air Force Base, Oklahoma, two of us young student-pilot second lieutenants got an instructor pilot (an IP) aside one day. My buddy asked the all-knowing, seven-foot-tall god-like Instructor Pilot, “Do you have any advice for us, sir?”  Because we really wanted to graduate.

“Read,” the IP said.

I asked “Read what, sir?”

He said “Just read.  There is so much information, just read.”

Oh, was he right.

There are so many incident and accident reports out there today on the Internet.  He’s more right now than he was back then, because now there is more to read.

It’s good for me to read and read and read, and look for the little bits of new information—clues to the cause of the accident—that I can chuck into my bag o’ clues.

Someone wrote on one of these accident report sites:

“Don’t judge—learn.”

Well-spoken.

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Matt Johnson

Matt Johnson is from Fargo, North Dakota, where hundreds of other people are from. He went to school and learned very little, but the United States Air Force got ahold of him in 1986, when he attended Undergraduate Pilot Training at Vance Air Force Base, Oklahoma (“Little Prison Camp On The Prairie”). He was in the UPT class of 87-07, graduated, then went to Beale AFB, California, and flew as a KC-135Q copilot, refueling the SR-71 on worldwide missions—England, Okinawa, Japan. Also, he flew the T-38 in the Accelerated Copilot Enrichment (ACE) program, and his instructors were SR-71 pilots, Major Brian Shul and Major Terry Pappas. He got all kinds of excited about that jet, and became an Instructor Pilot (IP) in the T-38 after a short three-month school and ten short checkrides at Randolph AFB, and instructed in the White Rocket for a year and a half. Nobody called it the White Rocket, but that sounds cool and I’m a nerd. Note: nobody called it the “SR-71” at Beale AFB; we all called it “the sled.” Matt taught as a CFI for a couple years in Virginia, near Washington DC (bogies everywhere, like fireflies), and now flies for fun out of KFAR, Fargo, ND, in a Lancair IVP. He writes, too, which is troublesome.

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