Pray for family members of plane crash victims
Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2016 2:48 pm
This is probably an unusual prayer request, but this has been bothering me since I saw the CH.11 news report last night. Three family members were flying a small plane (Cirrus SR20) from Norman, OK to Hobby Airport in Houston. The report said all three passengers were siblings coming to Houston to visit their Uncle who is a patient at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.
The plane was piloted by a woman who got her pilot license in 2014, but there was no information about the number of hours she had flown. The weather was perfect and she made her first approach too high and was told by the tower to go around. (Hobby has a lot of heavy commercial traffic, including Southwest Airlines.) The tower had to vector her back for another approach and she was sandwiched between a Southwest jet and other aircraft. Again, she approached too high and was told to go around. The news report was not clear about her position in the pattern when the crash occurred, but I'm pretty sure I know where and how it happened.
Based upon the location on the ground near the airport (Telephone Rd.), I'm convinced she was close in and turning from base to a short final approach. It appears she overshot, then made the classic fatal mistake of steeping her bank, losing airspeed and stalled. Witnesses described the plane as "nosediving" into the parking lot of a hardware store. The video showed the plane was not vertical when it impacted a car in the parking lot, so it appeared to me that she was recovering from the stall but far too late to prevent a crash.
Any crash is tragic, but this one really got to me in a big way. Ch.11 played part of the tower recording between the tower and the pilot. She sounded flustered and perhaps even a little scared, but very polite and very young. (Voices can be deceiving so she may not have been as young as I believe.) Immediately before the crash, the tower controller said, "straighten up, straighten up!" I believe he was telling her to go "wings level" to avoid the stall, so she must have really been banking hard trying to make the runway. (The stall speed goes up when a plane is in a bank, as compared to straight and level flight.)
I'm a pilot and we are a fraternity. It's bad enough to hear that people died in a crash, but to here the voices of the tower controller and a scared pilot is gut-wrenching. The base-to-final turn is known as the dead-man's turn and every CFI I've known stresses the critical need to maintain airspeed in that turn. If you overshoot, go around and live, or increase your bank and die. Yesterday, we lost a fraternity member. She was a new pilot going into an unfamiliar, high-traffic airport and she had missed the approach twice on a CAVU day. All the elements of a classic crash were present and claimed the lives of thee people trying to visit the Uncle in M.D. Anderson.
I know it will sound silly, but it's hard for me to even type this post. Please pray for the family members' whose grief must seem unbearable.
Chas.
The plane was piloted by a woman who got her pilot license in 2014, but there was no information about the number of hours she had flown. The weather was perfect and she made her first approach too high and was told by the tower to go around. (Hobby has a lot of heavy commercial traffic, including Southwest Airlines.) The tower had to vector her back for another approach and she was sandwiched between a Southwest jet and other aircraft. Again, she approached too high and was told to go around. The news report was not clear about her position in the pattern when the crash occurred, but I'm pretty sure I know where and how it happened.
Based upon the location on the ground near the airport (Telephone Rd.), I'm convinced she was close in and turning from base to a short final approach. It appears she overshot, then made the classic fatal mistake of steeping her bank, losing airspeed and stalled. Witnesses described the plane as "nosediving" into the parking lot of a hardware store. The video showed the plane was not vertical when it impacted a car in the parking lot, so it appeared to me that she was recovering from the stall but far too late to prevent a crash.
Any crash is tragic, but this one really got to me in a big way. Ch.11 played part of the tower recording between the tower and the pilot. She sounded flustered and perhaps even a little scared, but very polite and very young. (Voices can be deceiving so she may not have been as young as I believe.) Immediately before the crash, the tower controller said, "straighten up, straighten up!" I believe he was telling her to go "wings level" to avoid the stall, so she must have really been banking hard trying to make the runway. (The stall speed goes up when a plane is in a bank, as compared to straight and level flight.)
I'm a pilot and we are a fraternity. It's bad enough to hear that people died in a crash, but to here the voices of the tower controller and a scared pilot is gut-wrenching. The base-to-final turn is known as the dead-man's turn and every CFI I've known stresses the critical need to maintain airspeed in that turn. If you overshoot, go around and live, or increase your bank and die. Yesterday, we lost a fraternity member. She was a new pilot going into an unfamiliar, high-traffic airport and she had missed the approach twice on a CAVU day. All the elements of a classic crash were present and claimed the lives of thee people trying to visit the Uncle in M.D. Anderson.
I know it will sound silly, but it's hard for me to even type this post. Please pray for the family members' whose grief must seem unbearable.
Chas.