Three Dead in Houston Cirrus Crash

killbilly said:
Being high and fast was something I struggled with even after I earned my PPL. It took a while (and a lot more practice) to stop doing that. Is that common with new-ish private pilots?
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As a relatively low-hour PPL, I can definitely attest to this. I think it's partly due to the airports you frequently fly out of or learned to fly at. I learned to fly at KSGR in Houston, which had 8,000 feet of runway and relatively light traffic; plenty of time to correct mistakes and ensure a stable approach prior to touchdown. It was overall quite forgiving for student pilots and one can become complacent quickly if you're always flying in and out of similar airports.

On the flip-side, flying into HOU is a completely different dynamic in a 172 (for me at least); speed is kept high on final, slightly shorter runway, not to mention, heavy traffic during the day so there's definitely the added fear of causing unnecessary extra work for the controllers if you make a mistake.
 
Aerodynamically clean air frames don't slow down easily, making short approaches that much harder. Combine that with a tailwind on base making it that much more difficult. After the first missed short approach, there should have been no attempt at another. Assign the blame for that as you will.
 
Derg said:
High and fast in the Airbus means you're going to get to practice your go around procedure.
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Not according to some FOQA videos out there. At an unnamed airline lets just say a video starts off at 1,100 AGL at Speed 210kts and flaps 1 and the question of what do you think happens next?
 
Constellation said:
As a relatively low-hour PPL, I can definitely attest to this. I think it's partly due to the airports you frequently fly out of or learned to fly at. I learned to fly at KSGR in Houston, which had 8,000 feet of runway and relatively light traffic; plenty of time to correct mistakes and ensure a stable approach prior to touchdown. It was overall quite forgiving for student pilots and one can become complacent quickly if you're always flying in and out of similar airports.

On the flip-side, flying into HOU is a completely different dynamic in a 172 (for me at least); speed is kept high on final, slightly shorter runway, not to mention, heavy traffic during the day so there's definitely the added fear of causing unnecessary extra work for the controllers if you make a mistake.
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How are you addressing this? I did a few things on my own to deal with it (and it rarely happens to me anymore) but I don't want to be prescriptive here, given that I'm not a CFI. I will say one of the things I did was to get with a CFI (@bucksmith ) during a BFR to get my overall landing technique improved.
 
If she got into a flat spin though I don't think fast was her problem. Although I guess it could have been an accelerated stall due to trying to make a tight in approach?
 
The Cirrus is well known for being a very slippery airplane. Power needs to be reduced early to make a normal approach and landing. The flap speeds are also relatively slow, so you must slow down considerably before you can add the drag of the flaps. It was not uncommon for me to be struggling to slow down when making a visual approach.

When I was flying one last year, I would often take along students (usually instrument or CPL) from LeTourneau so they could fly the empty legs and get some experience flying outside the 141 bubble. Coming from the C-172 one of the consistent mistakes they made was to not make their pattern wide enough to slow down. If you add the very busy airspace around HOU and mixing in with jet traffic, a low time pilot would certainly have been flustered.

killbilly said:
Being high and fast was something I struggled with even after I earned my PPL. It took a while (and a lot more practice) to stop doing that. Is that common with new-ish private pilots?
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It's not uncommon at all for student or new PPLs to struggle to bleed off the energy necessary to make a normal pattern and landing (especially in higher performance airplanes like the Cirrus). From the first few lessons, you are warned against getting too slow and tend to err on the side of being too fast. However too fast can be just as bad as too slow. When I taught for a flight school out of ADS, they added 5kts to all the pattern speeds "for a safety margin." The result was a string of crumpled firewalls due to students porpoising on landing.

Derg said:
High and fast in the Airbus means you're going to get to practice your go around procedure.
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Happened to me just yesterday.

Should have used the speed brakes earlier and got caught behind the airplane for a moment. Fortunatly there was no traffic, we made a quick 360 back to final to loose some altitude down to the glide slope.
 
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Hacker15e said:
I find it tough to believe, from a technical point of view, that a "flat spin" was inadvertently entered by a normal-category aircraft at traffic-pattern altitudes.

The last second of flight that was captured on video doesn't seem to show that kind of rotation.
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Actually the last second of that video shows a classic "normal" spin. Nose down, high AOA, high vertical velocity with little horizontal velocity, rotation around the vertical axis through the CG.

One thing you will hear from pilots who have little or no experience in this airplane is that the parachute was added to the design because a spin in a Cirrus was unrecoverable. This is simply not true. Despite the Cirrus published spin recovery of "pull the chute", it will recover from a spin using the conventional recovery procedure (and enough altitude which this pilot obviously did not have). The factory test pilots spun both the SR-20 and SR-22 as part of an abbreviated spin test program.

As usual the best way to recover from a spin is not stall the wing in the first place.
 
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killbilly said:
Being high and fast was something I struggled with even after I earned my PPL. It took a while (and a lot more practice) to stop doing that. Is that common with new-ish private pilots?
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Yes, but IMO it's something that can and should be hammered out during primary instruction.

The "flying" part of flying is all about energy management—how to get it, how to use it, how to trade it, when to trade it, and when to keep it... and most of that can absolutely be taught, if the lessons are focused appropriately. While a private pilot license may be a "license to learn", there are some foundational things that should be established before solo and I believe that this is one of those things.

I'm a stick and rudder fox at heart.

-Fox
 
Mini-complaint: I hate the term "accelerated stall". To me, an accelerated stall is a stall resulting from a too-rapid pitch-up, such as what one does to begin a snap roll. To most of aviation, an "accelerated stall" is something that occurs at a speed higher than "stall speed', as if the wing is wired to the airspeed indicator. Speed is a very poor base reference for "stall", in my opinion... it's a crutch for people who don't quite understand aerodynamics to teach new pilots some specific thing to watch out for.

And for the love of pete, has anyone ever decided what a "whip stall" is?!

~Fox
 
Acrofox said:
Mini-complaint: I hate the term "accelerated stall". To me, an accelerated stall is a stall resulting from a too-rapid pitch-up, such as what one does to begin a snap roll.
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If we're going to get pedantic, stall AOA has nothing to do with either pitch or airspeed.
 
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