Just got a note from a friend who knows the pilots and planes involved and this is his comment. He's in the UK currently and the crash was in RSA so he doesn't have anything more current that what he says here.
"Yeah, knew Nevil well. He had an Extra and was doing well but I think hard times forced him to sell and buy Garth Kopke’s GK1 (KR1 with Honda motor).He’s been pushing it a bit hard. Borrowed Dickie’s KR and pulled the wings off doing Aeros" Sakkie's plane ZS-UKU had crashed in a flat spin and killed Sakkie and a passenger sometime prior to my arrival in SA in 1990. The photo shown in the previous issue of KRNET ostensibly shows a broken spar under the seat. A plane coming down flat, hard enough to kill the passengers, could likely have damaged the spar and if it hadn't been strengthened correctly, could have been a weak spot. Normally that section of spar is the strongest so for it to break indicates an inadequate repair . . .agree?. Also, as John says above, the pilot (Nevil) was an Extra pilot and was accustomed to pulling strong aerobatic loads but even so . . . . Ken Cottle has spec'ed my KR-1½ at +9 and -7. A person would black out before ever getting close to those loads. I think when the dust settles we'll discover a spar that had not been re-built or repaired correctly following the flat-spin crash. Mike StirewaltKSEE ________________________________ -Please see LIST RULES and KRnet info at http://www.krnet.org/info.html -Change list delivery options at https://list.krnet.org/list/krnet.list.krnet.org/ Affinity List Info Board -Search recent KRnet Archives at https://list.krnet.org/empathy/list/krnet.list.krnet.org/ -Search John Bouyea's decades of archive at https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
