Posted on 11/21/2007 12:55:39 PM PST by Darksheare
MAYBROOK, N. Y. - The pilot was killed and two passengers injured in the crash of a single-engine plane in the woods near Stewart International Airport early Wednesday, authorities said.
The plane lost contact with controllers before 2 a.m. when it was attempting a second landing at the airport following a failed first approach, FAA spokesman Jim Peters said. State Police said one of the passengers called 911 after the crash.
Rescuers found the wreckage hours later. Pilot Brian H. Early of Radnor, Pa., was found dead, police said.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsday.com ...
Ping.
YIKES!! Prayers for those involved. Wonder if the pilot was VFR only.
One of our drivers comes into work down route 208.
This morning, it was blocked up by a carpet of cops and ambulance vehicles.
Seems they knew the plane went down in a certain wooded area, but weren’t sure exactly where in that area.
At first, we’d figured some of the local L.L. Bean ‘hunters’ (guys who buy their gear out of L.L. Bean and think they’re uberhunters) had a small shootout in the woods there.
Not that such things have happened in the past.
*cough*
We were surprised to hear that a plane had gone down.
Didn’t know that it was a small plane until later, around 7.
Local news, radio and such, were strangely quiet about it.
Took me a bit to find anything about it.
Good question on that.
Odd hour, not to mention weather, for a small aircraft to be flying.
Yeah.
But I see lots of small planes during third shift.
Wonder what the inspectors will recommend after this.
The inspectors will probably reccommend that people not fly thier iarplanes into the ground. Icing is a good bet, although I am curious how this plane missed the approach. Stewart, IIRC, is a 10,000 foot runway with ILS and the plane had redundant GPS. It looks like someone made a vary serious, and tragic, mistake.
Low and slow with wing icing in heavy fog.
The 10k runway is used for the jumbos/ C5’s.
They use the secondary for light planes if memory serves.
The area is a hodgepodge of lights, had some genius in a jumbo line up to land on the warehouse I work at earlier in the year.
Once he figured out that those were light poles he was looking at, he did the ‘large blarting power up and turn while looking guilty’ maneuver.
“Oopses” are somewhat more common than reported.
None of them fatal until this one.
Yep, and until you’ve made an approach into a city of lights looking for the runway lights, you can’t believe how easy that is to mistake blvd lights for the runway lights.
Especially when the light color is the same.
In fog, it makes it even more fun.
Couple years back, a pilot ran out of avgas and made an emergency landing on Route 84.
Darn good pilot, he landed in a lull in traffic and roll taxied to the emergency vehicle pull off.
I think it was a Cessna, but don’t quote me on that one.
He fell short of making it to the local light strip.
Plane landed upside down.
It didn’t land upside down. In photograph one, the nose is clearly smashed. The right main gear is visible attached to the right wing. The main gear and nose gear are separated from the aircraft.
In photo 2, the nose gear is shown on the left wing side of the aircraft, separated from its housing.
Photo 3 shows the left main gear still in its housing before the nose of the plane.
Photo 4 shows a reverse angle of the wreck. The tail is wrapped around a tree. The left aileron and left elevator are partly sheared from their mounts and are deformed - bent - downwards. The left wing flap is deformed upwards because a tree is underneath it.
Conclusion: The plane hit the ground with the nose and left wing low. This smashed the nose and sheared the landing gear on the nose and left wing. The plane flipped over from the impact and stopped where it is shown. The tail is wrapped around a tree and there are no drag marks leading to the tree. The left wing flap is smashed upwards by another tree. The left aileron and elevator partly broke from their mounts and deformed in the direction they were moving when the plane stopped: downwards.
The plane was flying at night in poor visiblity and had already missed an approach to the runway. It landed with the nose and the left side low, at high speed. The plane would have been banked to turn left for this to happen.
Conclusion: classic graveyard spiral. In low light and hazy conditions, the pilot was flying the pattern around Stewart and became disoriented. Stweart is a left hand pattern IIRC, and the pilot already missed one approach. Therefore he was not sure of his position and probably under stress. When he leveled the plane from the left turn, he perceived a right turn and banked left to compensate. Since he was actually banked left to begin with, he increased the bank to the left and lost altitude until he crashed.
This is the same thing that happened to John F. Kennedy, Jr., but this time the photos of the damage are undeniable.
Land meaning came to rest.
*Sorry -I wasn’t being clear*
No problem. You got me to look at the photos and examine what happened. I checked with a friend in the area. He said Stewart is a left hand traffic pattern.
Stewart has some odd traffic.
Much of it comes overhead where I work.
Plenty of times they are low, slow, spoilers, gear, and flaps out while still three miles out.
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