Preliminary NTSB report on Connell crash

Sorry if this has been posted, I didn't find it on the first few pages (I understand this won't quell the conspiracy theories...nothing would...but the NTSB is comprised of pretty much apolitical types with no axes to grind)

http://www.avweb.com/eletter/archives/avflash/1290-full.html#199508

as many hours logged as I thought he did....

enough to give a fair amount of confidence but not really sufficient to achieve the skills to match.

Most also give discounts for advanced ratings and certificates like an instrument rating. So 500 hours is certainly nothing to scoff at. Still a fair number of fairly new instrument pilots manage to kill themselves at that stage when they get in the soup.

From the NTSB report I can see a lot of possibilities. My best guess is that he may have succumbed to spatial disorientation or he just got into an unusual attitude or a stall that he had neither the skills or the altitude to recover from. Whatever went wrong appears to have gone wrong in the soup because the witness account seems to suggest he was doomed by the time he broke out.

I also see a lot of what appear to be serious mistakes at this point that raise serious questions. Why was he attempting to land at that airport if icing was such a serious concern? Why did he keep trying to rescue an approach that was apparently going very badly. Why did he ask for a "360" while on an instrument approach in the soup past the final approach fix? It sounds as if the controller was trying to help him as much as possible, and he didn't follow the suggestions.

Double danger! Actually, triple danger: my age (22); my flying time; and the damn good NVA gunners. But I survived. I now have over 17,000 hours logged.

oh yea right

Talk about shitty luck...

"N9299N was about 2 ½ miles from the airport when it then transmitted if it could execute a 360-degree turn. ATC then instructed N9299N to climb and maintain 3,000 feet and queried N9299N’s present heading. N9299N transmitted, “heading due north and climbing.” N9299N then declared an emergency."

Wanting to make a 360 degree turn at that point in the approach was an incredibly stupid request/decision. Even if he thought he was in VMC making a turn like that would be a nearly certain invitation to at least disorientation and probably vertigo. 510 hours is just enough to think they know everything and not quite enough to realize they know nothing.

I'm not going to go far as to say he was stupid, because I don't have all the available information. However, asking for a 360 past the FAF is something a VFR pilot might do in visual conditions, but should not be attempted otherwise. Trying that in the soup that low is something that will indeed get you killed. It sounds as if the controller was smart enough to know that and didn't issue the clearance.

It's possible and perhaps probable that he was making some radical corrections to try and get back on the approach. Once you start going past standard rate turns with no reference to the natural horizon, you are asking for trouble. Couple that with everything else that was going wrong for him and the outcome is almost guaranteed to be bad. It sounds as if he was behind the aircraft all the way and he eventually reached a point to which recovery was impossible. This is all just speculation. I'll reserve judgement until the final report comes out.

I haven't seen any documentation on how many hours of actual or even simulated instrument time he had...or whether he had met currency requirements. I can visualize very easily what I BELIEVE happened...the IFR approach was initiated, and probably started out okay but somewhere around the outer marker, the visibility "improved" a little bit, likely just enough to give him a glimpse of the runway (or the VASI or approach lighting or something) which caused him to abandon the gauges and try for a contact approach but the low ceiling wrapped him up again and he had already lost his attention to the GS and localizer. It only takes a few seconds of confusion, not having either clear visual or consistent instrument reference to crank into a steep turn (as you suggest) and simply lose it. I am imagining his declared 'emergency' was an admission he didn't know which way was up.


In and out of the soup creates temptations that can easily displace judgment and negate marginal training.

Because there's lots of times I've done things and then afterwards thought, gee that was pretty stupid.

Flying requires constant vigilance. It doesn't matter if you have 30,000 hrs. If you are negligent or careless just for a moment in either planning or execution, your next flight can be your last. It's easy to label someone like that as stupid, but it doesn't matter if you are the smartest guy in the world. All it takes is a short burst of stupidity to create disaster and we all have the potential for it.

The trick is to have your own little voice that tells you, this is stupid, do something different. The first and best choice is usually climb and turn away from cumulogranite. Keeping the blue side up and the brown side down usually helps also.

I can't tell you how many people I've know that got complacent, because they've been riding for years, just for a split-second, and paid a terrible price.

In my 30 years I've been lucky enough times to keep that thought foremost in my mind.

a flight check. I can think of at least three who are no longer plying the skies...at least not in human form.

A few times I've seen 3 hefty guys pile in a 172 or an underpowered PA28 while the pilot tops off the tanks on a hot summer day. Then I watched in amazement as they skimmed the trees off the end of the runway. It kind of renews your faith that God does indeed love idiots.

As far as how they manage to pass their check ride, there's a few unscrupulous DPEs out there who will drive by, pick up their check, and hand you your cert so long as CFI Billy Bob said you were good to go.

way to convenient that he's dead for my tin foil hat. I believe that most times the worse case scenario(when it comes to the Government) tends to be the truth.

Just because you're no longer paranoid, doesn't mean they're not still out to get you.

...is pretty hard to do. Unless the winds are really bad, basically an ILS is a piece of cake to fly, either by hand or with the help of a coupled autopilot.

In his aircraft and in those conditions I cannot imagine him not at least trying to have the autopilot fly the approach. Him being so far off course as to be called up by ATC, to me is evidence he had is avionics not set up correctly. All pilots make mistakes- perhaps he was tired, perhaps he hadn't flown much recently, who knows.

Setting up his GPS system (Garmin 530/430 combo) to fly a vectors-to-final-ILS is a straightforward, piece of cake, not very complicated thing. The only trick is to remember to flip the unit over to ILS mode from GPS.

Some years later, he was flying a G4 to pick up GHWB in HOU to take him ...somewhere, I forget where now. He -apparently-
was trying to fly a VOR course as if it was the localizer and didn't realize the error until the nose was knocking down light poles in a parking lot. Google Milford Dixon Houston for more info.

There's nothing "easy" about an instrument approach. They can all bite you on the ass. With practice, you can get proficient, but adopting the attitude that they are "easy" because you have a box that can fly them often leads to a smoking crater at the end of your story.

Lots of possibilities come to mind. Perhaps he overshot the LOC and he had to turn the AP off because it will only correct using standard rate turns. Perhaps his AP had problems and he wasn't using it. Perhaps he didn't fully understand how to use his AP, or RNAV equipment. Maybe he had the wrong approach selected and elected to fly it by hand instead of going missed and reconfiguring everything.

there is no excuse for complacency. I agree that having the mindset that an instrument approach is "easy" is a recipe for possible disaster. However, even conceding your point, there are degrees of difficulty. I would suggest an NDB approach in a 50 knot crosswind is harder on the difficult scale than an ILS, though night, visibility, and concerns about icing definitely make it harder than it otherwise could have been. His relative lack of experience might have contributed to his deciding to take off much later and facing difficult night and weather conditions, all in the interest of getting home on a friday night. I wasn't there and I don't know what factors he was weighing.

All of these points reinforce the point I've been making - that it is far more likely that this guy did himself in than that he is the victim of some murder conspiracy.

Having not read any of your previous posts, it sounded as if you were trying to make the point that an ILS approach is not difficult given the equipment he had available.

I would agree that it is far more likely he was his own worst enemy here.

Not one message of sympathy from Rethugs. This is beyond strange.

with no axes to grind".

Are you speaking about the same NTSB that did such a wonderful job on Wellstone's crash?

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

The one that exists in Tinfoilhatstan?

Naturally the foil hatters will tell you Richard Conry's felony conviction was fake, that he never falsified his medical paperwork, his flight logs, and his resume, and that his colleagues simply gave false testimony when they said they had to take the flight controls away from him on several occasions. They claim he was really a top notch pilot and the only possible explanation for the Wellstone crash was an EMP weapon deployed for the specific purpose of political assassination.

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

The NTSB later determined that the likely cause of the accident was the failure of both the pilot and copilot to maintain a safe minimum airspeed, leading to a stall from which they could not recover.

Michael L. Guess, the First Officer, was characterized in the NTSB report as being "below average" in proficiency. Significant discrepancies were also found in pilot Richard Conry's flight logs in the course of the post-accident investigation. He also had a well-known tendency to allow copilots to take over all functions of the aircraft as if they were the sole pilot during flights. After the crash, three copilots told of occasions in which they had to take control of the aircraft away from Conry. After one of those incidents, only three days before the crash, the copilot had urged Conry to retire. A few months before the crash, Conry told another pilot, Timothy M. Cooney, a childhood friend, that he had difficulty piloting and landing King Airs. The copilot Guess was cited by coworkers as having to be consistently reminded to keep his hand on the throttle and maintain airspeed during approaches.

http://www.ntsb.gov/publictn/2003/AAR0303.pdf

If I don't buy into every crackpot theory that a Democratic Party politician was "assassinated" every time a tragedy befalls one, I must not "belong", eh?

Now perhaps you think you mean well, but whether you care to acknowledge it or not, the "research" into the Wellstone crash is almost exclusively based on the writings of those people who make their living writing fictional tales of elaborate bullshit "theories" intended for the consumption of screwy individuals who never saw a conspiracy theory they didn't like. Therefore the endless regurgitation of said bullshit, however well intended, does harm to the families of those who died in that accident, and your continued defamation of the NTSB does harm to the families of those who have died in other accidents.

Now if you can't handle being challenged by the relevant facts of the case, which aren't in dispute by anyone north of a room temperature IQ, why are YOU here? I'm sure there are plenty of forums which cater exclusively to foil hatters where nobody dares ever raise the bullshit flag when someone else puts forth complete nonsense.

conspiracy behind every event that negatively affects a Democrat. Oddly, it never happens to someone of the other party.
If you want to read some truly goofy stuff, poke through the September 11 forum. It will :scared: the shit outta ya.

That at least nonsense like this doesn't infest main stream Democrats the way reciprocal nonsense infests the Republican main stream.

Ask any 10 Republicans if they think Vince Foster was murdered and I would venture to guess at least 8 of them will say yes with a straight face. The other two will say "No, but I think there's a lot the government isn't telling us about that." You can do the same thing with Waco. Personally I think batshit crazy loons are a laugh a minute. At least they offer entertainment value.

...

(mid-70's)in a 4 seat plane, one engine, to Cabo San Lucas from Santa Monica. As we approached Cabo,
the pilot said the landing field wasn't where it was supposed to be, according to his map.
I spotted the field, and the pilot said, "oh, gee, I must have had the map folded wrong".

Then, on our return flight, we stopped to clear customs at the border. On take-off, you have
to clear a small mountain range. The pilot was going to set his altitude for 500 feet above
the mountain tops, and we encouraged him to allow more clearance. Sure enough, turbulence
as we were climbing dropped us 300 feet in nothing flat. He came damn close to flying us into the mountain.

When I related the story to a friend who'd been a Navy pilot during WW II, he told me that if
the guy reached a thousand hours it would be safe to fly with him. Until then, stay out of his plane!

Boll weevils, hahaha!!!!