{"id":1774,"date":"2012-12-31T18:55:57","date_gmt":"2013-01-01T01:55:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blackenedroots.com\/blog\/?p=1774"},"modified":"2013-09-14T21:12:38","modified_gmt":"2013-09-15T04:12:38","slug":"surviving-a-plane-crash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blackenedroots.com\/blog\/surviving-a-plane-crash\/","title":{"rendered":"My uncle’s plane crash"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>My uncle Gary was in a fatal plane crash just a few months before I was born. He was only 17 years old and he was taking flying lessons with the hope of earning his pilot’s license. It must have seemed a perfectly safe and reasonable choice to his parents, as they lived close to the Van Nuys airport and his father was also a licensed private pilot.<\/p>\n

Gary and his instructor took off from Van Nuys airport in the single-engine Ercoupe on Saturday, January 22, 1966. The Ercoupe has only two seats\u2014Gary was seated in the left-hand seat and his instructor, Donald K. Carey, was seated in the right-hand seat. On their approach to the Santa Paula airport from the northeast, their plane apparently ran out of fuel just short of the airport. Their plane sputtered and lost altitude. The plane hit a eucalyptus tree in a residential backyard, and nearly hit two houses before it crashed into electrical and telephone wires. The plane made a hard landing on its right side, crushing the right wing and causing fatal injuries to Mr. Carey.<\/p>\n

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In the family history archives that I’m compiling are a couple of contemporary newspaper accounts of the accident. I’ve scanned these and included them below.<\/p>\n

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On the day of the crash, Gary was flying with his instructor in a single-engine Ercoupe. The Ercoupe was a made by an American company, Engineering and Research Corporation (ERCO), from 1937 to 1968. According to\u00a0Wikipedia<\/a>, the Ercoupe “was designed to be the safest fixed-wing aircraft that aerospace engineering could provide at that time.” Below are a few photos of an Ercoupe in action (from The Armchair Aviator, which has a\u00a0great set of photos<\/a>\u00a0of the Ercoupe).<\/p>\n

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The FAA’s Aviation Safety Information Analysis and Sharing System<\/a> (ASIAS, formerly the\u00a0Accident\/Incident Data System or AIDS<\/a>) only tracks accidents since 1978, and their Historical Aircraft Accident Reports database<\/a> only covers the period from 1934 to 1965. The\u00a0NTSB, however, maintains a\u00a0pre-1982 accident database<\/a>\u00a0that did<\/em> have a record of the accident. According to the NTSB accident report entry, the plane was an Alon A-2 Aircoupe (a model of Ercoupe;\u00a0see a brochure from the mid-1960s<\/a>) with the registration number\u00a0N5472E.<\/p>\n

The brief NTSB report<\/a> can be seen\u00a0here<\/a>. The NTSB report concluded that they were making a long final approach at too low an altitude, possibly because they had a hard time judging their distance and altitude due to sunglare (they were flying towards the sun at sunset), and the instructor failed to notice and\/or correct the problems with their approach.<\/p>\n

While the conclusions of the NTSB report state the proximal causes of the crash, they do not state the ultimate cause(s) of the crash. The description of the conditions that led to the unexpected loss of altitude is left out,\u00a0thereby rendering an incomplete picture of the crash. This is not unlike stating that massive trauma from a high-speed impact caused someone’s death, and neglecting to state that the high-speed impact was due to being pushed off a bridge.<\/p>\n

From what I’ve been able to determine, the reason that the plane was coming in too low on its final approach was that the plane’s engine was malfunctioning, making it unable to generate enough thrust to maintain proper altitude.<\/p>\n

The Press Courier article shown above reported that the plane “was approaching the landing strip at the Santa Paula airport from the northeast when it lost power.” Additionally, The Press Courier reported that “a witness to the crash said he heard the engine sputtering and glanced up.”<\/p>\n

In a recent post on the subject, Gary himself reported that the engine had failed:<\/p>\n

Began taking flying lessons in summer of 1965. After soloing and with 30 cockpit hours total, on final approach the engine failed and the plane stalled into a ditch at the end of the runway. My instructor was killed and I was in the hospital with a concussion\u00a0for three days, oblivious to what had just happened.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As to why the engine failed, he stated:<\/p>\n

I was told that the arm to the float in the carburetor became detached, thus flooding the engine. The theory that the plane ran out of fuel is highly unlikely since I manually checked the fuel level during all preflight inspections.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Seen in this light, the accident determinations cited by the NTSB report are little more than red herrings:<\/p>\n