quote:

Originally posted by rscalzo:



No one bothered to stop and at least help push the aircraft off to the side???

Quebec Must have thought he was an English speaker.

There is something seriously wrong with the people in the cars.

quote:

Originally posted by hrcjon:
There is something seriously wrong with the people in the cars.

Two stood out to me, the ones that wouldn't get off the planes ass after it was on the ground.

quote:

Originally posted by rscalzo:

quote:

I'd have loved to be the first police car on the scene, would have gotten some great photos.

No one bothered to stop and at least help push the aircraft off to the side???


Years back I responded to the crash of a Jetranger. Tail rotor failure. Did an amazing job of autorotating into the only tiny clear area near the NJ Turnpike. Took photos with the pilot . Hung out with the NTSB rep from Newark who let me tag along on the initial review. Pretty cut and dried at that stage.

That's impressive on a tail rotor failure as you have no torque control.

One of the recoveries I did with a friend years ago was a medivac helicopter that crashed very badly after losing a tailrotor. Clearly it was not the original crash victim's day as neither he nor anyone else on the helicopter survived his second crash of the day.

OK, you are behind the plane. you have a once in several lifetimes opportunity to at least find out what happened. You don't even stop to ask much less find out if there is a medical emergency?

You would have had to pry me away with a crow bar...

Greased it!

One article suggested this airport was his destination and it's less than a mile from Hwy 40.
Someone smarter than me (and with more spare time) can plot it out on aerials.

http://www.airnav.com/airport/CYQB

quote:

Originally posted by Graniteguy:
Why didn't they use the nearly deserted service ramp to the right?

Service ramps are frequently short, narrow, and descending. His wing span is over several lanes of traffic. The main traffic area was flat.

That's a good smooth pilot, great job, I bet he didn't even spill his cocktail !

quote:

Originally posted by Graniteguy:
Why didn't they use the nearly deserted service ramp to the right?

The problem is that with an off-field landing, the airplane still needs to be flown with a stable approach in terms of airspeed, rate of descent, etc, and it needs to be conducted around obstacles to get there. It needs to be landed straight; an airplane doesn't do well turning on a curved surface on the ground at anything above taxi speed. It's not built that way. The airplane has very small, weak brakes, very minimal steering, small tires, and is nearly 40 feet wide (think parking an F350 in a tight parking space, but doing it at 80 miles per hour).

What might look clear when setting up for the approach to land, may change as cars enter the area. Once committed to land, attempting to change landing areas often proves to be disastrous.

The approach is flown at best glide speed; it's the minimum drag speed; any speed higher or lower results in a higher rate of descent and a reduced glide distance. For most light airplanes, this is true even if the engine is producing power: in the case of the video, smoke is evident as the aircraft descends. It could be anything from an onboard fire to burning oil in or outside the engine to a rich mixture. Hard to say. In any event, with an engine failure (or partial-power failure, which appears to be the case in the video), the airplane is flown at best glide speed.

It's clear from the video that the pilots is making adjustments to pitch for obstacles and probably to adjust for traffic speeds. Reducing speed to pitch up for obstacle clearance means lost energy and reduced speed below best glide, which increases rate of descent; there's a very limited margin of how far one can go below best glide before the airplane is too slow and either stalls or develops an excesive rate of descent. Much above 500-600 fpm will do damage or injure the occupant.

As the airplane is preparing to land, especially in a low-wing cherokee, the pilot has no view of what's beneath him. He doesn't want to descent into cars or too close. No one wants to hurt others, and from a personal preservation perspective, the airplane is a fancy beercan. It offers no significant crash protection if someone runs into it on the road, and airplanes with wings full of fuel tend to burn when they get torn up. The airplane doesn't have air bags. Imagine racing around in traffic in your car, but the car is made of .032 or thinner aluminum, and little else. The airplane is built just strong enough to survive in-flight loads imposed on the structure, but not for crashes.

Pilots routinely land on a runway, but it's a 150' wide flat piece of concrete that's a mile long, and when landing, the pilot owns the runway. There's really no environment for teaching landing between moving obstacles, so the pilot's first experience would have been that landing.

As for other cars following too closely, drivers are used to how other vehicles behave, including the way the other cars slow down. Drivers take their cues from brake lights, and the way the car ahead of them dips, swerves, etc. The airplane doesn't have brake lights. The pilot would have been touching down around highway speed, about 65 knots or less. Without power, the airplane would have slowed initially with wheel friction and aerodynamic braking, but shortly with the pilots own brake application. The airplane rate of deceleration is not like a car, and without any visual indication of what's going on, to other drivers, who were already taken by surprise at the appearance of something that just dropped out of sky in front of them, reaction time would have been further reduced. Ever have someone cut in front of you, drastically reducing your braking distance, and then hit their brakes? What if they didn't have brake lights? What if they appeared out of the sky, and didn't behave like a car? Remember that the airplane itself is a significant distraction, and the driver is trying to process it. One more reason why landing on a road with traffic is a dangerous proposition.

If the airplane had set up for a landing on the off ramp, assuming the pilot thought he had wingtip clearance (nearly 40' wide, remember) for the approach and landing, and if the pilot thought he could negotiate any turns in the road (and any downhill gradient significantly changes brake energy required for the landing), then he's have to be able to count on no traffic appearing to change his landing plan. The fact that he's making an emergency landing precludes the possibility of rejecting the landing and going around, and the fact that he's executing a forced landing near the airport indicates some urgency. He needs to get down and get stopped now, and he's got one shot at it.

All pilots train for engine failures, and in single engine airplanes, pilots train for forced landings without power. Very few get actual off-field landing experience, and even those who do may be faced with completely unfamiliar, less-than-ideal conditions during an emergency event. In addition, the actual execution of an emergency landing is quite different than training, so all things considered, it's worth giving the guy a pass.

quote:

Originally posted by Blackmore:

quote:

Originally posted by rscalzo:



No one bothered to stop and at least help push the aircraft off to the side???

Quebec Must have thought he was an English speaker.

Or they were in Subarus

One thing I learned in the US of Air Force flight line operations and procedures.

Always yield to the aircraft, for they are bigger and have more BTUs to use against you, in the event of a physical confrontation.

It was carburetor ice. The link has an aerial photo that shows the highway in relation to the airport.

https://www.aopa.org/news-and-...lot&utm_medium=email

EMERGENCY HIGHWAY LANDING CAPTURED ON CAMERA
PILOT INVOLVED DESCRIBES WHAT CANADIAN MOTORIST FILMED

April 20, 2020
By Jim Moore

The pilot of a Piper Cherokee who picked a fair-weather day to finally get out of the house and fly was forced to land on a busy highway, becoming an instant social media star who handled the emergency without putting a scratch on the airplane.

“I am that pilot,” Florent Gagné confirmed, reached by phone at his home in Quebec City Canada, on April 17, the day after a video posted on Twitter documented his unplanned feat of airmanship and collected the first of what would become millions of views within days.

A retired civil servant who has owned his Piper Cherokee for 25 years, Gagné would have no doubt preferred not to attract so much attention. But landing a single-engine piston airplane in the flow of traffic on a busy highway, in the age of cellphone cameras, will do that.

“It worked rather well,” he conceded, “in the circumstances.”

Gagné, 74, said he had never had trouble with carburetor ice in his 1973 PA–28-140 until April 16. Restless and cooped up like the rest of the world during the global coronavirus pandemic, he had been looking forward to some time in the air. He had moved the airplane from its winter hangar to the summer parking spot a week before, and carefully checked it over ahead of this first flight of the spring. Gagné was ready to pounce when the weather turned favorable.

“Yesterday it was a beautiful, sunny, fresh day,” Gagné recalled. “It was rather cold here in Québec, but the humidity was not that important.”

Gagné said he has flown his Cherokee in all seasons, though lately he takes the winters off. The first sign of trouble came soon after departing from Quebec City Jean Lesage International Airport.

‘A good runup’

A thorough preflight gave Gagné no reason to hesitate. His Cherokee is only a couple of years beyond a major overhaul, with new paint and a new interior.

“That plane is a very good plane,” he said. “It is very well maintained. I’m very fussy about that.”

He fired up the engine, which ran perfectly as he taxied to Runway 29.

“I did a good runup, also, and the engine was running very well,” Gagné recalled.

Departing west, Gagné was cleared to climb to 2,500 feet, and was just passing 2,000 when the engine began to run rough.

“It was only for a second or two,” the pilot recalled. It got his attention, but the quick return to normal operation suggested a drop of water might have sneaked into the fuel system. “After another two minutes, not more than that, it started to run rough again.”

Gagné needed no further provocation to turn back toward the airport and request an immediate landing clearance “that I got right away.”

The engine was managing about 1,600 rpm, well short of full power. Gagné worked his emergency checklist, including mixture full rich and carb heat on.

“I did everything that they teach us,” Gagné said, noting the engine performance “probably got a little worse after I put the carb heat on.”

He had a clear view of the airport, but there was an obvious problem with the plan: He was losing altitude quickly, sinking below the pattern altitude.

“I had the airport in sight, right in front of me, about two or three kilometers,” Gagné recalled. But with just 800 or 900 feet of altitude remaining, he realized that his prospects of making the runway with available power were dim.

“I told the controller at that time that I was going to land on the highway, 40, here in Québec City.”

Captured on camera
Autoroute Félix-Leclerc, as the highway is officially known, is often jammed with traffic, but Gagné expected to find less than usual, given the social distancing directives in place in Canada (and most of the rest of the world). “The roads are supposed to be less busy than [usual], but yesterday, there was a lot of traffic.”

The longtime pilot pointed out that close attention to the video, filmed from a car that was also westbound on the highway connecting Quebec City and Montreal, reveals black smoke just visible from the exhaust of the stricken Piper, close enough to be seen from the moving cars below. The approach took him over a bridge on final, followed by a highway sign spanning six lanes of the divided highway, the bases of which are about 1,350 feet past the bridge. That left Gagné just over 3,000 feet of slightly inclined, three-lane highway to work with.

A convenient gap in the traffic gave him space to put the Piper down with authority, no bounce, and join the flow of westbound traffic.

Still producing about 1,600 rpm, the stricken engine produced just enough power to allow Gagné to politely pull to the right, opening up a lane for passing traffic. His arrival appeared to catch some drivers by surprise, but the vehicles managed to slow and pass through the opening without putting a scratch on the airplane.

Gagné did not have to wait long for roadside assistance. Within minutes, six or more police cruisers and at least two fire trucks were on the scene.

“I always wonder why they come [with such a] big arsenal,” Gagné mused, though it turned out to be handy having some help pushing the airplane more fully out of the travel lanes. Gagné had stopped just short of the airport exit, just over 1 nautical mile from the runway he had hoped to land on when he took off minutes before. Gagné summoned one of his two sons, who is also a pilot, to give him a ride.

With the help of some lumber to make up for the Cherokee’s wider-than-a-car wheelbase, the airplane was loaded on a flatbed in relatively short order, and Gagné and his son followed the “caravan” for the short drive back to the airport. Once it was back on the ramp, Gagné climbed back inside and started the engine, which ran beautifully.

“I was just, you know, ready to go back and try it and go back up there,” Gagné recalled. “I decided to make a big boy of myself to go back to parking and wait for the mechanic to come.”

Further inspection by the mechanic found no anomalies. The ice had probably melted off on the shoulder of the highway. Gagné noted that the black smoke visible in the video suggests that he might have had a slightly less exciting day had he leaned the mixture “maybe a little” while still in the air, though that’s not what the factory checklist instructs. He did not express regret, however.

“I’m alive, and there’s not even a scratch on the plane,” Gagné said.

“But there is a scratch in my pocket,” he added: The trip from highway off-ramp to airport set him back close to $1,000.

Gagné may by now have had the chance to make an actually relaxing flight, and he will likely be as meticulous as ever when it comes to preflight and runup. But he’s clearly prepared for whatever might arise.

“We have to be ready at any time, you know?” the 40-year pilot said. “That’s what I realize.”

I would fly with Florent anytime.

This is a case of the pilot having handled well an emergency that should never have been allowed to happen.

Way to go pilot for setting it down easy.

Way to go A-hole drivers for reinforcing my belief that too many people are selfish jack wagons. Also, not even a thumbs up from the Camera guy on the way past him?

quote:

Originally posted by V-Tail:

Carb ice.

Maintenance.

Excessively rich idle mixture.

Preventable.

Basic airmanship.