Private aircraft makes emergency landing on beach

[piisfish 140]

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Except for all the screaming and crying inside.

that's because you have never been in the car whil I was driving

scissors beat paper, paper beat rock, rock beat wingsuit - KarlM

[piisfish 140]

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Doubtful, considering the huge difference in mass. Like a bug hitting you while you're riding a bicycle.

said bug would be around 3 pounds, to keep the proportions.

scissors beat paper, paper beat rock, rock beat wingsuit - KarlM

[regulator 0]

[http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/03/17/jogger-killed-plane-likely-heard/?test=latestnews]

HILTON HEAD ISLAND, S.C. -- The kit-built single-engine plane had turned into a glider, almost silently trying to make an emergency landing along a stretch of beach. Pharmaceutical salesman Robert Gary Jones, ear buds in, listening to his iPod while jogging neither saw nor heard it and was struck from behind Monday evening and killed instantly.

"There's no noise," said aviation expert Mary Schiavo, a former inspector general for the National Transportation Safety Board. "So the jogger, with his ear buds in, and the plane without an engine, you're basically a stealth aircraft. Who would expect to look up?"

The 38-year-old Jones, whose mother said was serious about nutrition and exercise, especially jogging, was on a business trip to Hilton Head for GlaxoSmithKline. He was looking forward to getting home to the northern Atlanta suburb of Woodfield, Georgia, for his daughter's third birthday Wednesday, Pauline Smith said.

"I was never so shocked in all my life," she said of learning the news, her voice shaking. "They say that God only gives you what you can handle. I said, 'You know what, I've reached my max."'

The pilot, Edward I. Smith of Chesapeake, Virginia, and his lone passenger walked away from the crash landing near the Hilton Head Marriott Resort and Spa. Smith was on the beach Tuesday, when the four-seater aircraft was hoisted onto a trailer hitched to a pickup truck and towed away. Authorities did not identify the passenger.

"I've got a lot of issues going on right now," Smith said. "I've got a plane that's all torn up. And I've got a young man that I killed."

The Lancair IV-P aircraft had lost its propeller, with oil smeared all over its windshield, making visibility difficult, authorities said. It was "basically gliding" when it instantly killed Jones, said Ed Allen, the coroner for Beaufort County on the South Carolina coast.

The plane took off from Orlando, Florida, at 4:45 p.m. Monday and was en route to Virginia when it started leaking oil at about 13,000 feet (4,000 meters), said Joheida Fister, spokeswoman for Hilton Head Island fire and rescue.

National Transportation Safety Board spokesman Keith Holloway said no cause had been determined. He said the plane would be inspected in Virginia and that investigators would interview the pilot and any witnesses.

"We don't know what occurred, especially since we haven't actually examined the aircraft," Holloway said. "We are still gathering facts."

Even with oil smeared on the windshield, Schiavo, the former NTSB official, said Smith should have been able to see through a small window on the side of the plane and possibly yell out to anyone below. Still, there may have been little time to try to avoid hitting the jogger, she said.

She said Smith made the right choice in landing on the beach rather than the water. The aircraft likely wasn't carrying flotation equipment.

"Planes like this sink like a rock," she said.

The airplane model that killed Jones has a turbine engine, can be built from a kit and can fly up to 370 mph (595 kph), according to the Lancair Web site. The "fastbuild kit" for the IV-P model, which has a pressurized cabin, is listed as costing $129,000 (euro94,000), the site says.

The plane "has proven over the years to be very safe, reliable and extremely low in maintenance," the site says.

Joseph Bartels, chief executive officer of Lancair International, the Oregon-based company that produces the aircraft kits, said Tuesday that the kit produces a "light, fast and strong aircraft."

"This particular aircraft is one of about 1,000 sold either as kits or completed," Bartels said, though he added he had no specific knowledge about the airplane that had crashed. His firm does not produce the engine, which is purchased separately, he said.

Bartels, who had seen online news photos of the damaged plane, called the landing "miraculous" given the damage to it, but also expressed sorrow at the deadly outcome.

Pauline Jones, of Dunedin, Florida, said her son was a wonderful husband to his wife, Jennifer. The couple also has a 5-year-old son.

She said she's going on "borrowed strength."

"It's been very difficult," she said. "I haven't been to bed since I heard. I haven't had any sleep."

[RPC1117 0]

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Not to second guess the pilot or claim that I know what he was thinking.
But-very limited vision-probably not very familiar with the area. SC beaches are not crowded this time of year. It wouldn't be a bad guess that the beach would have a lower population density than the area around the airstrip. Maybe he didn't want to pile into a neighborhood if he totally lost it. There's a golf course just off the airport but he may not have known that.

The runway is 4,300' long x 100' wide, and has plenty of grass alongside it.

Aerial view attached - trouble if you miss. I can see the allure of a wide, flat beach, compared to an airport surrounded by trees and development.

Still, that's a tourist resort, and the beaches usually have people on them. He could have at least landed in the water a few yards offshore, which would probably avoid the people, still provide a soft landing, and not be deep enough to drown in.

The area around the HH airport is a mix of both residential and commercial. The main highway on hilton head is on the south end of the runway (mind you the accident happened at 6:00pm - lots of traffic). There is some "resort" stuff up around there, but it is mostly full time residential houses and shopping centers. Knowing the area as well as I do, I'd say the pilot made a much smarter decision to put it down on the beach than possibly coming up short on making the runway.
The beach this time of year is not usually very crowded. Mid March is not really beach tourists for HH...Golfers maybe, but not beach goers.

[kallend 2,106]

Lancair IV-P is a very slick airplane (winglets, pretty high AR wing, rivetless exterior, well designed (low drag) cooling inlets, retractable LG. Without the drag of a windmilling prop (which produces a LOT of drag) it should have a glide ratio well over 10:1. From 13,000 ft it should be able to glide some 20 miles.

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[regulator 0]

This is the video of an eyewitness that saw the plane strike the jogger...she said it hit him in the upper body.

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2010/03/16/bounds.sc.plane.kills.jogger.wsav?hpt=T2

[riggerrob 643]

Since helicopter controls are far more complex than (fixed wing) airplane controls, it would take the rest of the afternoon to explain how cyclic, collective, rudder pedals and throttle control a helicopter.

Propellers on fixed wing airplanes are much simpler. The first propellers (and those still installed on most simple two-seater airplanes) are fixed pitch. A fixed ptich propeller is like a tuned exhaust system in that it can only be "tuned" to a single airspeed/rpm (rotations per minute measured at the crankshaft of the engine) combination. So owners of simple airplanes are forced to chose between a "climb" propeller or a "cruise" propeller.

Faster, higher-climbing and more complex airplanes all use controllable-pitch propellers that can be adjusted in-flight to be efficient during cruise and climb. Controllable-pitch propellers can change the pitch (angle of attack) of propeller blades to take a deeper or shallower bite of air to match the power being produced by the engine.
To simplify the pilot's work load, all modern controllable-pitch propellers have govenors that adjust propeller blade pitch to maintain a constant-speed.