What: Piper Cherokee
Where: crashed in trees two miles from Alpine County, Calif., airport, near Woodfords south of Lake Tahoe.
When: late Thursday morning
Who: Pilot 53-year-old Raymond Wieveg
Why: Pilot radioed in engine failure then attempted an emergency landing. The pilot was the only one on board. He did not survive the crash.
What: DEL RIO AVIATION INC Arrow Falcon UH-58C crop-duster helicopter
Where: Escalon, about 70 miles southeast of Sacramento, CA
When: August 27, 2012
Who: 1 aboard
Why: 8 a.m. Monday a cropduster crashed in an orchard. According to his son, the 71-year-old pilot, Bill Cavanaugh, has 20,000 hours of flying.
Cavanaugh sustained injuries and was hospitalized at San Joaquin General Hospital.
What: Pamir Airways Antonov AN-24 en route from Kundus to Kabul Afghanistan
Where: Kabul on May 17th 2010
When: May 17th 2010
Who: 38 passengers and 6 crew
Why: Lost connection with ATC 40 minutes from the airport. The wreckage, found at Salang Pass, displayed no sign of life.
The report of the Henan Airlines crash suggests that Henan Airlines be fiend $795,000 due to safety issues and suggests the chief pilot should have his pilot’s license revoked, be removed from his post and expelled from the Communist Party, and should also face criminal charges.
The report says “says chief pilot Qi Quanjun did not locate the runway before landing.” The jet crashed 2260 feet short of the runway. The pilot crash landed under conditions of poor visibility, then left the plane, failed to evacuate the passengers and rescue the injured. The report names 19 people in all as contributing to the accident. Airline officials and local civil aviation authorities are also cited in the report and may be subject to “disciplinary penalties, be demoted or dismissed.”
Click to view full size photo at Airliners.net
Contact photographer Weimeng
What: Shenzhen Airlines/Kunpeng/Henan Airlines Embraer ERJ-190 en route from Harbin to Yichun China
Where: Yichun China
When: Aug 24th 2010
Who: 91 passengers (including 5 children) and 5 crew; 43 immediate deaths, 3 serious injuries and 50 minor injuries
Why: The plane overran the runway—and departed the runway on landing—at Lindu airport in Yichun city in Heilongjiang province at 10:10 p.m, split on impact, exploded, and burst into flames. 53 people were rescued, three of whom with serious injuries.
An investigation in 2008 revealed 100 pilots employed by Henan Airlines’ parent company had falsified their flying credentials; and about a hundred pilots flying for other airlines were found to have done the same thing.
What: Robertson R-22 en route from Norwich in Chenango County to Zanesville, Ohio.
Where: found in wooded area of the Town of Dryden, east of Ithaca.
When: Found 9:30 a.m. Sunday.
Who: Pilot Earl L. Small Jr., 57, of Powder Springs, Ga.
Why: The pilot has been missing since Thursday
The Boeing-737 flight that crashed in Kazan may have done so under the command of a
Pilot In Command (PIC) who had never performed a real go-around. The PIC had 1000 night flight hours and was properly trained, according to authorities—but if that is the case, how is it being reported that the PIC had never performed a go-around? What is verifiable is that there is a large debris field, a nose down crash. Note how windy it is while they are on the field putting out tape and spraying. Also there is a video being posted that shows a nosedive: http://lifenews.ru/#!news/122878 though whether this is actually the Tatarstan Airlines flight in question is, in fact, questionable.
The PIC had 25000 hours and the copilot had 1900 hours. Reports are that the “pilot of Kazan crash had put the plane into nosedive.” The plane hit nose first. We do not know if it was at the steep angle in the video above or in a more normal angle.
The black box has been recovered, and the preliminary report may be available soon.
Six crew members and 44 passengers died. Their bodies have not been identified yet, through the manifest has been released.
March 20 is the date the search starts again, more on that below.
So yesterday, Thursday, was Airbus’s turn in court–
Today, Friday, Air France has been called in its turn before a judge in France to get its hand slapped. Or get in preparation to get its hand slapped, in ten years or so. Anyway, Air France is also on the mat.
Or, as they call it in France, (to be purists here) Mise en examen
This is a criminal investigation. It is a matter of FRENCH LAW. As it was explained to me, “Every air accident is also a criminal matter, and a judge is appointed to oversee the investigation and follow up including charges if any to be filed.”
So what was the problem with the flight? It crashed. It killed lots of people No one knows for sure why. (Though to some of us it seems obvious.) No black boxes, right? But we’re not idiots. We have plenty of information about what was going on. Not everything, of course, but we have the messages sent by the plane’s computers. They reflect faulty readings which are believed to be the result of faulty pitot tube readings and a series of system failures. We would have a rounder picture of events if the black boxes, which hold crucial information were not misplaced somewhere in the Atlantic. They think they know where it is, (or at least they say they know or say they think they know) based on drift and whatnot (heavy on the whatnot.) But millions have been spent finding this needle in a stack of needles under the ocean, in a submarine mountain range. Nearly 30 million dollars has been spent on the search for the black boxes so far. The cost of the new search is shared by Airbus and Air France and will cost 12.5 million.
What about the details about the mise en examen preliminary manslaughter charges filed Thursday against Airbus? They were filed in French court by Judge Sylvie Zimmerman over the 2009 deaths of 228 people aboard Air France Flight 447. Fatal accidents automatically prompt criminal probes running concurrent with civil investigations, but a couple of points which may not be obvious to Americans not versed in French Justice are that the charges may be issued pending further investigation, and may hinge on the black boxes which have not been found and may never be found; AND the dual investigation slows things down. That may be one item that delayed the Concord trial 10 years after the accident. You’ve seen pictures of a guy walking around with a tiny ankle-biting dog chewing on the hem of one pants leg? Well, instead of a chihuahua, picture the entire french justice system. Might tend to slow down ones progress, do you think?
So Air France will be in court Friday, ie today. Watch the news, because what we saw yesterday about Airbus, we’ll see today about Air France. I hope the families are getting some satisfaction from this, because it is going to be a long (long long long) time before they feel like they’re actually being heard, not herded into obscurity.
