Just in case anyone (like me) is thinking - wait did that aeroplane have a parachute?
From:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirrus_Airframe_Parachute_Sy...
The Cirrus Airframe Parachute System (CAPS) is a whole-plane ballistic parachute recovery system designed specifically for Cirrus Aircraft's line of general aviation light aircraft including the SR20, SR22 and SF50. The design became the first of its kind to become certified with the FAA, achieving certification in October 1998, and as of 2014 was the only aircraft ballistic parachute used as standard equipment by an aviation company.
The more generic system is called BRS, Ballistic Recovery Systems. They deliver this as an option for many small aircraft and it's popular for experimental / home built aircraft.
One downside of the systems is that they typically have a maximum lifespan of 10 years while airframes last 50+ years. So every 10 years there is a large maintenance cost to replace/renew the parachute system. Much less an issue for a $ 800k Cirrus SR22 (like the one in this incident) than for a $ 30k old Cessna.
Am I correct in saying after one usage, the parachute system generally needs replaced? I think I read this about Cirrus planes anyway
I believe the whole airplane needs to be replaced after BRS use.
Yes. The parachute has a pyrotechnic deployment mechanism that is consumed; I never saw a BRS sold in separate components, so you need to replace the entire package. The 10 year shelf life is coming from the pyrotechnic charge and the parachute material, they both age.
The parachute system will need to be completely replaced after usage no matter what. Activating the parachute involves firing a small rocket motor to pull it out quickly.
Thank you, I was so confused. I was thinking the pilot a genius for bringing and activating a parachute. Now I see it was just great design.
> As of 1 May 2021, CAPS had been activated 122 times, 101 of which saw successful parachute deployment. In those successful deployments, there were 207 survivors and 1 fatality. No fatalities had occurred when the parachute was deployed within the certified speed and altitude parameters
For those curious about seeing it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBCUQlF3MMU
Itās a āmarquee featureā of buying a Cirrus, he didnāt just wake up and pack a chute
21 of 122 failed? Thatās a concerning statistic. Iād expect closer to 99% success, not 82%. How many fatalities when the parachute failed to deploy? 100%? If so, then you have almost a 1/5 chance of dying when you engage the parachute?
Cirrus has a list of deployment events on their site. The failures mostly appear to be cases where the parachute was deployed too low.
It's not 100%. In one of the flying mags you can read a story about how a VFR (not instrument rated) pilot got into the soup, lost attitude awareness, freaked out and pulled the chute lever. Nothing happens. While the pilot was yanking on the chute lever, taking hands off the stick let the aircraft's static stability take over and the plane flew out of the cloud by itself. The pilot then took over and landed in the usual manner.
That is not a correct interpretation of that statistic.
The parachute has never "failed" in any engineering sense. The stat is taking into account all deployments, including those well outside of the deployment envelope, such as not enough altitude or too much velocity. No one can expect any parachute to deploy if you're too close to the ground.
Within the envelope of deployment, the statistic says it has a 100% success rate.
the chute has deployment parameters (altitude, airspeed of plane, etc) that aren't always met by the pilot in an emergency.
They are some impressive numbers, but to really compare you need an expert looking at each situation and estimating the likely outcome had the CAPS system not been installed.
Most GA pilots are awful so it's a pretty safe bet that CAPS saved lives.
I was wondering whether there was a mix-up in the crew count, as one pilot with a parachute saves two people and a one-person crew lands the plane.
This mostly clears it up.
My less charitable reading was that the pilot abandoned the Cirrus on a parachute, but then it seemed like the plane landedā¦
Pilots of planes with CAPS are (now) taught to pull the chute if anything goes wrong inside the profile (low enough speed, far enough above ground) where the chute is designed to work. The aeroplane is insured, you can buy a new one. Even if the pilot and all passengers are insured you can't buy new ones.
They changed this because it turns out that the same phenomenon that leads to private pilots taking undue risks in the rest of flight ("Get-there-itis") also makes them reluctant to pull the chute even when it's clearly their best option. Pilots who clearly couldn't reach a safe landing spot, yet had working CAPS would dig themselves (and their passengers) a grave rather than just pull the handle. So teaching them to start by assuming they'll pull the chute and only then considering whether there are other options reduces the fatality rate.
That's exactly what I wondered about. How one parachute and two crew can lead everybody uninjured.
> The device is attributed with saving over 200 lives to date.
That particular phrasing and calculation, suggesting that every chute deployment without fatalities represents that number of people āsavedā is quite controversial and IMO not supported by an analysis of the data.
I think itās great that the system exists, it has undoubtedly saved lives, but unless Cirrus crashes are overwhelmingly fatal compared to other airplanes, itās overstating āfatal accidents turned into non-fatal accidentsā by likely a factor of ~3 and number of fatalities avoided by ~4.
This type of mishap is probably the best scenario for a chute, though. I have no illusions that following a mid-air that I am still a strong favorite to bring my non-chute airplane to earth without fatalities. (The stats say Iām about a 60:40 favorite to do so.)
CAPS saves lives. CAPS has not saved the lives of every person who survived a CAPS deployment, because most of those would have survived anyway. In most off-airport arrival scenarios, Iād be wishing to have a chute.
* - One of my instructors was in command for CAPS Event #46
I completely agree, but for a more complete analysis, we would have to consider the fatality rate for the sort of crashes in which CAPS is employed.
IIRC, Cirrus is now encouraging pilots to use CAPS in any engine failure with sufficient altitude for it to work, on account of the number of such accidents, in CAPS-equipped aircraft, where the pilot chose not to use it, and someone aboard was killed or seriously injured. This will presumably further muddy the used/saved ratio, while probably increasing the total number of saved.
In a collision situation, at least one as violent as this one, you can't be sure whether some vital control or structure has been damaged to the point where it is about to fail, so using a parachute of any sort, where feasible, seems to be the rational choice.
Quite by accident, I came across this pucker-inducing article a couple of days ago, where thre's little doubt that bailing out, if it were an option, would have been the right thing to do, even though this flight ended safely in this case.
https://airfactsjournal.com/2019/03/student-flight-control-j...
(On second thoughts, if the pilot had a parachute, he could have attempted to free up the controls without making his situation any worse.)
> . I have no illusions that following a mid-air that I am still a strong favorite to bring my non-chute airplane to earth without fatalities. (The stats say Iām about a 60:40 favorite to do so.)
Note this was a midair with a much larger, faster aircraft and at an unfavorable aspect. The empennage was sliced nearly entirely through by the other aircraft's propeller and the elevator/horizontal stabilizer is deflected into a position commanding a steep dive.
The SR-22 also cannot recover from a spin. I would assume most of those deployments are from out of control spins. I am not sure the parachute system can be credited for saving more lives than a similar plane not-equipped, because the Cirrus _needed_ that parachute system in order to be certified.
> The SR-22 also cannot recover from a spin.
The SR-22 can recover from a spin, using conventional anti-spin control inputs. EASA testing showed that.
It is true that Cirrus secured an āequivalent level of safetyā ruling during FAA certification and so did not demonstrate conforming spin recovery in flight testing here, but it can recover.
Wow, that's incredible. Goes to show that people do walk away from plane crashes with some regularity. My father was a pilot[0].
He sold his plane about 15 years ago (to a group of owners, one of which was a priest, I'm sure there's a joke in there). A few of winters later, he was called out to Romeo Airport; the pilot flying the plane that was formerly his had crashed the aircraft a few miles short of the runway in bad weather[1]. He was traveling with his daughter, a friend and, I think, his wife. He died, but his daughter was able to get free and make her way to a nearby farm to call for help. Looking at the plane, the fact that anyone survived at all let alone walked to a nearby house with minor injuries is pretty miraculous.
It's hard to impress upon folks who have never been in a small plane like that just how ... yeah ... how much it feels like you're hanging onto a kite. I have no idea the kinds of structural technologies are involved in the aircraft but I know his plane was made in the 70s and was light enough that he only had a pole which attached to the front landing gear to pull it out of the hangar. The weight is so critical that the 7-seat plane can realistically only seat 4-5 adults. I remember being shocked that they had to weigh the paint they applied when he had the plane re-painted.
[0] I'll spare the details as I have left many comments in the past about his experiences.
[1] https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/43894 - "Pilot Error"; I recall my Dad saying "all plane crashes are pilot error"
> The weight is so critical that the 7-seat plane can realistically only seat 4-5 adults. I remember being shocked that they had to weigh the paint they applied when he had the plane re-painted.
I used to work in general aviation. If my eyes could fly a loop in my skull they would have.
Were the occupants required to use the bathroom before flying? That's how much weight you're potentially saving by weighing the paint on a small aircraft.
They make you weigh the paint because they want you to spray on a certain thickness so they say "X oz paint, Y oz thinner/hardener" (or something like that) in order to get your mixture into the right ballpark so it will work with whatever procedure they want you to spray it on with and get the thickness/finish/hardness the OEM wants you to get.
In aviation there's a ton of treating simple systems as black boxes and "do X and exactly X" type maintenance that happens in order to smoothly transfer liability. You paint a cowl the way the OEM says not because you couldn't get an equivalently performing cowl a different way but because you don't want the NTSB coming after you trying to determine if you did it different but right or different but wrong.
The specifications to which general aviation stuff is done isn't really any more exacting than stuff in automotive or heavy industry. The service literature is just more verbose and the service procedures are more tightly defined.
>in order to get your mixture into the right ballpark
This makes perfect sense. I'm using a kitchen scale to measure the 2-part silicone mixture that I'm using for making toys, not because weight is critical but because it needs to be right for curing. I should do similar when mixing epoxy, but I always eyeball that for some reason. Maybe has to do with cost, it's $10-20 worth of silicone I'm mixing, and usually a quarter worth of epoxy, just due to quantities involved.
I'm building an experimental, and we tend to re-do weight and balance after painting. An elaborate paint job can add 30+ pounds and can shift your CG rearward. The regs don't require it, but many builders do it anyway.
Very interesting. I remember thinking it was positively "nuts", but then when you're in the aircraft being slapped around by the breeze, it starts to click.
>The specifications to which general aviation stuff is done isn't really any more exacting than stuff in automotive or heavy industry. The service literature is just more verbose and the service procedures are more tightly defined.
This reminds me of how often I quote weight limits on cars to people and their eyes go wide at how easy it is to exceed the OEM's recommended limits. I'm fairly sure I'm one of the few among my friend groups that has read through every owners manual for the cars/vans I've owned.
I once witnessed an airplane crash that everyone survived. I was a preteen hanging around outside the Scotts Valley roller rink with a friend in the early eighties. The roller rink is next to the now defunct airfield. The airfield was lower than the rink by an embankment. We had recently been watching Jaws on Betamax and my most persistent memory is seeing only the tail crossing the field. It reminded me of a shark fin moving through the water, as the embankment was high enough that I could not see the body of the plane. Then bam, the plane hit the embankment right in front of me, caught air then crashed nose down. I think the plane was a Piper but my knowledge of small craft is limited. It was definitely a wing under. My friend ran to get his father and we all ran over to the wreck. My friend's father opened the doors and everyone but the pilot was able to get out by themselves. The pilot had hit his head on something and his face was covered in blood but alive. I found out from press reports later that was the only time I "met" Steve Wozniak.
Edit: just looked it up. The plane was a Beechcraft Bonanza A36TC.
Thanks for sharing this story. Well structured, great ending.
> The weight is so critical that the 7-seat plane can realistically only seat 4-5 adults.
I think you overlooked an important factor there. The plane was indeed designed to realistically seat 7 adults.
The issue is that in the 50 years since the plane was originally designed, the average weight of adults (in the US) increased by about 18% [0] and the average adult woman today weighs as much as the average adult man in the 1960s.
[0] https://www.newsmax.com/US/average-weight-man-woman-obese/20...
I find it very hard to agree that a PA-32 was "designed to realistically seat 7 adults". I don't think they even imagined 6 adults as a typical cabin load, but rather a max of 4 adults and 2 kids and a typical of 2 adults and 2-4 kids. It is one of the more roomy cabins among light singles, but every one of them that I see for listed for sale right now is configured with seating for only 6, which is great for 2 adults and a few kids.
The point of the person you're replying to is that people have gotten bigger, which is a fact. Pointing out the comfort of levels of people in airplanes today doesn't dispute that.
It used to be more common to have a flexible combination of seats/baggage/fuel. But pilots flip out (or crash) if they can't fill the tanks, every seat and the baggage compartment and come in under gross. So the same airplanes often don't have the "bonus seats" they used to.
Numbers from Wikipedia, from the 1972 PA-32 owners handbook:
3,400 lb gross - 1,788 empty - (4 hours * 15gph * 6 lbs) / 7 passengers = 178 lbs per passenger. The average adult in the 70s was about 160. So you're not going across the country, but you could safely do a day trip with a 90 minute flight each way.
Now the average adult is 180. And they're a little taller than they were in the 70s, but not much. So every passenger has an extra 20 pounds horizontally. So in 2021, you'd be just over gross except that the people can't actually fit in the airplane.
Yeah, its 7 seats in the same sense as the Tesla Model Y can be a 7 seater. Its technically true, but really only true if some of those people are small.
Even with FAA standard people it would be small for 7.
You're probably right -- I likely have the number wrong. In fact, I was able to find the craft in a database online (still reporting my Dad's corporation as the owner, so it's not perfect) and it indicated 6.
I recall him saying 7, but that was a few decades ago (the plane was destroyed by its new owners in 2006, and I hadn't flown in it since a few years prior to that). :)
Not so much overlooked as omitted ... I had originally written "average American adults" but I didn't want to distract into the territory of "how bad our diets are in this country".
My Dad almost always flew alone. So much so that when the plane was packed and we were making an approach into the Sandusky, OH airport, we had a sudden "dip" on the way down that everyone noticed (we were headed to Cedar Pointe, so it was preparation, I guess). My Dad explained that he wasn't used to landing with so much weight and hadn't adjusted the trim correctly[0].
[0] If it wasn't abundantly clear, all of my flying experience ended at about age 17, which was a while ago, and I was never a pilot, so to the extent that I get any of this wrong -- that's why :)
There's also the fact that an aircraft like that may be able to carry 7 adults in some conditions. If you're at sea level in cold dry weather[0], then you'll have a lot more performance available than if you're trying to take off from Denver airport on a hot summer day just after a load of rain. There have been (usually light) aircraft that have crashed on takeoff/landing because the pilot didn't take the hot day into account, the minimum flying speed was higher than they expected, and the engine performance was too low.
Wrong - most singles canāt fill the seats and the tanks. This is general aviation 101 folks
This sounds like backcountry tent sizing. 3-person tent! (Good luck fitting two people in there and anything else!)
Apparently normal humans weighed less than 150 pounds until we discovered McDonalds.
If you can fill the seats and the tanks (and be legal), I'd say someone made your tanks too small.
> It's hard to impress upon folks who have never been in a small plane like that just how ... yeah ... how much it feels like you're hanging onto a kite.
Years ago I was doing pilot training in a Cessna 152. A coworker of mine was a retired Navy captain and instructor at the TOPGUN program, with hundreds of carrier landings in an F-14. He looked at me like I was crazy. He said those little planes were deathtraps and he'd never go up in one again.
Not long after that I had a lesson that coincided with some turbulence from the nearby coast. The plane janked around by seemingly hundreds of feet in every direction. I was scared (almost literally) shitless, and that was my last lesson. I haven't been in a small plane since.
I'm glad my Dad's not flying any longer. He was doing very long (multiple stops for re-fueling, flying on some form of breathing tank[0]) trips. He can go on for hours (and we let him) about stories of how he almost didn't make it home due to X or Y[1].
And he joked that every gauge/gadget on the dashboard that didn't come with the plane was there because "if I had it when X happened, X wouldn't have happened" (...or I wouldn't have left the ground knowing the condition existed, or it would have warned me with well enough time to get to safety before I have to be met by emergency vehicles on the tarmac).
Funny enough, he would get a little uncomfortable flying commercial. I'm not sure if he was putting on a show for us kids or if he was serious but he'd say he "didn't like someone else in charge of the plane". My Dad flew GA (alone) a few times a week most weeks, so he was unusually experienced for a small plane pilot.
[0] He had a breathing apparatus that allowed him to fly at higher altitudes in the unpressurized cabin, IIRC, but I'm not a pilot.
[1] Except, when he tells it, he was never in any danger. Doesn't matter if he's hanging an arm out the window trying to manually spin the prop, "it was always under control.". Uh huh.
This sounds like my dad. He was a skillful pilot but enjoyed risk too much to be a āgoodā pilot. Died of lymphoma 30 years ago, so it never caught up with him. He flew a lot for a private pilot, over ten thousand hours,so had a few of those stories too.
I flew with him as a child enough to have experienced some of them myself. I remember:
- An inflight electrical fire, at night, over the Sierras.
- A very tense IFR final into Monterey, at night in fog, in a twin Comanche just ahead of a Learjet when the controller had a power outage and lost radio contact.
- A test flight in a STOL Maule Rocket that ended with stalling and bouncing in the rough just short of the 7600 hundred foot runway at Stead AFB. The gear collapsed during roll out and damaged the wing and prop, but there were no injuries. Sadly, Maule went out of business and the aircraft was never repaired.
thirty foot jump as a passenger in a 4-seater here at 10,000 feet in the mountains - I hear you! :D
Video of the cirrus chuting down: https://twitter.com/DenverChannel/status/1392560583950561281
A photo of the airborne metroliner with fuselage blown open: https://imgur.com/gallery/yKPOWR0
Juan Browne of the blancolirio YouTube channel did his usual excellent overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ph7OR6C90w
Wow the Cirrus is looking pretty good for how much damage it did to the Metro. Flight surfaces are still there and it's only broken in half of the parachute landing. Guessing it might not have been controllable after the collision.
The plane flying missing half the fuselage suggests to me that fuselage was excessively strong (and therefore heavy and expensive).
A tube is only strong when complete. Cut away half the tube and bending resistance probably goes down ~10x.
> The plane flying missing half the fuselage suggests to me that fuselage was excessively strong (and therefore heavy and expensive).
It's probably the opposite: that the fuselage was only strong enough to resist the air pressure differential, and that the real structural component was the cabin floor. And that, luckily, the control cables for the tail were routed through the cabin floor, instead of through the top of the cabin.
It's not the cabin floor. it's what the cabin floor is attached to. Most fuselages have all of their longitudinal strength in their stringers, which are usually run along the floor. If the Cirrus had ripped through the bottom of that plane and not the top then that jet would have torn apart.
The structure would be designed around an adequate fatigue life. I wouldn't be too surprised if fatigue considerations were such that in "normal operations", stresses could well be 10x lower than the ultimate material strength.
Private Pilot here - just thought I'd chime in quickly;
Many aviation enthusiasts / pilots first go to is to have a look at the flight data - usually available on FlightAware / FlightRadar24 and a few other websites, plus LiveATC usually can provide recordings of the flights communications to towers as well. We should refrain from using just those data points to draw conclusions to the cause; the NTSB (and other orgs) will perform an investigation and the report will be made public (both interim, and final ones), and changes are almost always made to processes / systems, and often to the virtual or physical items that led to this incident.
There are a few more photos and insights from various folks that were there at the time and captured a few moments on the reddit thread here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/nauck8/mid_air_just...
Note - it's incredibly rare for a midair not to result in fatalities so an incredible amount of luck all around.
Itās not incredibly rare. Around 2 in 5 midair mishaps result in no fatalities.
https://iflyamerica.org/midairs.asp
This one was incredibly lucky, especially for the Key Lime aircraft.
Interesting - that's higher than I would have expected, but apparently explaind by most collisions being in the pattern or otherwise near an airport (makes sense now that I think about it.) At least in the pattern, for most of the time, everyone is going in approximately the same direction (even this case.)
My guess would be that only in the worst scenarios does a collision involve a full-impact. In most cases I would expect either or both pilots to be taking avoiding action so that you might get some more minor scrapes which allow you to limp home.
Thanks, that does seem incredibly lucky indeed.
Also, I like the headline including "all parties ok".
ATC comms with visualization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5tb2dVWJqc
The pilot is speaking about failed engine after the collision, like it is nothing. Fascinating. I'd be shouting something obscene in such a situation. For half an hour at least, I think.
He might not have been aware of the full extent of the damage. He is on final; the plane is flying; he's lost an engine; he's going to land it. There is no time for anything else.
He might not have been aware of the full extent of the damage.
This is likely true. He was the only person onboard the plane, so he would not have been able to get up and look. Unlikely he could see the extent of damage from his seat. And as noted, on final approach, he doesn't have time for much to change plans. Even if he knew the extent of the damage, the choices are roughly the same - land as planned, or go around.
That said, he did exactly what he should. Aviate, navigate, communicate. He controlled the plane, made a decision, and communicated that to ATC. Well done.
I think itās amazing planes can fly sort of straight with only one engine providing thrust though.
>> The pilot is speaking about failed engine after the collision, like it is nothing. Fascinating. I'd be shouting something obscene in such a situation. For half an hour at least, I think.
When you get your medical clearance, one of the things they look for is signs of psychological issues or instability. Not saying that's you, and I bet you'd do better than you think. Pilot training also IMHO makes you better at that stuff.
When people encounter emergency situations in domains they are familiar with they tend to do a pretty good job of rolling with it.
Exactly. You either panic and run around screaming and then you die or you could try and take control and you might live. It's no different than most of us driving a car. If a tyre blows out, most of us wouldn't scream and close our eyes, we would try and steer to safety.
This what separates professionals from the chaff
Bloody hell: the state of that Metroliner. Surprised it held together with that amount of damage, and huge kudos to the pilots for getting it on the ground safely.
For such a serious accident this seems about the best possible outcome for the crew of both aircraft. I'm not an expert so I'm not going to comment on root cause or blame here, but simply glad to read that at least everybody survived.
No deaths nor injuries involved, which I feel like this should be in the headline. I came in expecting to see at least a commercial flight was involved (how does it make to #1 on HN otherwise?) but was very relieved to see it was two small aircrafts with 1 and 2 pilots respectively and everyone survived safely.
The Metroliner isn't really a small (private) aircraft, it's more a commuter type aircraft, 19 seats. But in this case it was only carrying cargo so the place of impact didn't have any people in it.
Another lucky point is that it was at low altitude and at slow speed (preparing to land). Higher up it would have been much more likely to break up due to way higher speed and larger pressure difference between the cabin and outside.
Other inches-from-death aspects: there was no-one in the aft of the cabin; the collision missed the pilot; it missed the empennage; it missed the wings; it missed the control cables; and possibly (I'm speculating wildly here) it left the cabin floor intact, without which, I doubt the tail would have stayed on.
> I came in expecting to see at least a commercial flight was involved (how does it make to #1 on HN otherwise?)
The Metroliner (one with the fuselage ripped through) is commercial, [0] but apparently carrying cargo only in this case. [1]
Surely a mid-air collision even between two hobby Cessnas say is rare/interesting enough to make it?
[0] - https://www.keylimeair.com/
[1] - https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2021/may/12/col...
If there were two commercial passenger flights involved and it were 300 miles south, it would be life imitating art.
It's strange that the planes were supposed to be flying parallel and yet the damage to both planes in the photos suggests a collision at right angles
Remarkable that the Metroliner held together, despite that terrible damage, and they landed it safely
edit: interesting photo of the landing from the Reddit thread linked elsewhere https://imgur.com/gallery/yKPOWR0
The Cirrus overshot the centerline of the runway it was supposed to land on. The common way for these situations is for the plane to be on an intercept angle towards the centerline. That's a max 30 degree angle for an instrument approach, but this was a visual approach so it could have been a sharper angle. All it takes to make this mistake in a Cirrus (and other G1000 avionics type small airplanes) is to forget 1 button on the autopilot mode. If it isn't set to capture the final approach track (either GPS or ILS) it will continue straight ahead which in this case means into the side of another airplane.
One thing that makes it more likely is that US air traffic control makes heavy use of visual approaches, and then it's allowed to point two aircraft at collision courses on the same altitude because they can see each other. The European way to do this is to have them intercept at different altitudes so if one overshoots they pass over/under. But it results in lower capacity per runway than the US system.
Indeed.
Something else I'd like to point out is that it might seem easy to 'blame the Cirrus' pilot or them call out for inattention, but doing so by itself isn't helpful. Aviation is so safe partly because it has managed to turn a culture of blame into a culture of continuous improvement and shared learning: I'd be very surprised if the airport's procedures came out of this unmodified, for example.
Iāve probably mentioned this book on HN a hundred times but āBlack Box Thinkingā discusses the aviation culture of avoiding blame and making sure a problem isnāt repeated and how other industries (like medicine) would benefit hugely from a similar approach. Itās really interesting.
>> I'd be very surprised if the airport's procedures came out of this unmodified, for example.
I'm curious. The airport is at about 5900ft and they were at 6400. If that's AGL for them that seems like a long and high approach. If not, then they were going to do a 3 mile straight in at 500 feet AGL? Either interpretation doesn't fit my (limited, student) experience.
If the 1 button on autopilot mode is the red autopilot disconnect, ātime to hand-flyā button, I agree with you.
This turn to final (with the unusual additional warning to ādo not fly through finalā) is a visual maneuver and Iād expect most every pilot to be hand-flying at that point. (My autopilot and navigator is capable to make that intercept, but itās way more tedious and distracting to program it than to just fly it.)
In the airline world it would at the very least be encouraged and in many cases mandatory to have the underlying approach programmed for this anyway. Even more so if told not to fly through final you would have the localizer up and monitor it.
In a Cirrus with what is probably a GFC 700 with flight director capabilities I would expect any competent instrument rated pilot to have the FD on and approach mode armed (the 1 missing button I meant) exactly to avoid this mistake.
Great to hand fly, but in a capable airplane just plain stupid not to use all the tools. And even mandatory on the professional side of things in many cases.
Looking at the youtube video of the radar with the radio sound that someone posted below, the Cirrus is cleared to runway 17R but he turns to runway 17L. There are 3 possibilities : 1- he mistakes one runway for the other visually, 2- he wrongly thinks he is cleared for the 17L runway 3- or he makes a too wide turn going for the 17R, intruding the 17L area.
The cirrus is the one that makes the mistake.
The 17 runways are quite close laterally (700ā) , it may be either way a bad maneuver (overshooting) or chosing the wrong runway.
https://es.flightaware.com/resources/airport/APA/APD/AIRPORT...
The metro was not expecting another traffic in approach for his runway (I understand that they were in different frequencies with different controllers).
During the approach the upper-right side relative angle position in the window of the metro, makes the cirrus hard to spot. I guess he didnāt see the cirrus at all or just barely before the crash.
The cirrus is looking at the runway to his right and the other traffic probably the whole time, the metro is in front of him, so he doesnāt see the Metro till he is on top of him.
Usually with parallel runways, traffics are kept at different altitudes till they are aligned with their runways. This way if they make a mistake, they are separated by 1000ā vertically with the airplane flying parallel.
In this case the cirrus was cleared to visual approach and informed of the cessna he had to follow first. Once he says he has the cessna in sight, he is cleared to visual approach following the cessna. In the same comunication he is informed of the metro flying to the other runway and he replies traffic in sight again.
My guess is that he either has the metro in sight at the beginning and then he forgets about it during the maneuver, or he gives traffic in sight two times.
Thinking that the second part of the message is for the same aircraft (the cessna) he doesnāt even recognize what the controller is telling him about the metro. This is possible if he is too busy flying the maneuver and not paying proper attention to the radio, he hears ācleared for approachā and ātrafficā but he mentally donāt really process the information the controller is giving him. A kind of sensory overload.
In airliners we have mandatory TCAS (traffic collision avoidance system) installed that shows you the near traffics in the screen and give you coordinated (between the traffics) automatic avoidance guidance and alarms( one traffic climbs and the other descends or keeps altitude).
In busy airports TCAS maneuver happen relatively often (a handfull of times a year) but nowadays is much harder to have a collision or a close call.
Also when two pilots are in the cockpit (like airliners) itās easier that one is concentrated in flying and the other in the communications. Itās very common to correct and be corrected all the time during the flight.
It will be interesting to read the official report.
Edit: Kudos to the Metro pilot who was super calmed in the radio while declaring emergency and landing the plane. That is really difficult.
Edit 2: correcting the airport , KAPA (I talked about KDEN initially which has the same runways but with a bigger separation). This does make a difference regarding the mistake.
Thank you Denvercoder9 for the heads up.> I understand that they were in different frequencies with different controllers.
If that is so, then it seems from the recording that the Metroliner pilot was only informed about the Cessna ahead of him and on approach to 17R, not of the Cirrus.
The Cirrus pilot is told about the Metroliner in an exchange that goes thus:
TWR: "Cirrus 6DJ, traffic you're following just turned right base there ahead and to your right at 6600', Cessna."
6DJ: "I have traffic in sight, 6DJ."
TWR: "Cirrus 6DJ, follow them, runway 17R, cleared to land. Additional traffic north shore, it's a Metroliner for the parallel runway."
6DJ: "Traffic in sight, cleared to land 17R, 6DJ."
Now, does that second "traffic in sight" refer to both aircraft, or only to the Cessna he had just been cleared to follow? It would be unambiguous if he had replied "two in sight", but if, for whatever reason, the mention of the Metroliner (in the same call as the clearance was given) had not registered, the Cirrus pilot would not have been aware that more than one other aircraft needed his attention. And if the Metroliner communication was being conducted on a different frequency, neither pilot would have had any other opportunity to become aware of the other airplane, except by seeing it - and, in addition to the Metroliner pilot presumably being in the left seat, the Cirrus was banked right, turning final, and one might guess its pilot was probably looking at the runways and/or the Cessna ahead.
Putting this together, I suspect the Cirrus pilot never registered the presence of the Metroliner until the collision - and I doubt the Metroliner pilot saw the Cirrus even after the collision, given that he thought he had an engine failure (he might have seen it earlier, when it was heading north on downwind, and assumed it was behind him.)
This does not alter the fact that the Cirrus pilot overshot the 17R approach while turning onto final, and it is this which caused the collision. One other fact, pointed out by several commentators: the Cirrus was travelling at about 160 kts at the time, so any delay in turning final results in being out of position more quickly than in your average small, single-engined airplane.
160 kts (around 140 indicated) does not seem like a remotely appropriate airspeed to join a pattern full of Cessnas in closed traffic.
SR22 Vs0 is 59 knots (call it 60 to make the math easier). 1.3 x Vs0 is a reasonable "over the fence" speed, so 78 knots (call it 80) indicated would be good on short final, maybe 90 on base-to-final. (Instead, they were descending and thus accelerating slightly and hit 169 knots on the base leg.)
Bombing into the pattern over 50 knots faster than appropriate (70 knots faster than the traffic you're following and 40 knots faster than the much larger and on-profile Metro on the parallel) might be contributing, but certainly suggests to me that the Cirrus crew was behind the airplane.
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ā Putting this together, I suspect the Cirrus pilot never registered the presence of the Metroliner until the collision - and I doubt the Metroliner pilot saw the Cirrus even after the collision, given that he thought he had an engine failureā
This is what I think aswell. The overshoot may be either way a miss identification of the runway, or just a poorly executed turn to final of the 17R. The investigation is going to be interesting.
> The 17 runways are quite separated laterally so itās more probable that he was wrongly going for the 17L thinking he was aiming for the correct runway.
> https://flttrack.fltplan.com/AirportDiagrams/KDENapt.jpg
This is the diagram for a different airport (Denver International, KDEN). The accident happened at Centennial Airport (KAPA), where the two runways are only separated by about 700 feet.
17R is shorter and narrower than 17L. If the pilot mistook 17R for a taxiway, it would have been a mirror-image situation to the relatively recent one at SFO, were an airliner was making its approach to a taxiway.
Thank you! I should have checked. Then he may have overshoot going for the correct runway. Thankfully both pilots will be able to testify.
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