Martinaire Caravan down
 

Heard Martinaire had an engine failure and lost a plane in Oklahoma last night. Pilot had minor injuries. Anyone hear anything else?

This:

The Kathryn Report: Martinaire Cessna 208B Super Cargomaster N1324G: Aircraft force landed near a highway 15 miles from Perryton, Texas

Glad he survived. Curious to hear what happened, in detail.

Report on this Martinaire Caravan Crash
 

Well, this investigation was done 5 days before my son died while flying a Caravan maintained by Martinaire. It says a turbine blade failed which caused eventual loss of power. This was a compressor turbine blade. The independent inspector, hired by my attorney, also found turbine blade failure in the engine from my son's crashed Caravan. Yet, this did not come out in the public report as they claimed my son got spatial disorientation. Martinaire and the NTSB blamed my son for the accident to protect the industry. It's as simple as that.

So a little warning to you pilots wanting to fly for Martinaire. Their shoddy maintenance causes crashes. They don't care about your life and will cover up evidence to save their butts.

The Kathryn Report: Cessna 208B Grand Caravan, Martinaire, N1324G: Accident occurred November 29, 2012 in Bryans Corner, Oklahoma

Sorry to hear that Kepi.

Sorry about the loss, my deepest condolences.

Sorry for your loss, Kepi.

I lost a friend in a C208 in November 2012. His turbine came apart, dumping oil all over his windshield. He landed safely, but rolled into a grove of trees, where a branch came through the cockpit window, killing him. There have been allegations of shoddy maintenance in that event also.

Is it really cheaper to pay the lawsuits and replace the aircraft than to keep it properly maintained in the first place?

The Oklahoma engine was extremely high-time and high-cycle and part of the large number of PT6s that were having blade issues (most replaced by now, I believe).
I can tell you for a fact the engine that was involved in the Michigan crash was running on impact (Pratt can and did nail it down to almost an exact power setting). Pratt, the experts, tore it down to the bare case, with the NTSB, FAA, Cessna, McCauley, and Martinaire all present. Many, many photos were taken every step of the way documenting everything that was found. The NTSB corroborated this with data from the Garmin 696 onboard to produce a plot which was consistent altitude and speed wise for the power setting Pratt estimated.

Seriously, we're to believe they all are in cahoots to cover this up? For a random cargo carrier? Or the industry? Or Pratt? Then why report on the Oklahoma incident, or the many other Pratts losing blades? It's reported more on Caravans because they're singles, and a twin can limp home on one.

It's terrible what happened to your son. No one deserves that, much less at such a young age. But your theory is honestly completely unrealistic. Spatial disorientation and CFIT are very serious problems that affect the industry at every experience level. Any pilot, no matter how skilled, and flying any airplane, can fall victim.

This was discussed at length during another thread. It's tragic and unfortunately, it seems the lawyers are telling him what he wants to hear, not what is based on facts and investigation. Good people make mistakes, sometimes knowingly, sometimes not knowingly. Just because a life was ended due to an error or mistake doesn't mean they were a bad person or we should not remember the good.

Ths IS an investigation by Aeroscope
 

My lawyer hesitated taking this case. He didn't jump on it with the intent to tell me things I "wanted to hear". I wanted the truth and with the actions of Martinaire to require a court order just for the investigator to check the wreckage was very unusual. If there was nothing to hide, why not let us investigate and end our lawsuit? No, they made our efforts very difficult because they knew they did wrong. Why would there be a coverup for this single cargo plane and not the Oklahoma crash, because there was a fatality and possible law suit.

Here is the response from an independent investigator after I told him what the person who claimed to be at the NTSB investigation said.

"I can tell you from all my years of doing this and looking at dozens of crashed PT6’s that if there is enough force on the engine to cause the entire power turbine wheel to shed all its blades, then it will happen to the compressor turbine wheel as well. They are fractions of an inch aware from each. And we would see it in the impeller and impeller shroud. He is right, that engine spins at 38,000 rpm. And when it comes to a screeching halt at that rpm under full power, all hell breaks loose. That engine was pristine other than the PT wheel. There was no foreign object damage from dirt ingestion as he says. You can see that in the entire compressor section. I attached photos of the first 2 stages of compression. The first is the impeller wheel and the second is labeled “#2” Where is this damage from engine running and ingesting dirt? It’s not there. Because this engine most likely shut down when the PT wheel failed. The torque wrinkle in the exhaust duct comes from a high powered prop hitting an inanimate object. It doesn’t care whether it is a tree or a house or dirt. When 800 hp at the propeller comes to a stop, the large rotating mass of the engine wants to keep going. As such it puts a big transverse wrinkle in the exhaust duct.

I did look at possible autopilot issues. I don’t buy he forgot to turn it on. I don’t buy that he got spatial disorientation. The flight track shows him flying straight and then just losing altitude. As he would if he lost engine power. I did look and the autopilot didn’t have a trim motor which is really the only unit in an autopilot that can generally kill you. The typical pitch and roll servos don’t really have a history of putting the aircraft in an unrecoverable situation. I didn’t have or test the autopilot computer but the evidence on the flight controls really isn’t there to support that theory."


QUOTE=JamesNoBrakes;2059739]We can't even get into the blade creep and micro fractures at the neck that would be present from blade failure. To be sure, there are signatures, but many would not be present to the naked eye. For comparison, Google a few ATSB or NTSB full accident reports. You'll see the kind of testing that goes along with a PT6 blade failure. I think the inference is that the engine turbine must have failed due to the intact compressor, but then there's nothing in front of the compressor anyway.