Jon Berndt writes: > > Connections: a good friend of mine just finished King Air training and > > passed his check ride this past thursday. He works for the same > > company that operated Paul Wellstone's plane which crashed on Friday > > killing him, his wife, his daughter, both pilots and 3 other campain > > staffers. (Paul Wellstone was a MN senetor running for re-election > > this fall.) Anyway, my friend knew one of the pilots and had worked > > previously with him at Pan Am. > > I have a feeling I wouldn't have seen eye-to-eye with many of Wellstone's > views (as interpreted and explained by my Minnesota relatives who just > finished up a visit with us here in the warm and wet South), but that's > sure a tragic thing - his family being wiped out like that. Did he have > any other children? My guess is that if Mondale runs, his GOP opponent > won't have a prayer. Think so?
This is definitely a terrible tragedy. He had two additional sons and 6 grand kids. Agree or disagree with his views, he was in it for the right reasons -- not to pad his resume or his bank account, but to try his best to make a difference or go down swinging. But, beyond that, it's probably better to discuss the political aspects of all of this in a different forum. :-) > > It would be really interesting to have a King Air in flight gear. > > I was thinking that, too. For now, the C310 is probably the closest thing we have ... fgfs --offset-distance=7 --altitude=2500 --vc=120 --airport-id=KEVM --aircraft=c310u3a-3d This will start you off on the west bound approach they were attempting. From what I heard they plane crashed about 2 miles south of the normal approach path. I've also heard they crashed 2 miles away from the airport ... they were heading mostly south when they went in, so for some reason they were way off their approach path, very low. Perhaps they missed their approach and were trying to go around? So far I haven't heard any indication that they've found a mechanical problem, but there wasn't much left of the fuselage and cockpit to look at. The plane wasn't equiped with any sort of cockpit or flight data recorder. Other planes were in the air in the area before and after and no one indicated that the conditions were especially daunting. Ceilings were low (700' or so), but pilots are trained to handle that. So did one of the pilots think they saw the runway and let themselves decend too low and by the time they realized that wasn't the runway they were too low, too slow, out of whack, maybe a little ice??? Or was there some sort of mechanical issue that forced them to abort their approach, try to go around, but they never made it? My buddy who is now officially a King Air pilot was speculating on what sorts of things could catch an experienced pilot off guard ... if you have a runaway prop govener failure, it can make the plane react like the _other_ engine went bad. If you try to shut that down to quickly before figuring out what exactly is going on, you might not realize you are shutting down your good engine ... if you are already < 700' agl, that doesn't leave you much room to figure out what's going on, and things go south pretty quickly up there if you get behind the curve ... all complete speculation, hopefully they will find some clues that shed light on what really happened. Curt. -- Curtis Olson IVLab / HumanFIRST Program FlightGear Project Twin Cities [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Minnesota http://www.menet.umn.edu/~curt http://www.flightgear.org _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
