dutchroll

And this is why we can't have nice things. Just when authorities are mulling over how much they should regulate, some idiot flies something in a major airport flight path which hits a passenger jet.

This is just tragic Even well trained and highly qualified pilots can do it under pressure. Always, always, check your flight controls. There is no excuse. It takes a few seconds, and ultimately once you get into the air, they're the only thing you've got! You can possibly scrape by without everything else. http://www.c-130.net/c-130-news-article291.html

On that topic, I would be very interested to know if whoever investigates it can get a good CoG estimate. It would seem unlikely based on the apparent reputation of the pilot that he would deliberately put the aircraft in such a situation. So the million dollar question is, why did it inadvertently get into it?

Yes modern glass instrumentation handles it well and also keeps a downloadable electronic record. I don't see why that wouldn't be an acceptable substitute for paper providing it has the appropriate functionality. We use the same principle for electronic charts, etc, and they're approved.

I think fuel and W&B for every flight is over the top. If you're doing a local flight for example, a fuel log is pretty pointless (not so for a cross country, where I agree it's a good idea). Likewise, if you're flying solo on a local flight without baggage and you know that there is no possible fuel loading which will put you outside CoG limits, doing a W&B is kind of pointless. This scenario is actually pre-calculated and listed in my W&B sheet which resides with the MR folder anyway! I would argue that one with CASA.

I realise that. Just because you're the only one who flies your plane doesn't exempt you from carrying the Maintenance Release (or equivalent). CAR 139 specifically requires the carriage of the MR in an Australian aircraft, unless otherwise approved by CASA. If you have approval to not carry it from CASA, that's fine. If you don't, you must carry it. If you have exemptions from certain things from CASA as an RA registered aircraft or any other aircraft type, that's great. However if you don't, you must comply with the CARs as they are written. The documents are not carried to assist an accident investigation. They are carried to show that the aircraft and pilot have fulfilled their statutory obligations. Like having a compliance plate on your car, except that the requirements for aviation are much more onerous. We can argue all day over why or whether they should be, but the fact is that they are. "Strict liability" is a legal concept very commonly applied to regulatory regimes and not just in Australia. There are many legal debates and discussion papers on this topic. Yes there is an argument that not all aviation regulatory breaches should fall into this category, but that's not how things work at the moment for any regulatory regime. At least they're not offences of "absolute liability"!

That's a bit sad. If you have maintained your aircraft to a high standard and you've been diligent in ensuring your aircraft and personal documentation is up to date, you shouldn't fear a ramp check. If you haven't done these things, well maybe some self-reflection is required.

Disclaimer: I'm allowed to say this as it doesn't directly relate to the accident I was interviewed over. When I was interviewed by the ATSB regarding the loss of control and crash of a Pitts aircraft (same variant as mine) last year in the Hunter, we were shooting the breeze about ATSB investigations of experimental category aircraft accidents. In recent years the resource-starved ATSB has generally steered away from investigating many experimental or small aircraft accidents and left it to local authorities. This has been a formal policy of Management. I was told that this policy is changing in the interests of ongoing air safety and they are genuinely attempting allocate resources to formally investigate more GA/experimental aircraft accidents wherever possible. I don't know whether this extends to RAAus aircraft - maybe there is some confusion here and that's still beyond the resource capability of the ATSB (wouldn't surprise me). However it seems there are moves underway to formally investigate as many of these types of accidents as they can.

Yes a conventional spin is a fairly nose-low attitude and this is exactly what he had by turn 2 after it had passed through the incipient phase. It appeared to me that he went into a flat accelerated spin by applying opposite aileron and forward stick while still having the "into spin" rudder applied, and flattened it by adding power. All typical effects. Pulling the power off steepened it again and he recovered. As a general rule you need a nose down attitude for recovery because it is in that attitude that you can get the most rudder effectiveness to oppose the yaw. When spinning in a flat attitude the airflow over the rudder is shielded by the horizontal stabiliser. Adding or reducing power changes the gyroscopics. I take your point there, but a "spiralling" aircraft is fairly hard to mistake, although some witnesses may say it was "tumbling". Some types of eyewitness reports can be unreliable, eg, whether the aircraft was right way up or upside down is something most wouldn't be able to accurately distinguish. However when more than one says they saw it "spiralling", it was probably spiralling (I don't mean necessarily spiral-diving, I mean just going round and round). And again, the impact photo tells a lot too. No scattered wreckage, no scrape marks indicating it skidded or careered into the field. Just what's left of a plane as if it had been slapped straight down in that spot from above. Hard to imagine any other scenario.......

That instructor seems to have quoted a non-standard technique, especially in respect of holding rudder neutral. That's not going to achieve anything at all for many aircraft types in a spin. It seems to me rather unwise to use a hybrid or non-standard technique for spin recovery unless that is the technique specifically listed in the POH, as determined by spin testing that aircraft design. For example, if you're flying an aircraft where the POH says that spin recovery is just neutralising all controls that's fine (there are some which will actually recover all by themselves if you basically take the pilot out of the equation!). Try to do that in a Chipmunk or a Pitts and you'll be sitting there with neutral controls until you impact the ground.

If a spin theory doesn't seem likely, why was the aircraft clearly witnessed spiralling all the way to the ground, and why did it impact with low forward velocity? It's not like wreckage is strewn across a wide area with big scrape marks across the ground - it's all in one little spot. There are any number of ways it might have entered into it and any number of reasons why it might not have recovered, but it's the only scenario (I believe) which fits the fairly clear description of spiralling, how it seems to have impacted, and a failure to recover to controlled flight.

The text of an email certainly does not convey everything which goes on behind the scenes. And I'd love to know who the twit in AOPA was who leaked it to the public. That was pretty pointless as it said nothing other than "I resign" (to paraphrase it) in a blunt one line sentence, so someone in AOPA is playing silly games. I've also read some of the social media and blog commentary on other websites following it, and it appears that there is more than one twit in AOPA.

"Mr De Stoop said its Eureka report recommended privatising Airservices Australia...." Lol. Seriously. AOPA reckons that a privatised Airservices will help their members? What planet do AOPA live on? Now I think I realise why I'm not a member. A privatised Airservices will slug their members with aviation usage charges that will take their breath away, I can guarantee you. This is because Airservices is monopoly infrastructure. Privatising monopoly infrastructure is a one way ticket to hell for people who think they're going to get a better deal! Go take a walk through Sydney Airport to see how it works.

"I thought it was doing aerobatics and it went into a spiral," Mr Woodroofe said. "I said to my wife Allison: 'Come and have a look at this'. But she said: 'I don't think that's aerobatics, that plane is in trouble'," he said. Mr Woodroofe said there was a chance the plane's engine failed. "It was very quiet when it was spiralling, I think, but I can't be certain," he said. Yeah unfortunately Mr Woodroofe is not describing an engine failure here. He's describing a spin. Here we go again.

I spent 16 years in the ADF as an Officer. People from Defence actually end up a fairly broad cross-section of personalities, although they are taught to use authority when they have it. Some are absolute, complete tossers. Some are really genuinely trying to improve things, with mixed success. The common denominator is that the personalities don't change. The tossers stay tossers forever, and the good blokes stay good blokes forever - generally speaking in my own experience. Don't for a minute think the civil world is all enlightened. In my current 16 years of working for a very large "iconic aussie airline" which has been a private corporation for as long as I've worked for them, I have encountered a roughly equal number of complete and utter tossers in senior managerial positions who have no military background at all. Which leads me to depressingly believe that nothing ever changes, no matter where you work and what your background is. Stick an AOPA executive in the CASA CEO position. You reckon everything is going to suddenly start going your way? You reckon the entire rest of the aviation community- commercial operators, military, etc, etc, out there will roll over to AOPA's way of thinking? You reckon they'll last long before the Government sacks them? You're absolutely on drugs if you do.

I'm sure Skidmore realises there is a perception problem with CASA just as I'm equally sure he realises there are actual problems with the way CASA works. I doubt very, very much that he's out of touch with reality as I know him to be an intelligent and astute person who checks his facts before shooting his mouth off. I don't know the full story, but I'd venture to say that: a) if someone really ticked him off, then it is likely that what they said or did was pretty ordinary behaviour. b) if he perceived there was some sort of conflict that he needed to move away from, then it is likely that there was actually a real conflict. AOPA are no band of angels. I used to know a past President of AOPA. He was a complete .......... (enter derogatory descriptive word of your choice here), and that was a near universal opinion from other pilots who'd known him too.

This kind of crosses back & forth between theory and practical safety. Theory: the engine won't fire if it's turned with the ignition switches off (true). Practice: a number of fault scenarios can negate this theory, and it has happened many times in real life. Therefore be very careful. On my aircraft the prop must be hand turned through 9 blades on the first flight of the day to check for hydraulic lock. The engine has never fired, but I double check the switches are off, and turn it as if it will suddenly start (carefully!). Electrics? Well no it shouldn't make a difference as far as whether the engine will fire on magnetos, but some planes have a number of electrically operated systems which, if inadvertently operated on the ground, could hurt someone. Therefore, electrics off when you're not in it (unless you're testing something).

I've worked with Mark Skidmore when we were doing introductory testing in the Air Force of a new aircraft. I found him to be very diligent and of the utmost integrity, and a genuinely nice bloke too - a sentiment shared by others who worked with him as far as I know. If he resigned from anything, it's unlikely to have been for some pointless reason.

The M14P radial has a 150 deg C max limit for shutdown. Mind you, on a really hot day it's not always possible to get the CHTs down to 150, but you can get them pretty close (within 10 degrees). You have to shut it down sometime. Unless you are operating your engine regularly in quite an unusual manner, it seems to be very debatable as to whether shock cooling is likely to cause issues for the average pilot observing normal engine limitations. Far more likely are problems caused by not warming the engine up properly before applying high power settings....and I've heard of that happening quite a bit.

I meant re-honed, sorry. But anyway, it had significant work done on it to extend its life, then it cracked.

Yes by the 4th domestic sector of the day with all different flight numbers (which is normally our limit) it starts getting difficult to remember who you are, I can assure you! On the subject of squawking ident, if I recall my Officers Mess bar conversations with our military ATCers many eons ago, I think it just temporarily changes the symbology to a far more prominent indication, rather than giving any extra data. Then again, we used to drink a lot at the bar so god knows what they really said........

Yeah I've heard guys called on taxi and asked to recheck their flight # ID.

Interesting. As quite a big deal is made of having that rego set correctly in a mode S transponder.

Which reminds me of a question Ian: do you guys get the callsign readout of a Mode S reply even if the traffic is not formally identified? I presume this is the case, but I've noticed that on the couple of occasions ATC has wanted to talk to me regarding intentions, etc, the call is always preceded by "traffic 5 miles south of position x at 4,500'....centre". Is it the case that you can't address an aircraft by its Mode S rego until you've actually identified it (eg in case they've got the wrong rego set in the transponder or whatever)? I've heard Centre give VFR traffic to an IFR aircraft including the callsign and altitude without verification but specifying that it was an ADSB paint, so presumably the VFR aircraft had operational ADSB Out.

Aerospace Logic do, and Electronic International gauges will do that but only on the multi-channel analysers (not the plain garden variety CHT gauges). I don't think I'd get too worried about shock cooling myself. There's some pretty substantial debate over whether it's as big a problem as it's sometimes made out to be, especially for your normal, average, sensible aircraft operation. The greatest shock cooling we generally get is when we switch the engine off at the end of the flight, and that's pretty hard to avoid. My engine monitor is setup to look for standard shock cooling and despite doing spinning and aerobatics where there can be large power changes, and some pretty rapid descents back to the airfield, it hasn't alerted me even once that there's any problem. I read one incident where a guy was told his cylinder cracks may be shock cooling, only to dig through the maintenance documentation and find out that his cylinders had 3000 hours on them including a re-bore!