Hawker Driver

A retired airline guy with 17,000 hours ran one off the runway at Sedona several years ago.

eaglefly

Sounds to me like he got slow and sloppy on the approach perhaps as a result of trying to space himself with the slower 172 ahead and in the process of doing that (and keeping the Cessna in sight) he lost airspeed control. Could a small amount of ice have aggravated the situation ?

Perhaps. They said he didn't actually stalled, but in the deep semi-stall low speed regime perhaps with intermittent stick pusher firing that he was combatting, over-controlling (especially with a now very effective rudder) could have exacerbated his ability to fly out of it while he wobbled toward the tree tops with the aural stall warning blaring away. Both roll and pitch oscillations were reported by witnesses before it went first to knife edge and then snapped inverted and nosing down to impact.

But the fact is, we must also recognize that this same pilot has crashed and totaled a high-performance turbine aircraft in the past under similarly benign conditions and it was a result of "pilot error".

cardiomd

No not at all, it just takes a longer time to figure out who the family was in the 12 hours after a tragedy, and it is not really good to publish family details, and better to let them grieve a bit in private before interviews. If something happened to my loved ones I wouldn't want a hack reporter going through facebook pages and publishing a semi-biography immediately on their own.

There is a nice writeup about the family here if anybody is interested. They died of smoke inhalation after surviving the impact. She probably never knew what was happening.

Plane crash in Gaithersburg, Md., shattered picture of a happy family - The Washington Post

cardiomd

And of course the requisite begging site which is all the rage now. This also was not set up by the family. I gave a very small amount (much less than I gave that test-pilot widow from the *******s at Scaled Composites).

Gemmell Family Fundraiser by Jenifer Miller - GoFundMe

(I post it simply for people to make own decisions on donating. I am of very mixed feelings regarding these but gave a small amount, I doubt he will be "getting rich" off this tragedy in any stretch and it doesn't seem like a scam. Let's not debate the merits of these types of sites here.)

EasternATC

How could you conclude that after reading the article? Even if she didn't know why, she very well knew there was smoke and fire, and gave everything trying to protect the children.

Seminole00

and he is a doctor?

cardiomd

You two are ridiculous. If your house all of a sudden is engulfed with smoke and flames, you would most likely think it was a bomb or a gas main explosion or something. You'd be disoriented. Plane crash, even if in the vicinity of an airport, would be pretty far down on the list.

She ran to the bathroom to hide, herding up her kids, died of smoke inhalation, did not run through the smoke. It is a horrible way to go.

But what do I know, I'm only a doctor, talking to, apparently, the reasonability-handicapped.

PCLCREW

NTSB also stated today that both engines were operating and there was no ice accumulation on the aircraft.
All systems were normal.

RhinoPherret

Cardio,

I believe EasternATC and Seminole00 interpreted part of your statement: “She probably never knew what was happening” to mean you assumed she knew nothing of what had occurred and did nothing as a result. I don’t think you meant that but it comes across that way from that statement.

I do not think WasternATC and Seminole00 were saying they felt the mother knew it was a plane crash. They were just re-stating what the police believe occurred in that the mother apparently did know something horrific happened, had a minute or two, and was trying to do what she could to save her children and herself.

Might want to take a moment in responding to some of these types of posts my good Dr. Otherwise, you may come across sounding just like the folks you disdain in some of the postings.

Remember; It’s all good!

redeyed

It'd be interesting to see an FDR trace on the elevator position. Sounds eerily similar to the Colgan 3407 accident, where a stall warning/pusher activates; and the stick is (incorrectly) pulled hard back for recovery. That would explain the witness accounts of the aircraft's attitude excursions.