Curtis L. Olson 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.
Here is the approach they were flying (I think): https://www.americanflyers.net/ap/default.asp?t=download&f=L\011L$100.PDF I assume that the King Air had a serviceable DME, so they would have had an MDA of 1740ft ASL (371ft AGL) if the approach hasn't changed since 2000. I read somewhere that the reported ceiling at the time was 700ft lowering to 400ft. KEVM is an untowered airport, so they must have been using the altimeter setting from somewhere else nearby. airnav.com mentions that there are 72ft trees 2,550ft from the end of rwy 27: http://www.airnav.com/airport/KEVM However, the plane was a fair bit back from there. We can only speculate on what went wrong: 1. The altimeter setting they were using differed too much from the local pressure (but wouldn't they have had a radar altimeter as well?). They descended to MDA early (dive and drive) and flew into the trees. 2. The plane was carrying some ice, raising its stall speed, and possibly even leading to a tail stall. 3. The pilots busted MDA looking for the airport. I don't think that #3 is very likely in this case -- they would have known about the trees and have been aware of the icing conditions, and wouldn't be likely to be fishing around like that on a non-precision approach. If the plane did have a serviceable DME, then #1 doesn't seem likely either, since they would have stayed at 1840ft ASL until 2nm out, which is about where they crashed -- the altimeter error would have had to be large to bring them into the trees there. Given that the plane's heading was 90deg off on impact after a steep descent, #2 might be more likely -- they might not have noticed last-minute ice building if they were concentrating on the approach. We'll have to wait and see what the NTSB comes up with. All the best, David -- David Megginson, [EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.megginson.com/ _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
