Report on the Lancair fatality 31/3/06

[Guest brentc]

Good pickup J430 - not a type certificate at all! Should have read C of A for the aircraft type. My error earlier.

 

 

[jcamp]

It's not unheard of for CASA to pull a type cert. Didn't the Vickers Viking suffer this fate for it's tenenct to lose a wing in flight or something along those lines back in CAA days?

The Viscount was grounded by DCA following inflight structural failure immediately (as in a/c taxiing were called back). 700 series with the single spar didn't fly again in oz and were scrapped wherever they were at the time of grounding.

 

 

[Guest Ruprect]

From Wikipedia-

 

"Safety record:

 

Between 1981 and July 2008 132 amateur-built US registered Lancair aircraft have crashed, resulting in 107 fatalities."

 

Taking into account their homebuilt market dwarfes ours does this crash record seem particularly high to anyone else?

 

 

[Guest Flyer40]

Impossible to answer without knowing the total number of Lancairs flown. However I will say that the Lancair appears to be affected by a pilot proficiency problem, not an airworthiness problem. Previous experience with aircraft such as the R22 and MU2 has shown that specific training in response to a known issue can turn around poor safety performance.

 

The Piper Malibu was probably similar in that it initially had such a poor safety record that the FAA initiated a special airworthiness review. The Malibu is a complex high performance aircraft and a lot of pilots were said to have stepped up from less sophisticated aircraft. The Malibu came out of the review with no adverse findings and soon after the safety performance improved.

 

I would suggest that what changed was that the surviving pilots gained through experience the expertise that their training didn't give them.

 

 

[Guest High Plains Drifter]

Previous experience with aircraft such as the R22 and MU2 has shown that specific training in response to a known issue can turn around poor safety performance.

The R22 problems were not weather related.

 

IMO, the miss-use of the GPS caused this accident - as was pionted out by others, if it was a clear day this would'nt of happened.