airnutz wrote:
Matt Gunsch wrote:
Dan Jones wrote:
I haven't read the accident report. Was that the airplane's initial test flight, or had it been flying for awhile? Unusual that both engine's would calve like that together - almost makes one think she took on a load of bad fuel.
They had changed a tank out a couple of months before, and the plane had been running good at times, and bad other times. My personal bet is fuel tank venting.
The pilot did nothing wrong,
Engines running good times/bad times??

The pilot ignored this situation..decided to keep an
appointment for a photoshoot..carried a passenger in a flight ending in disaster??? He did nothing wrong???
Hopefully an example of the CAF in the early death throes of leaving the "bad old days" behind them...

the plane was flying well enough to fly from San Marcos to Breckenridge, so it was flying before. They had been having intermittant problems and were going nuts trying to figure it out. It would run for hours with no problems, then pack up and run like sugar.
They took the plane to the run up pad, performed as many checks on the ground as they could, and it passed them all, they taxied back, we recowled it, and then they went out to fly it. they performed thier runup and everything was good, there was no sign of anything bad, so they took off, and it was not until rotation that it started to smoke. There was not enough runway left to stop so he did what he thought best, get it into the air as high as he could, and hopefully limp around and land. The reason he did not land on the highway was he never got high enough to make a turn, he barely made a left turn before there were unable to keep it in the air any longer.
I don't remember a L-bird looking for them. The Zero took off after they went down, and it took him a while to find them. Lefty was all ready in the air and he could not find it.
The pilot did nothing wrong, and as far as the passenger, she was crew, and had been working on the plane,so it was not a beaver flight. Lori had been busting her butt working on that plane, and the only reason I went over to help is my 4 planes were out flying, and I had nothing to do.