BEEN THERE. DONE THAT!
Notes on the East Side aircraft accident:
I was in the front seat piloting a similar single engine plane (the instructor was in the rear seat). The instructor was unhappy with my left turns which were nice, easy, sweeping arcs."No, dammit, you need to turn the plane tighter, we don’t own all the sky!". So I tried again, a little tighter. "Still too wide, he yelled. Don't be such a wimp! Throw that stick over hard. You can't break the plane!" (see note)
Well, nobody calls me a wimp! So hard over I pulled the stick, and started into a really tight turn. Suddenly we started rolling over as a voice from the rear kept muttering "get your nose up, get your nose up!" Suddenly the horizon indicator was turning in circles and all I could see was sky, grass, sky, grass, sky, grass - over and over. The speed indicator was climbing, the altimeter dropping, and everything on both sides was getting grayer and greyer…I discovered the Graveyard Spin!
(Because the nose had fallen off, the control surface on the wings started having a different effect - instead of turning the plane to the left, they were just tightening the now nose-down spiral. Since we were headed straight down, my attempts to recover by pulling back on the stick just made matters worse - we didn't pull up, we just spun faster! Finally a voice from the rear said -
"Let Go, I've Got It, Let Go, I've Got It." So, I let go - I'm not that possessive. Slowly the pilot recovered from the spin, which left us just diving straight down, and then tried to regain altitude. We had started at 1800 feet - we leveled off at a bit over 100 feet (almost jumping distance.) We had attained a downward motion of over 240kts (max speed for the plane is supposed to be 180 knots). We had pulled over 3gs - max allowed stress on the plane was 2.4. (Inspection on landing indicated that almost all of the rivets holding the skin on the plane had popped and the plane was a total loss.)
The delay in recovering from this spin is because my sudden turn and precipitous nose-down caused rapid acceleration and the pilot had momentarily blacked out in the rear seat (my high levels of adrenalin kept me conscious).
Now our friends going down the East river had to make a sharp turn to the left to return the way they had come; the inexperienced pilot might not have know the tricks of recovering from the spin, and the building simply got in the way (an observer noted that the plane seemed to be doing acrobatics), and the plane did not hit nose first, but rather smacked into the wall belly-first.
der Brucer
Note: Apparently the pilot had not heard about my previous days experience which involved totaling-out a T28 by crashing into an aircraft carrier - but that's another story.)
