What Caused Cory Lidle’s Crash?

航空发表于 2010-10-20 21:47:45

I GOTWORDOF CORY LIDLE’S AIRPLANE CRASH WHILE SITTING on the tarmac of the Seattle-Tacoma airport. Our Delta jet, bound for New York’s JFK, had a glitch—a flaky antiskid sensor. We sat for two hours. Boring! I amused myself surfing the Web on a BlackBerry. There on the Drudge Report was the awful headline about Lidle slamming into an apartment building on Manhattan’s East 72nd Street. In a helicopter, it was reported. Well, it wasn’t a helicopter. After landing at JFK and turning on my BlackBerry again, I learned it was a Cirrus. I own a Cirrus. Mine is a 310hp SR22, nine months old. Lidle’s model was a 200hp SR20, a 2002 model. The airplanes look the same to anyone but a Cirrus owner. All Cirrus aircraft, including Lidle’s and mine, have an airframe parachute. Thus, an obvious question ran through my head: Why didn’t Lidle activate the chute? Cirrus airplanes are as safe as small planes come. This summer I flew my wife and two children from California to Wisconsin and back in our Cirrus. We crossed the Sierra Nevada range and the Rockies. My wife, who tolerates flying but is no enthusiast, said she’d never felt safer. Our SR22 ran flawlessly. We had weather displays, in real time, on a large-screen map. We tuned the XM Satellite Radio to a station playing Sixties tunes to help the time fly. The Troggs never sounded so good. Plus we had the chute. Knowing it’s there is comforting, especially as you and the people you love most are winging over the Rockies on a single engine and propeller. A failed engine is a low-probability event, but if it happened over hills and rocks one’s chances of surviving would be poor. Another great pilot fear is a midair collision, such as the one Cirrus cofounder Alan Klapmeier experienced while a student pilot in 1985. The other airplane sliced a wingtip through Klapmeier’s wing strut. Klapmeier was able to land his damaged airplane. The other pilot was killed—not by the midair collision but by spiraling into the ground after losing his wing. Klapmeier thought a mistake like that should not have to have fatal consequences. Operating out of their Wisconsin family farm, Alan and his brother Dale got into the airplane business at the low end. During the 1980s they sold build-your-own-airplane kits, a small market. But the Klapmeiers really wanted to build airplanes that were certified by the Federal Aviation Administration—real airplanes, in the minds of many. After failing to land bank loans in Wisconsin and North Dakota, the Klapmeiers found a friendlier banker in Duluth, Minn. and relocated Cirrus. There they designed a brand-new airplane, with the goal of FAA certification. This plane had three novel features: a body and wings made of fiberglass composites; a big computer screen, replacing many dials and gauges; and a parachute stored in a space behind the baggage compartment. On the ceiling was a handle the pilot could pull if necessary. The pulled handle would fire a small rocket through the airplane’s roof and release the parachute. In 1998 Cirrus won FAA certification for its radical airplane. In 2002 the SR22 passed the Cessna 172 as the world’s bestselling single-engine plane. Critics of the Cirrus say the chute is mostly a marketing ploy. If so, the ploy has clearly worked. But, in fact, the Cirrus parachute has saved 21 people, including a grandfather and his grandson over Canada’sMonashee Mountains, as well as a man who suffered a brain seizure while flying north of New York City. An Educated Guess What happened aboard Lidle’s plane? Allow me to speculate while we await the final accident report from the National Transportation Safety Board. In essence, Lidle and his CFI (certified flight instructor) flew straight up a box canyon—a virtual box defined by airspace regulations. Radar tracking shows that Lidle was flying north up the East River in an approved “visual flight rules” corridor, which is as wide as the East River and has a ceiling of 1,100 feet. The corridor comes to an abrupt end at the north end of Roosevelt Island. Beyond that, a pilot needs approval from air traffic control to enter LaGuardia Airport’s airspace. Radar tracking shows that Lidle’s airplane was flying 112mph 700 feet above the river when it made a sudden 90-degree turn toward Manhattan north of 72nd Street. A turn that sharp for an airplane moving 112mph can be done only in a very steep bank—some amateur sleuths have guessed a bank of 55 degrees. That is one heck of a bank. Most pilots at Lidle’s level have never practiced banks steeper than 45 degrees. I can tell you that a 45-degree banked turn results in a sudden loss of altitude unless the pilot adds power, pulls back on the yoke or does both. A 55-degree banked turn doesn’t sound like much of an increase. It is, in aerodynamic terms. A plane banked at 55 degrees feels nearly twice as heavy as a plane in level flight. A 55-degree banked turn—if that’s what it was—is a very dangerous maneuver at an altitude of 700 feet. In the snap of a finger, such an airplane could lose 200 feet. Seeing Manhattan’s tall Upper East Side apartment buildings looming in the windshield, Lidle may have pulled up too fast and stalled the airplane. In any event, he lost control—and was too low to pull the chute. The three big killers of small airplanes like Lidle’s (and mine) are bad weather (thunderstorms and icing are the most dangerous conditions), fuel mismanagement and loss of control during low-altitude turns. All the evidence in Lidle’s crash points to number three. This was a common and avoidable tragedy. Cirrus is not to blame. a Digital Rules By Rich Karlgaard, PUBLISHER NOVEMBER 13, 2006 F O R B E S 53

页: [1]

航空论坛_航空翻译_民航英语翻译_飞行翻译's Archiver

What Caused Cory Lidle’s Crash?