There's an aerial spraying school in Battleford SK. I should ask for some dual on low flying. How to look for hazards, etc. Motodaves close call with wires over a river comes to mind also. There's really no need for me to have a close call or worse in that environment.

Pinecone wrote:There's an aerial spraying school in Battleford SK. I should ask for some dual on low flying. How to look for hazards, etc. Motodaves close call with wires over a river comes to mind also. There's really no need for me to have a close call or worse in that environment.

Would do that in a heartbeat. Ag
folks are the gold standard for low level ops. They're either good, have quit, or are dead.

Energy management could have mitigated or even prevented the turn in the canyon accident and this recent one. I have contended, for years, that it should be taught all pilots. Ag school covers this, but is expensive. I covered the energy management turn before solo for zero time Ag students. It is not a difficult technique.

Edit

Pinecone wrote:There's an aerial spraying school in Battleford SK. I should ask for some dual on low flying. How to look for hazards, etc. Motodaves close call with wires over a river comes to mind also. There's really no need for me to have a close call or worse in that environment.

Fran has a great school going on there. He's a good guy. Would be worth getting some training from him for sure...


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contactflying wrote:Energy management could have mitigated or even prevented the turn in the canyon accident and this recent one. I have contended, for years, that it should be taught all pilots. Ag school covers this, but is expensive. I covered the energy management turn before solo for zero time Ag students. It is not a difficult technique.

Care to elaborate on the "Energy Management Turn"?

Come to think of it, the great guy that checked me out on the 185 has 7500 hours in AG planes. I'm sure he could help me. I need more time with him to work on wheel landings anyway!


Fran is a good guy. I met him in Lloydminster years ago. Would be awesome to fly with him, but I guess I don't need to go that far.

Pinecone wrote:
He told me his story because I told him I dreamed of flying all the major rivers in North America from their headwaters to the sea. I won't forget when I get around to it.

That is a BRILLIANT dream. Just in the north alone that would take you through and over some incredible country.

ICON has done lots of testing and boating on the water. I've done lots of boating and float flying. There's times when the water, wind, waves, and the craft are at odd angles and condition called broaching or a similar destabilizing oscillation can occur.

Most often it's encountered when running downwind with the sea but can happen into the wind if the bow meets the waves at an angle. It can also happen on relatively calm water boating or perhaps landing at an odd angle in a floatplane or amphibian relative to flight.

It happens more in my experience if into the wind and waves when settling from high speed planing into displacement mode and can be very brief. The bow can quickly be swung unintended and wet one side of the hull more than the other. Drag is increased and counter steering is compromised. A tipping oscillation side to side from vertical can happen and increase in severity.

If the plane's wing tip hits during a swerve then that increases drag on that side and soon bad things get even worse. This was the movies but observe:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzPSjBPAlMQ

Not sure what happened to the A5 but it was destroyed quickly it appears as the debris field wasn't very large.

Gary

Av8r3400,

For an entire chapter on the energy management turn, click on my signature box below. Energy is good stuff anywhere, but critical in maneuvering flight or at low altitude. Airspeed is altitude and altitude is airspeed. Since we start with no altitude, we want airspeed first down low or on takeoff. The sources are ground effect, down hill slope (gravity), engine power ( lets use all of it), or just cruising at low altitude. Only when necessary we pitch up. Three things make a level turn down here dangerous: speed, load factor, and putting a down wing into something.

So starting with safe cruise speed lets pitch up wings level to trade airspeed for altitude and slow down. The slower we go the faster our rate of turn. Before stall speed we bank with plenty of rudder while releasing all the back pressure we used to zoom up. No back pressure no stall and no load factor in the 1g turn regardless of bank angle. We want to get the nose around quickly and onto the target with whatever bank is necessary and lots of rudder.

Now we come around quickly at first so that we don't have to have a wing down into stuff late in the turn to target. We are looking up through the top of the windscreen for the target and very quickly the airplane has pitched itself down. Nose down no stall at any bank. We must be sure to level the wing first before pull up. We don't want the wing in stuff and we don't want a graveyard spiral.

Finally we pull up to level cruise down low or use the airspeed gained in the dive to zoom back up to original altitude.

Low we always have max kinetic energy but we are high and slow in the 1g turn. Win win win.

Was Mr. Halladay was concerned with energy management? I believe his focus should have been on safe water landings and aircraft attitude on contact.

Gary

Indeed. And based on the photos of the wreckage, it didn’t cartwheel, so it really looks like it hit flat, level and hard.

MTV

Pinecone wrote:A fellow that sold a book at Oshkosh told me a story. His book came with a CD full of photos of the north. I believe he was from Minnesota so you may have heard of him or know the story.

He was flying down the MacKenzie River, NWT in a J3 on floats, hands off, perfectly trimmed, 200' off the surface. He dropped his chart, and reached for it, carefully so as not to bump the stick. When he sat up with the map in his hand he was inches from digging his floats into the water at cruise speed. He's certain he would have crashed and inverted had he looked up a moment later. He thinks the weight shift alone caused him to descend.

Moral of the story: trim slightly pitch up and hold the stick forward when flying low. Relax for a moment otherwise and you may hit the surface.

He told me his story because I told him I dreamed of flying all the major rivers in North America from their headwaters to the sea. I won't forget when I get around to it.

Pinecone, was the guys name George Erickson? His book was 'True North'.
I looked at that very plane he flew. Several years ago when I was searching for a 'beginner' floatplane to get my SES rating and to build time. Seems like it was in Hibbing, Virginia, or someplace in that area. Plane had been flown and was well used. He was a heck of a nice guy and had lots of stories to tell. I guess I should have gotten his book but I was so focused on finding a plane that his mentioning of it was not taking seriously. I had heard so many 'stories' from sellers that I only half assed listened.

The energy management turn at 1g is the safer turn low or high, steep or shallow. We can admonish students to fly high, ignoring that they must takeoff and land and that they may try maneuvering flight elsewhere. We shouldn't refuse to teach them how to do both safely. We don't want them inadvertently stalling so we teach them how to do it safely. We instructors are somewhat hypocritical about maneuvering flight. Do we really want to say, "You are on your own. I refuse to help you?"

PA1195 wrote:Was Mr. Halladay was concerned with energy management? I believe his focus should have been on safe water landings and aircraft attitude on contact.

Gary

I believe Contact was speaking to the first Icon crash that ran out of room in the canyon, not the more recent one that killed the baseball guy, with his reference to energy management.

Poor or no energy management is involved in most canyon turn and buzzing accidents. Buzzing is stupid but even stupider and often deadly when done using instrument orientation level turns. Instrument orientation maneuvering just isn't the safer way to maneuver with obstacles ahead and to our sides. Flying down in the terrain requires contact training. It's not more difficult, just different. It gets little or no attention because it only comes into play on takeoff, landing, forced landing, and maneuvering flight. Lots of commercial pilots engage in legal maneuvering flight.

Back to Halladay for a bit...hopefully ICON will explore his presumed final flight path and known conditions/configuration. For example to determine what behavior the plane exhibits when speed and controls are operated as he might have done.

Not sure what their recording instruments captured. They have engineers that used that info in product development and that's maybe why it's installed on production aircraft. Maybe a drop test is in order or something similar? It's a sport aircraft and not a Part 23 airplane however.

This operating agreement may have been superseded by a more current version. The flight data recorder is noted on pp. 2-3:

http://cdn.iconaircraft.com/v2/own-a5/a ... _v10sa.pdf

Gary

WWHunter. Yes. True North was the book.

Sounds like he was tanked on meds....

https://www.flyingmag.com/roy-halladay- ... SOC&dom=fb

Yep, a nice cocktail of medications, many of which are not approved for flying.

That airplane had to have hit with a slight nose down impact, which broke the hull, flipped it and broke the tail off. I'd GUESS that he had one heck of a descent rate, pulled, pulled harder, hit the water nose down, and you can see the result in the photos of the wreckage.

A terrible waste on many different levels.

MTV