Posted on 02/22/2023 9:39:13 AM PST by george76
A 57-year-old flying instructor died from a heart attack after joining a pilot on a flight in a 1978 Piper PA-28-161 plane in England.
A flight instructor died after suffering a heart attack mid-flight over England last summer — but the pilot thought his colleague was just pretending to be asleep as a joke..
The unsuspecting aviator continued the flight in a 1978 Piper PA-28-161, with the instructor’s head slumped over his shoulder, and landed safely at Blackpool Airport in Lancashire on June 29.
It was not until the pilot tried to get the instructor up that he realized the 57-year-old man was dead..
...
Safety experts warned that although the pilot was able to land the plane without incident, “had this occurred on another flight the outcome could have been different.”
The pilot asked the instructor to join him on the flight on the morning of June. 29 because the crosswind that day was above his personal limit to fly alone
...
When the plane landed and the instructor still would not wake up, the pilot finally realized that something was amiss and summoned airport personnel, including firefighters and medics, who tried in vain to revive the instructor.
The man’s post-mortem exam showed that his arteries were clogged with fat and that he had a blood clot in one of his arteries.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Do FAA rules specifically state the your instructor pilot must be alive?
There will never be any evidence if you don’t want there to be. All a big joke isn’t it.
He once opened the passenger side door in flight.
He would also pull the throttle back all the way and announce, "Engine failure! Whaddya do?" He also once sneaked a pencil eraser into the cigarette lighter and said, "Whoops! Electrical fire! Whaddya do?"
I could see him pulling something like this . . . but I think I would have called him on it a little sooner, and then radioed the tower to have the EMTs standing by on landing.
That would have been a VERY tense landing, though . . . especially in a crosswind!
By your standards we should have zotted every troll who turned every death into something about covid. Then you wouldn't be here calling for the zotting of trolls, would you!?
Thanks
Early on, we did some exercises using the doors to generate enough drag to steer the aircraft. Simulating loss of specific flight control surfaces. In the end, I think that my instructor had to employ those techniques to prevent the aircraft where he was a passenger from crashing into homes around Ensenada. The end assessment was a locked up control surface due to improper maintenance. Since he is no longer with us, his name was Ralph Buck. He was an instructor at Flying J Aviation at Brown Field south of San Diego. Over 50,000 hours of flight time and dead over improper maintenance of the aircraft where he was passenger.
No one ever dies “mid-flight.” To make the paperwork easier on the coroner, they always die at the destination airport.
My CFI was a Delta captain and built homebuilt aircraft in his spare time. That was almost 50 years ago - once I got a job that prevented me from flying at least once a week, I felt I wasn't sharp enough and quit. Still have my ticket but my medical isn't current.
I could probably still fly today. My situational awareness is good enough. I had COVID in January 2022 and January 2023. It seemed mild, but when I went to the skating rink, I managed to do a face plant on the wood floor. That never happened in the 60 years I've been skating. Clearly, I have some neurological impact that harmed the fine kinesthetics necessary to skate. I'm hanging up the skates and redirecting the time to become fluent in Scots Gaelic.
Glé mhath! Tha mi duilich, tha uiread de thrioblaidean agad!
My best friend from school is a Grant. My people are just a shower of MacGregors who left Scotland one jump ahead of the law . . .
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