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Martinaire Caravan crash

Old 03-20-2014, 05:23 PM
  #41  
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Thank you for the the posts. I am proud that he made it this far and I knew he was a good pilot especially after talking to other pilots he taught. We had a memorial celebration of his life at the aircraft hangar where he started. It's just so hard living with this pain of losing him. I can't imagine what went through his mind when he saw he was in deep trouble. He had to be so scared but at least he died instantly. The condition they found him in was painful to hear.

My wife and I made a trip to the crash site in Pellston, Michigan last year when the snow melted. We saw the tree his plane cut in half and uprooted. We saw the crater in the ground where the fuselage made first contact. We found his pen, a white button off of his shirt, and vinyl from the seat that still had his blood caked in the batting. Broken cockpit glass was everywhere. We left a plaque I had made attached to the tree where his body was found. A police officer who was at the scene showed us the location. We picked up everything we could find to add to a showcase cabinet we plan to set up.

Let me just say, I admire you pilots for your doing what you love even though it can be very dangerous. I admire my son for what he achieved. He wanted to be a pilot at an early age when he and my wife joined Civil Air Patrol. He loved what he was doing and was very happy until the end.
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Old 03-23-2014, 12:10 PM
  #42  
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A devastating lost. My heart goes out to you, your wife and immediate family.



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Old 12-18-2015, 11:12 AM
  #43  
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Well, it's taken almost 3 years and 3 law firms, but I have found out the cause of this accident that killed my son. An independent investigation of the aircraft showed that the turbine wheel in the PT6
failed after takeoff. The defense has dragged out our discovery process trying to run the clock on the statute of limitations. They may even be reading this response, but I don't care. My son tried to do an emergency landing, but there was nothing but dense forest ahead during this night time takeoff. It appears the only option, in my opinion, was to try to turn back to the airport. He didn't have enough altitude to do that. I am glad I finally found out what happened and that it was not his fault. The NTSB report is highly inaccurate. I can only hope we get some justice. I don't want to go into anymore detail, but I don't know how those responsible are able to sleep at night.
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Old 12-18-2015, 12:09 PM
  #44  
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Originally Posted by Kepi View Post
Well, it's taken almost 3 years and 3 law firms, but I have found out the cause of this accident that killed my son. An independent investigation of the aircraft showed that the turbine wheel in the PT6
failed after takeoff. The defense has dragged out our discovery process trying to run the clock on the statute of limitations. They may even be reading this response, but I don't care. My son tried to do an emergency landing, but there was nothing but dense forest ahead during this night time takeoff. It appears the only option, in my opinion, was to try to turn back to the airport. He didn't have enough altitude to do that. I am glad I finally found out what happened and that it was not his fault. The NTSB report is highly inaccurate. I can only hope we get some justice. I don't want to go into anymore detail, but I don't know how those responsible are able to sleep at night.
Can you share some of the details that you feel the NTSB got wrong?
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Old 12-18-2015, 12:41 PM
  #45  
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My lawyer is going to file an appeal to the NTSB to look at the new evidence and change their conclusion that my son got spatial disorientation. They supposedly used a chip out of a hand held Garmin that my son had on board to re-enact the flight in a flight simulator. They concluded that the forces he would have felt in the seat would have made him believe he was ascending when in fact he was descending with a pitch of -2 degrees. The do say the Garmin showed he immediately banked after takeoff to the right which would have been west when he was supposed to be flying south. I believe he was banking to try to get back to the airport. The NTSB thought it was spatial disorientation. My son said he taught his students to ALWAYS trust your instruments first. He loved flying at night. I never could understand how they believed he got spatial disorientation if his instruments were working. We just know our son and how he took flying very seriously. He promised his mother before this job that he would be very careful.
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Old 12-18-2015, 02:08 PM
  #46  
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Originally Posted by Kepi View Post
My lawyer is going to file an appeal to the NTSB to look at the new evidence and change their conclusion that my son got spatial disorientation. They supposedly used a chip out of a hand held Garmin that my son had on board to re-enact the flight in a flight simulator. They concluded that the forces he would have felt in the seat would have made him believe he was ascending when in fact he was descending with a pitch of -2 degrees. The do say the Garmin showed he immediately banked after takeoff to the right which would have been west when he was supposed to be flying south. I believe he was banking to try to get back to the airport. The NTSB thought it was spatial disorientation. My son said he taught his students to ALWAYS trust your instruments first. He loved flying at night. I never could understand how they believed he got spatial disorientation if his instruments were working. We just know our son and how he took flying very seriously. He promised his mother before this job that he would be very careful.
Kepi -

The bolded above IS spatial disorientation.

Good pilots get disoriented all of the time - even with working instruments. It is one of the foremost dangers in aviation. One of the absolute worst things you can do immediately after takeoff in a single engine airplane with an engine failure is try to turn back to the airport - especially at night when you don't even have as many visual cues as the day time.

I'm very sorry about your son and the impact on your family of this accident.
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Old 12-18-2015, 06:32 PM
  #47  
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Yes, the bold wording you selected is the NTSB explanation for what happened even though the engine failed on my son. The NTSB is not correct and this is not the first time. This explanation makes it nice and tidy for the employer to have no responsibility for putting my son in an aircraft that had too many hours on the engine. My son knew that the thing to do after an engine failure is to glide forward to put down the airplane. Hell, i'm not a pilot and even I know that! He knew the terrain was nothing but wooded forest ahead. I know good pilots get spatial disorientation, but with proof of a power turbine wheel failure, I don't buy it.

Last edited by Kepi; 12-18-2015 at 06:34 PM. Reason: addition
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Old 12-19-2015, 05:34 AM
  #48  
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OK....I thought you you were saying the 'they' was the independent investigation's discovery.

Did the NTSB report not say that there was a loss of engine power caused by a "turbine wheel failure"? This would seem to be pretty easy to confirm.

This explanation makes it nice and tidy for the employer to have no responsibility for putting my son in an aircraft that had too many hours on the engine.
You are making an accusation that the NTSB actually fabricated a false report so that MartinAire might be found not at fault or that maintenance would not be causal to the mishap?
Did the NTSB find evidence of falsified maintenance logs for this aircraft to prove that the engine had been operating past its' limitations?

It seems to me that you believe that it can be ONLY Spatial D or a maintenance failure. Incredibly few mishaps have but a single causal factor. Not a NTSB investigated mishap, but once in my personal experience an accident investigation board cited Spatial D as a probable cause in a mishap of a F/A-18D just off Charleston, SC. The burn to me was that they had absolutely no proof of anything! The aircraft was on radar at 10,000' one sweep and gone the next. No piece of wreckage, nor even evidence of a mishap, was ever found, yet the board went into some detail about how Spatial D affected this crew of two.
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Old 12-20-2015, 06:52 AM
  #49  
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The NTSB believed that since the propeller had damage from rotation, that the engine must have had power. The whole flight was 58 seconds and my son achieved an altitude of about 250 feet. I've been told that the propeller will continue to spin after an engine failure. This could have caused the propeller damage as it hit the trees and ground. It was evident that he was making a controlled emergency landing according to my aviation lawyer, who is a very experienced pilot. The NTSB went to interview the mechanic of the airplane and he happened to be having surgery that day. No further followup as far as I know. The there is no mention of the maintenance logs in the NTSB report. We are fighting the defense to get those logs now. They are refusing to give them to us as they also were refusing to allow us to inspect the aircraft and engine. My lawyer says the NTSB can use whomever they want to help with the investigation. They can choose the manufacturer of the engine and there is nothing anyone can do about it. As it was obvious power turbine wheel failure to my expert investigator, something is not adding up. I don't know exactly who is responsible for everything in the report, but it needs to be reopened with this new evidence brought to light. Thank you for the information and your interest in this case.
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Old 12-20-2015, 07:14 PM
  #50  
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Originally Posted by Kepi View Post
My lawyer is going to file an appeal to the NTSB to look at the new evidence and change their conclusion that my son got spatial disorientation.
If the NTSB thinks the new evidence is creditable, then they'll include it and change their probable cause. They have no dog in the fight either way, except to determine the most accurate probable cause. I'm in the accident investigation business too and one thing that people seem to have a hard time understanding is that humans make mistakes. All humans, whether it's the ones designing an airplane, or making it at the factory, or flying it. Not because any one of these people is "screwing off" or anything, but because as humans, we miss pieces of information, we don't process all information correctly, we don't react correctly every time, and so on. If human error is the probable cause, it doesn't mean the person was intentionally trying to have an accident or shouldn't have been a pilot due to gross incompetence, it means that on specific day at that time, all of the factors present exceeded the human capability to react correctly. I'd be lying if I said that I can react correctly 100% of the time. We want to know when this happens so we can design systems and processes that will keep it from happening in the future. I'm sorry for your loss too.
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