A competitor in an AOPA-sponsored STOL competition in Nebraska was killed Friday when his Cessna 140 appeared to stall and spin while setting up to land. According to AOPA, Tom Dafoe’s 1946 140 “rolled and dove during or soon after the base-to-final turn, and struck the ground in view of shocked spectators.” The accident happened on the second day of the planned four-day MayDay STOL 2022 event at Wayne Municipal Airport/Stan Morris Field in Wayne, Nebraska.
I was completely taken aback by the lack of communication from the pilot to the controller. The pilot never actually asked for priority handling nor mentioned anything severe was happening on board. Not saying that would have made a difference in this instance but communication does sound very casual when listening to it on LiveATC. Terrible accident with terrible results.
I’m old enough to remember when a privately owned Sabre Jet crashed into a Sacramento ice cream parlor in 1972. California immediately forbade the operation of private military jets in the state. The GA community was upset, but it exercised restraint. The subsequent investigation revealed glaring deficiencies in the training, oversight and type certification of some warbird operators. That these issues were addressed in a timely manner is the reason we continue to enjoy warbird demonstrations four decades later - including in California.
Today it may be time to take another look at warbird revenue operations. Their designers expected a third of these airplanes to be lost in combat and, maybe, 20% to be lost in accidents. There was a war in progress and getting them off of the drawing board and into the theater was the most urgent requirement. None of the heavier designs remotely meets contemporary certification standards.
A sooner-initiated turn from the downwind of runway 6 would have put the plane on the ground beyond the runway 6 threshhold. With two miles of pavement available, why fly a pattern that offers ANY chance of landing short of the threshhold?
Better yet, a simple 90-degree left turn from the left downwind of runway 6 would have put the aircraft on final for runway 15 - ABOVE the asphalt, and with half of the altitude loss of making a 180-degree turn.
Sure is a lot of black smoke from that fire. It doesn’t look like burning gasoline to me. It looks like burning jet fuel. One wonders. Could they have been given the wrong fuel. That sure would explain some things.
Any rich mixture combustion will produce black smoke. That said, a fuel problem crossed my mind as well. Hard to have any other kind of common-power problem on a four-engine aircraft. During the war, I’m sure plenty of B-17s made it home on three engines or less. So a problem with one engine doesn’t explain the accident.
>>Within hours of the crash, Connecticut’s Governor Ned Lamont and Sen. Richard Blumenthal held a press conference. My Facebook feed ignited with a vitriolic and occasionally obscene denunciation of this, claiming that Blumenthal had called for the grounding of all warbirds. If he said it, I can’t find the quote now.
Blumenthal definitely said it. I saw the footage. I had the same reaction as many of your inbox fillers, that it was a statement not based on any facts. Foolish, to be polite.
I agree that this seems unusual, but just like Paul stated about pilots judging the press, we likewise should be circumspect about assessing pilot/crew performance and decision-making. Flying for 26 years in the Air Force, emergency training always and continuously stressed that you: “Aviate, Navigate & Communicate”. There’s a reason communication is last on the list. Those of us that have survived a crash from a malfunctioning aircraft spend many hours questioning what and how we could have done it better. That said, a pilot flying a mechanically crippled aircraft at low altitude will have substantially less performance capability and altitude to work with. They certainly had their hands full and may not have been able to consider the “normal options”.
Mark, et al: Your thoughts and comments all make perfect sense from a smaller airplane / training problem perspective. Once you get into the bigger airplane / multi-motor arena, things change somewhat, especially when things go south in a hurry. I am sure that the NTSB will quite accurately determine what actually happened and present a fairly reasonable explanation of why it all went so “south” so fast.
Now, please do not think that I am demeaning your personal abilities behind the yoke or whatever your experience is. I happen to have 20K hours in large multi-motors, almost all jet. I do happen to have 2K hours in the T-29C/D (CV-240) with the USAF. During one hot summer morning departure from Buckley ANGB in CO in that T-29, we had a very bad seizure of the left engine. It stopped turning in less that 1 revolution. Things got really exciting for about 10 minutes. In those days, Stapleton was there and operational. We crossed that airport at about 50-60 ft agl, just slid over the terminal and eventually got back to Buckley safely for a dual engine change, a couple of other small structural repairs, and a new set of skivvies. The point of that story is that, while ATC was screaming at us, we didn’t hear them or respond other than a very curt / crude STFU transmission until we could breathe after passing over the terminal. We were not task saturated, we were massively overloaded mentally. With respect, I offer that the NTSB will possibly pose something along those lines to explain the lack of comm between the airplane and ATC.
Today’s aircraft are, thankfully, extremely reliable thus, training has evolved into fairly straight forward single item at a time problem solving. Multiple emergency training is now a no-no, however, multiple simultaneous actual emergencies are not, for some strange reason, forbidden in reality… Not saying that that was the case here, but I will wager a large cup of good Wawa coffee that these pilots had their hands full and didn’t have (mental) time to spend talking on the radio or seeing the obvious easy ways to get back on the ground safely.
Just my opinion.
I have a different take on Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s conference. I’m not sure I heard him actually call for the grounding of all warbirds in so many words. What I DID hear was a self-serving “politic-speak/stump speech” about “I have ordered the NTSB to start an investigation” and “they report to MY committee”.
Just in case the Senator is reading this - you could have made all the calls you want - but they were going to investigate anyway. But that’s their job.
Against a rapidly developing situation with a clear potential for loss of life Sen. Richard Blumenthal sounded SO “self-serving Washington-speak” - that believe me - if he was my Senator - there is no way in h3ll I would ever vote for him again.
“I’m not sure I heard him [Blumenthal] actually call for the grounding of all warbirds in so many words.”
Well, here’s a direct quote from Senator Stolen Valor:
“There should be very serious scrutiny over these planes before they’re allowed back in the air.”
Little ambiguity, IMWO.
Modern does not apply. I’ve watched enough WWII footage to understand that I really don’t want to be in a B29 or a B17 having a landing accident. Declare and then own the airport. Hearing the hesitation on frequency (with a load of passengers and a load of fuel) just seemed odd considering the aircraft being flown. Maybe the problem accelerated really quickly? dunno. Sad to loose good people & planes.
David, T, is right on the money; the enormous cloud of black Smoke is a big clue. Gasoline burns clean and jet fuel will give oodles of Black smoke. Hopefully, there will be photos from people that saw the plane as it came in to land. A lady that saw the plane fly over her house said that one propeller was not turning.
No matter, the B-17’s could withstand head-on cannon and machine gun fire, at close range, and not even cough no’r did the young 20 year old pilots even blink. Something really bad had to have happened to bring this B-17 down. RIP, to the passengers and crew.
I have always believed that these old warbirds belong in museums for historical value and in memory of those who flew them for a really good reason. Are we one day going to entertain fully restored and flying B-1s, B-2s, B-58s, SR-71s, restored and sailing nuclear submarines, and so forth?
909 was on the second flight of the day with that load of fuel. Normally, the airplane is fueled and preflighted before the ride flights, and “hot loaded”, exchanging passengers with engines running for multiple flights. So misfuelling isn’t possible. They lost one engine and feathered it, but that alone isn’t sufficient to bring down a B17, so something else must have been happening.
I disagree. There are plenty of examples of non-flying versions of these aircraft on display in museums throughout the country (and even the world). Many of the flying Warbirds do not have true historical significance because they’re typically late production models that came too late to see active duty or they were practically “rebuilt” from the ground up. Furthermore, I suspect that without the ability to be flown, many of these flying warbirds would never have been recovered and restored in the first place. Keeping a historic aircraft out of the air on static display or in storage somewhere is also no guarantee of infinite preservation since fires and natural disasters can destroy them as well.
Having these aircraft grace the skies and teaching younger generations how to operate and maintain them is as much or more significant to their history than having them simply collect dust in a museum.