Alternatively, he may have run low on "essence".
Posted on 04/20/2013 10:19:11 AM PDT by Fennie
A pilot who died when his light aircraft crashed just a few metres away from a house was reportedly a US Air Force general.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.sky.com ...
The 210 has very long wings. The fuel is in the wings. It is essential that the plane be level when fueling or you can end up short a few gallons. I never planned the last 5 gallons!
T210 driver
The general logged a lot of hours on big aircraft, so he was not inexperienced.
Is it possible he could have been that negligent about his fuel, especially with the wife aboard?
Who worked on that plane last?
Seven Days in May????
He graduated with me in 1980.
I doubt that he ran out of fuel. The article says he was landing at the airport in Williamsburg. Even experienced pilots can be distracted in the traffic pattern, get too slow, stall and spin without sufficient altitude to recover.
Gotcha. I always ask questions that I hope others can answer...
We are overlooking something very important.
Yesterday was a very interesting weather day.
To think about this rationally, we need to know what the weather was in that immediate area at that time.
We also need to know where the flight originated. That would give a hint as to how much weather deviation was involved, winds aloft along the route, whether the route was a fuel stretch, etc.
I suspect more aircraft run out of fuel on a three mile final than anywhere else.
Wonder what orders he was less than enthusiastic about? Gay indoctrination? Firing on American citizens? Taking orders from the U.N.? For starters...
Stall/spin is what makes airplanes fall out of the sky. That Cessna was not flying when it crashed. It was plummeting.
Thanks, OC!
Alternatively, he may have run low on "essence".
B-1 and B-52 pilot.
Thinking that little Cessna has a pretty good glide ratio.
Why assume he ran out of fuel. isn't it as likely, if not more so, that he suffered a heart attack, spasm at the controls, at the plane went in..an autopsy will tell.
One of the most common mistakes made when power is lost is to try to stretch the glide.
Trying to make a field just a little bit past that tree line or village or whatever.
That always ends in a stall spin close to the ground.
One must maintain the proper speed and take whatever comes because a crash under control beats a loss of control crash every time.
We don’t know what happened. The check I just made on the weather conditions at 5:00PM yesterday showed winds gusting to 35. It could have been something as simple as loss of control in turbulence.
That was exactly my guess, about 5 seconds before reading your post.
I think he had a medical emergency.
Also a non-pilot.
I expect every airplane that I'm flying will try to kill me at some point. The plane may be forgiving, but the hard earth is unyielding.
Medical incapacitation of pilots is pretty rare. Much more common is fuel exhaustion. Perhaps he did run out of fuel, tried to stretch the glide, then stalled and spun it. That photo shows an aircraft that was out of control when it crashed. Fuel exhaustion does not render an aircraft out of control.
No aircraft is forgiving in 35 MPH winds.
The weather I read was in MPH, not knots.
Never flew a 210, but I suspect that is is not a great ride close to the ground in that kind of wind combined with frontal passage or a squall line.
I don’t fly any more. Too old and can’t pass a medical and so longer watch aviation weather, but I do watch commercial weather closely.
My F350 has the Ford nav system on it and one of the nice features is the radar display.
I checked it at about that time and it showed a squall line out ahead of the front along the east coast. I would say very close to the Richmond / Williamsburg area.
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