231 Down in North Georgia pasture

[Heidiho]

With insurance rates climbing higher, here is one more reason why you should always visually check the amount of fuel in your tanks and not rely solely on the gauges.  This accident happened Wednesday, December 16, 2020.  One soul on board, no injuries.  The pilot actually made a  pretty smooth landing—only one skid mark on the ground—-in the breeches, unknown.  

[carusoam]

@mike_elliott (gear up in a field, no injuries)

For the records...

A bit of a guess on the tail number... not absolutely positive...

https://flightaware.com/resources/registration/N231NK

Great field choice, well executed... 

Best regards,

-a-

[Davidv]

11 minutes ago, Heidiho said:

With insurance rates climbing higher, here is one more reason why you should always visually check the amount of fuel in your tanks and not rely solely on the gauges.  This accident happened Wednesday, December 16, 2020.  One soul on board, no injuries.  The pilot actually made a  pretty smooth landing—only one skid mark on the ground—-in the breeches, unknown.  

Was fuel exhaustion the definitive cause?

[kortopates]

So far, the daily FAA report just says "Engine Failure"

Only a handful of very short flights since August, the last 3 being in Sept, Nov and then Dec 17. However the Flightware activity may well be incomplete since it doesn't show the incident flight on Dec 16th which is puzzling since the other short flights were all included with top altitudes of only 2-3K feet - so doesn't appear like a lack of Ads/b coverage. 

https://www.asias.faa.gov/apex/f?p=100:96:8329269741454::::P96_ENTRY_DATE,P96_MAKE_NAME,P96_FATAL_FLG:18-DEC-20,MOONEY

[PT20J]

FlightAware often misses my flights when they were short and not filed IFR.

 

[mike_elliott]

Thanks Anthony, perhaps speculating a cause based on an emergency landing field, effects on insurance and pilots skills are a bit premature. Thankfully, I dont have to have my wife spend her Christmas writing "the letter".

[rbridges]

Did he land gear up?  Was there a reason why he didn't try a traditional landing?

[Hank]

8 minutes ago, rbridges said:

Did he land gear up?  Was there a reason why he didn't try a traditional landing?

I'da probably tried a regular landing on that pasture, unless it's much shorter than it looks. Maybe he was high over the treeline and didn't have time to adjust?

[aviatoreb]

It ended well.  I am not second guessing this guy who made difficult and successful decisions in the heat of the moment.

[rbridges]

11 minutes ago, Hank said:

I'da probably tried a regular landing on that pasture, unless it's much shorter than it looks. Maybe he was high over the treeline and didn't have time to adjust?

I figured it was something.  Just wondering out loud.  

[steingar]

Maybe he had a high time engine?

[Hank]

21 minutes ago, aviatoreb said:

It ended well.  I am not second guessing this guy who made difficult and successful decisions in the heat of the moment.

I'm just curious. Any landing you can walk away from, especially off field with problems, is a good one!

[aviatoreb]

15 minutes ago, Hank said:

I'm just curious. Any landing you can walk away from, especially off field with problems, is a good one!

Almost - not any landing any time.  But in my book, any landing in an engine out emergency that you can walk away from with zero injuries is a good one.  That said we are Monday morning quarter backing which is a good thing - gaming scenarios as to how to handle an emergency if we find ourselves in the same situation, is mind training - so asking ourselves how we could do a good thing even better is a good thing.

[KLRDMD]

42 minutes ago, steingar said:

Maybe he had a high time engine?

What does a high time engine have to do with anything? "Infant mortality" is much more of a concern than an engine that has been running well for two or three decades and a couple of thousand hours.

[Davidv]

 

16 minutes ago, KLRDMD said:

What does a high time engine have to do with anything? "Infant mortality" is much more of a concern than an engine that has been running well for two or three decades and a couple of thousand hours.

I could be wrong, but I believe he was referring to the nefarious act of "forgetting" to put the gear down if he had a catastrophic engine failure or was near overhaul.  In this case insurance pays.  However, if you're making an off airport landing insurance is probably going to be involved anyway so it doesn't matter as much as making a perfect emergency landing on a runway with an engine that's toast.

[mike_elliott]

13 minutes ago, Davidv said:

 

I could be wrong, but I believe he was referring to the nefarious act of "forgetting" to put the gear down if he had a catastrophic engine failure or was near overhaul.  In this case insurance pays.  However, if you're making an off airport landing insurance is probably going to be involved anyway so it doesn't matter as much as making a perfect emergency landing on a runway with an engine that's toast.

Unless you KNOW you are making an emergency landing on a well groomed, off airport field suitable for a normal gear down landing, Error on the side of caution and keep the gear up and get the door opened, push the door lock forward while open. This will make sure your not trapped by a stuck door, possibly upside down in the weeds on fire (UWOF). First step in any emergency is to say "this belongs to the insurance company" then save all human life.

[kortopates]

50 minutes ago, mike_elliott said:

Unless you KNOW you are making an emergency landing on a well groomed, off airport field suitable for a normal gear down landing, Error on the side of caution and keep the gear up and get the door opened, push the door lock forward while open. This will make sure your not trapped by a stuck door, possibly upside down in the weeds on fire (UWOF). First step in any emergency is to say "this belongs to the insurance company" then save all human life.

Exactly right - unless you're very confident you have the room to roll out without hitting something why take any additional risk? Landing on the belly is going to provide the shortest landing possible with least chance of running into something during the rollout.  It not easy to aim for a clear spot AND slow down the aircraft. I saw a Bonanza successfully land gear down into a small park, a bit fast and then roll right into a house and explode! Don't give the plane a second thought - you're not replaceable. 

[fantom]

Trying to land gear down has the potential of causing more damage than a clean gear up like the pictured one.

Shearing the gear off, cartwheeling, nose over, toasted gear doors....you name it. Leave the gear up, and stop quickly and usually straight.

Subject pilot did a good job putting her down!

 

[kortopates]

12 hours ago, PT20J said:

FlightAware often misses my flights when they were short and not filed IFR.

 

That certainly used to be true, but these days since ADS/B has become ubiquitous I have never failed to see a VFR flight show up on Flightaware. Have you recently seen missing  flights? (It used to be that you had to  turn on "positional flights" - but I don't think that's the case anymore). Obviously success of this depends on being in Ads/B coverage but in my area you can't escape it. Even going over the local mountains into the desert for ground reference maneuvers is fully captured by Ads/B. In fact, on our winter flying safari to CENAM fully 95% of our flying was captured by ADS/B on Flightaware in Mexico and CENAM. Flightaware's map of Ads/B coverage: https://flightaware.com/adsb/coverage

Given the incident plane was captured in the past by Ads/B most of which where short and at low altitudes  I expect the incident flight to be captured too these days unless there was an outage.

[aviatoreb]

41 minutes ago, kortopates said:

Exactly right - unless you're very confident you have the room to roll out without hitting something why take any additional risk? Landing on the belly is going to provide the shortest landing possible with least chance of running into something during the rollout.  It not easy to aim for a clear spot AND slow down the aircraft. I saw a Bonanza successfully land gear down into a small park, a bit fast and then roll right into a house and explode! Don't give the plane a second thought - you're not replaceable. 

A technical question.  Clearly a gear up reduces the roll out phase of an emergency landing, and of course it mitigates the possibility of flipping if the wheels would catch on a ditch or something.  But gear up also increase float time if you are a bit fast.  So that tends to increase landing distance.  I am guessing that nonetheless at a given approach speed, you will still be shorter if gear up.

[kortopates]

2 minutes ago, aviatoreb said:

A technical question.  Clearly a gear up reduces the roll out phase of an emergency landing, and of course it mitigates the possibility of flipping if the wheels would catch on a ditch or something.  But gear up also increase float time if you are a bit fast.  So that tends to increase landing distance.  I am guessing that nonetheless at a given approach speed, you will still be shorter if gear up.

Maybe or maybe not. I think its wash.

First you have the same issue whether landing gear up or gear down - for either you can hold it off till it settles on the ground or if you were looking at obstacles ahead you might elect to fly it on to the ground taking your chances coming in hotter without obstacles rather than floating into them at a higher speed. (But with the gear down its going to make less of a difference since energy is dissipated much more slowly)

In truth, I don't think we have as much control on the point of impact as we would like in such an emergency. The choices we make at the time of setting up for the landing and executing the final approach will have the greatest impact in the final outcome (e.g., flaps, slipping etc). Our ability to make last second corrections is severely limited IMO.

But interesting thought for sure. 

[PT20J]

16 minutes ago, kortopates said:

That certainly used to be true, but these days since ADS/B has become ubiquitous I have never failed to see a VFR flight show up on Flightaware. Have you recently seen missing  flights? (It used to be that you had to  turn on "positional flights" - but I don't think that's the case anymore). Obviously success of this depends on being in Ads/B coverage but in my area you can't escape it. Even going over the local mountains into the desert for ground reference maneuvers is fully captured by Ads/B. In fact, on our winter flying safari to CENAM fully 95% of our flying was captured by ADS/B on Flightaware in Mexico and CENAM. Flightaware's map of Ads/B coverage: https://flightaware.com/adsb/coverage

Given the incident plane was captured in the past by Ads/B most of which where short and at low altitudes  I expect the incident flight to be captured too these days unless there was an outage.

Paul, I hadn’t really looked at it for a few months, but all my recent flights have been captured. It used to be that some were missing or incomplete, but it seems this has been improved. I’m not sure whether that’s good or bad . 

Skip

[PT20J]

15 minutes ago, aviatoreb said:

A technical question.  Clearly a gear up reduces the roll out phase of an emergency landing, and of course it mitigates the possibility of flipping if the wheels would catch on a ditch or something.  But gear up also increase float time if you are a bit fast.  So that tends to increase landing distance.  I am guessing that nonetheless at a given approach speed, you will still be shorter if gear up.

I’ve always subscribed to the view that survivability is mostly a matter of letting the airframe absorb most of the energy. The landing gear is an additional energy absorbing component that might help minimize the damage to the occupants, so in most cases, I’d probably put the gear down. 

Skip

[kortopates]

54 minutes ago, PT20J said:

I’ve always subscribed to the view that survivability is mostly a matter of letting the airframe absorb most of the energy. The landing gear is an additional energy absorbing component that might help minimize the damage to the occupants, so in most cases, I’d probably put the gear down. 

Skip

absolutely, you can't change the laws of physics. And no doubt you've seen many as I have where things didn't go well, both gear up or gear down. I was of the same opinion about leaning towards to gear down but now after having seen a number of gear down emergency landings begin with a successful landing leading to a catastrophic rollout I've altered my thinking to require sufficient room for rollout before lowering the gear. But just as vital,  is landing touching down under control as slow as possible; but precision and speed are tradeoff's. 

That said, because of how easily things can go sideways, in many cases its not at all possible to look at one of these in hindsight and really know how gear up or down would have made a difference.  

Edited December 21, 2020 by kortopates

[aviatoreb]

To counter point - I have read the theory that gear down that ripping the gear off in a ditch dissipates energy.

as for me I subscribe to the gear up - most of the time - school. For all the reasons said.