Accident yesterday in Scotland in which two people died ~ the one 80 and the other 16 ~ caught my eye for reason that the first of those numbers resonates: people over the age of sixty-five are responsible for 80% of all heart attacks. As a man, worth knowing too that 70% are suffered by men as against women.
Weather yesterday afternoon out of Glasgow ~ I've been based at the airport and run Ben Lomond northwest of the crash location on a summer's eve ~ looked to be insignificant with practically no cloud reported and twilight some way off.
Sadly I don't pay the premium for after-casts on FlightRadar24 for the Tomahawk ~ again a personal favourite among light aircraft ~ because the altitude data would be telling.
Nonetheless the track some way along the periphery of Loch Lomond looks wholly erratic in itself. Bear in mind too that flying is not a stress-free activity, and is the more likely to raise blood-pressures as and when passengers are involved.
Accordingly it would appear unlikely that the pilot ~ which I'm assuming is the 80-year old as you have to be 17 for the licence ~ would be prone to undertaking any series of steep turns for the fun of it.
(There is a possibility that both were pilots and the younger doing the flying, though it would be from the un-instrumented right seat unless the 80-year old were also an instructor... stay with me on this.)
But one way or another, I would have to guess it's the older of the two flying. Given that, I've had two engines stop on me in single-engined aircraft like this, one fixed with a subsequent restart (having been due to inlet icing) and another ending in a forced landing at Luton Airport.
And nothing much from the aircraft's tracks looks like anything that would explain a partial failure (and likely return to Glasgow), nor what you'd want to do should the engine have failed.
We don't know either where the aircraft was headed, but in visual navigation terms and sat on the left, you're following line features like the edge of Loch Lomond. This is in fact what happens until a drift over the lake and abandonment of progress that had largely pursued straight lines.
There is then always a possibility of a medical turn for the worse resulting in either (a) the pilot continuing with decidedly degraded performance or (b) the pilot having conked out and the 16-year old passenger having to assume the reins.
I've taught people to fly single- and twin-engined light aircraft and jet airliners and what is immediately obvious to anyone doing so is that the uninitiated lose control of direction rather than height in the first instance... note that the recent hijack of a Boeing 737 in the Middle East involved a passenger recovering from the death-dive rather than any pilot, and on the basis of what he'd only seen on TV.
Aircraft tend to be stable in (vertical) pitch but unstable in (horizontal) direction, which is how the Wright Brothers used to crash. Turns in aircraft also demonstrate negative stability in terms of the fact departures from straight and level are inclined to get worse instead of better.
This is compounded by the fact inexperienced pilots finding themselves at a steeper and steeper bank angle and tighter and tighter turn instinctively pull at controls and so inadvertently tighten the turn. At the same time the nose of the aircraft drops and so speed increases, in some cases to point of break-up: it's called a 'spiral dive' and like the stall is what killed any number of the earliest aviators.
But back to my 80/20 rule: if you're under twenty, you really don't want to get into an aircraft with anyone who's turned 80.
Or me for that matter.
