Accident Case Study: Traffic Pattern Tragedy

[Scott - A2A]

What a well done video and such a tragic video to watch. My initial take on this is what I find to be the biggest danger to pilots, and that is distractions and mental stress (fatigue, task saturation, etc). She was just being bounced all over the place with 737 after 737, and she was barely able to keep up. And her continued difficulty in getting the airplane down showed she had some issues staying on top of the airplane, and it was getting ahead of her.

However dropping the flaps in a climbing slow turn is such a big error that I don't think any experienced pilot should make regardless of the workload. That is just a huge red flag. I'm sure if Dudley was her instructor and saw her ever drop flaps in a climbing slow turn, he would have been all over that as it shows a complete lack of understanding of the dangers of a stall and spin.

As humans, we are batter able to deal with one thing at a time, but when we have multiple things happening, it causes us to make mistakes. In this case, there were several things against her.

I don't want this to come across the wrong way, but I'd rather see a pilot like her to be flying something more forgiving like a Piper Cherokee. That is what Piper designed the entire Cherokee line for, including the big six seater retractables. You can see by the shadow the airplane was in a spin.

Also, an airplane like a Cirrus that has a chute and G1000's, it would be nice to see some kind of logic in that airplane that, if the airplane is ever in a spin the chute will automatically deploy at 1000 ft AGL or so. I'm not sure what altitude the airplane was at but an airplane with a parachute should never be able to hit the ground with it still packed.

Scott.

[KarelPatch]

Do we agree that this is a very basic mistake any pilot knows about in theory? Or she wouldn’t even have known how to use flaps otherwise, right?
I understand that she wasn’t enough prepared so that this mistake should have been impossible to make but now, what do you think happened in her mind? What sequence? I refuse to believe that she didn’t know that raising flaps while climbing at such a low speed was unsafe.

[Oracle427]

I've come across CFI's that believe that a slip, not skid, is dangerous and should not be used to lose altitude. Any training deficiency is possible!

[DHenriques_]

I've come across CFI's that believe that a slip, not skid, is dangerous and should not be used to lose altitude. Any training deficiency is possible!

I've always found this amusing, as slip is actually anti-spin.
Dudley Henriques

[dvm]

Here is a interesting article I found.

https://www.pilotsofamerica.com/communi ... nts.90873/