What Caused Cory Lidle’s Crash?

航空

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