Forward velocity is proportional to lift, assuming your lifting surfaces still work. If you're stalling, standard practice is to apply power and get the nose down so that gravity and engine thrust are working in your favor to put air back under your wings.
In this case though, it sounds like the icing was much worse than they thought and fatally compromised the aerodynamics of the wings, and then the overspeed would have torn at the wings and fuselage... In that circumstance, you're no longer flying a plane, you're riding a javelin.
Training would generally still encourage the pilots to apply power; in the worst-case scenario (here), failing to apply power would not have made the crash survivably slower, so the sum total of best bad actions is still "Apply power and hope you're not in the worst-case scenario."
The pilots were trying to save the plane up until the last moments. They declared an overspeed condition soon after they ran into trouble, so they were aware of it, but did not intentionally cause it.
And if they were so iced over that control surfaces weren't responding and the wings were no longer generating lift, at that point they were well past the "Anything we do is going to have any effect whatsoever on the future" point.
I don't intend to listen to the audio. Second-hand, it sounds as though they did absolutely everything they could after hitting the cell, and the only way to have avoided this whole situation was "Don't fly that route that day."
... a problem that, in general, we see more often in private-jet and single-engine aviation than commercial-carrier aviation. Far more incentives to make a really, really bad call... And when the bad call happens, the Venn diagram of victims and responsible parties tends to have a lot more overlap, so there's, practically speaking, fewer consequences to discourage such bad decisionmaking in the future (can't meaningfully punish the dead, and the dead can't learn from experience what a bad call "smells" like on the lead-up to it).
I don't agree they had no way to avoid this. Every accident is a chain of mistakes, gaps or mechanical issues. We don't know the whole story here, but I do know that planes of this class are not given up for dead when they hit a surprise weather system. If they are, that means they missed something earlier - weather radar was misinterpreted or a bad judgment call was made.
The Mach tuck recovery is counter intuitive, and could lead to further overspeed and forces exceeding design tolerances.
Another possibility is flutter. I read overspeed and icing mentioned by a pilot in the transcript. Therefore I think of those two elements conspiring in an edge case resulting in forces exceeding design limits, something broke, and made recovery impossible.
But anyway, the investigation will likely answer these questions.
agree. some other forums have alluded them losing their horizontal stabilizer (based off it not being in some stills of the plane crashing) - so the something broke case may also be a big element.
No, throttle was surely idle. The plane was just flying vertically. In a dive, you have a 1:1 thrust/weight ratio and can go extremely fast. The pilot reported an overspeed warning on the audio (which people should not listen to if they're sensitive).
My gut says this is a sudden icing incident. Folks are pointing out that they appear to have flown straight into the center of a cell at altitude. A developing thunderstorm is MUCH warmer than the surrounding air, because the water condensing out of the rising/cooling mass buffers the temperature (due to heat of fusion). It can even be supersaturated ("higher than 100% humidity") if this happens fast enough. The water vapor is just desperate for a nucleation site to condense on.
So you have a situation where a metal jet body that is maybe 30C colder than the medium suddenly flies through this soup. It can ice over in seconds to minutes, and the plane ends up with bricks for wings and much more weight than it was designed for, and simply can't stay in the air. Then it dives inexorably.
It’s amazing to me that this post already feels quite old. But then I realized it only happened yesterday. I just feel that way because in today’s world we have seven different dashcam or security camera video feeds popping up on Reddit or X or whatever within minutes of a news event like this.
Sad story in this case. The cockpit audio was quite chilling.
Learjet 60 is about 18 metres long. In one frame it's a little above the ground, in the next it's gone up to about halfway between the cockpit glass and the wing roots, and in the next it's gone.
At 30fps, I make that somewhere in the region of 1000mph.
The speed of sound in air at sea level is around 770mph, and I got 1000mph from 18 metres of plane disappearing into the ground in about a single frame of video.
Let's not argue over the approximate nature of "1000mph" given the measurement constraints.
I think it's pretty much a mercy that no-one aboard would have felt a thing in the last couple of dozen milliseconds.
Last transmission was 22k feet/second, which is 15k mph.
(I thought ATC's cool as a cucumber 'altitude your discretion' was 'interesting' – presumably a formality they need to offer to clear the aircraft, since clearly no discretion was involved.)
Oops, thanks. Not familiar units for me, and I hadn't had a coffee.. that would be an absurd speed of course (nevermind to also have the composure to report it while experiencing it!).
I once read a transcript of an incident where ATC advised an aircraft with multiple engine failures and no hydraulics "Emergency team in attendance, runway at your discretion".
The reply: "Oh you want me to be all fancy and make it a runway, do you? Well, we'll see..."
They got it pretty close to the runway and it all had a far happier ending than this one.
"No immediate reports of anyone on the ground injured or killed." If that's correct, the people in that silver car had the luckiest day of their lives.
If you have an ounce of empathy, hearing someone scream in terror and narrate their final moments will affect you negatively. The pilot is aware of the situation the entire time.
In every thread on this not a single person I have expressed anything other than regret for having heard it
Yeah, usually i listen to stuff like that. I watch a lot of those youtube videos where pilots break down plane crashes from their perspective and sometimes you hear the audio from inside the cockpit. Usually that stuff doesnt affect me too bad but im fighting to resist the urge to listen.
I think the worst crash i learned about was when maintenance let a rear stabilizer go 20 years without so much as a checkup and the screw that controls the positioning of the rear stabilizer ran out of lube and stripped all the threads off mid flight causing the plane to lose all pitch control.
You could really hear the emotion in the pilots voice as they realized they were now riding a terrifying rollercoaster with no control over their altitude.
I actually think they may have survived which is insane, they had to try to control the pitch of the plane with the engine throttles, if you start going down then increase engines until you start going up again and if you go up to fast then decrease throttle.
Absolute insanity, i think they lived but if that had happened in the middle of a thunder storm while the plane was covered in ice there would be no chance.
It seems i combined two different incidents in my memory, the one where the pilot controled the plane via engine throttle was united airlines flight 232, out of 285 passengers and 11 crew 175 passengers and 10 crew survived the crash landing.
The other incident with loss of rear stabilizer control was alaska airlines flight 261 and all 88 people on board died when the plane crashed in the pacific ocean.
It's just hard on the soul. You hear someone professional, who we'd usually look to as the adult in the room, quickly unraveling.
She goes from the confident pilot speak to panicked reports to starting to scream and hyperventilate, while doing her best to recover and communicate what's happening to the tower. At some point you hear them acknowledge that it's too late and they're all going to die. And then one last scream before suddenly cutting out.
It's just that gut-wrenching empathy and feeling of helplessness.
I would personally say that people should listen to this stuff, though. Life is hard and fragile, and even though it's hard, empathizing with this suffering makes sure we understand the real costs of our mistakes.
I saw way too many dismiss a million deaths by COVID. So many people bat their eyes at 100 people dying in a plane crash now. If they heard the recordings of these kinds of last moments, I think we'd be at less risk of our (moral/procedural) standards slipping.
Yes i fully agree with you, because of the warnings i was very hesitant to listen to the audio and after learning it was a woman pilot i was even more hesitant. But i have now heard it and it was absolutely awful but not any worse than some of the other crash audio i have listened to. I believe its important for the living to carry the burden of the dead. The dead deserve to have their story told and listened to and the living owe at least that much to the dead.
It's unclear exactly what happened but I've heard some aviation experts talk about this and there are already some leading theories, which come down to two factors:
1. The so-called coffin corner [1] where the minimum safe speed for aerodynamic lift and the speed where the plane will stall narrows to a dangerously narrow window. This is caused in part because the speed of sound decreases at high altitude. Turbulence can throw you out of this window; and
2. It seems likely that control was lost because of ice. In released ATC recordings (which are awful to listen to, be warned) the pilot mentions ice. This is likely because of the bad weather over south Florida right now.
The pilot requested a new flight path and I believe tried to ascend from 35,000 feet to 37,000 feet and ended up in a spiral, banked at ~60 degrees, descending at ~30,000 feet per minute, crashing into the ground.
I'm not a pilot but I suspect there will be some element of this that is pilot error or at least could've been avoided and/or mitigated by an experienced pilot.
There will be many questions on why the pilot flew into the tops of what (at least on radar) appeared as a small-ish localized cell at that altitude. Vertical cloud development at those altitudes is a clear sign that whatever is inside is not going to be pretty.
Once the aircraft entered the conditions inside the storm, between the turbulence, icing, and up/down drafts it was likely an unrecoverable event.
That doesn't match what I'm seeing in the online discussions. I think most people who have a basic understanding of aviation or have been part of it would immediately see this as what happens when you fly a Learjet directly into a thunderstorm. The likely question is whether the first cause of loss of control was ice or something aerodynamic, like pushing the nose down in an updraft, causing the horizontal stabilizer to rip off.
In contrast, the coffin corner doesn't really have anything to do with this the plane would have been operating at standard enroute altitudes and speeds.
For context, I am in fact a pilot. I've read a little about what people are saying about this accident, but I've absolutely no new information or unique insight whatsoever.
I think as a pilot all we can say is “loss of control” but there’s many paths to that given available information.
Staying away from thunderstorms is a good rule of thumb no matter the aircraft and crew capabilities. Severe turbulence is expected within 20 miles of the visible portion of a severe thunderstorm.
AIM 7-1-26 paragraph c is in all caps:
NO FLIGHT PATH THROUGH AN AREA OF STRONG OR VERY STRONG RADAR ECHOES SEPARATED BY 20-30 MILES OR LESS MAY BE CONSIDERED FREE OF SEVERE TURBULENCE.
AIM 7-1-27 can be summarized as stay the fuck away from thunderstorms. This entire section is dedicated to avoidance.
See my other comment. This can't be ruled out yet, particularly because the pilot seemingly climbed to get above the weather where it would've been colder and the air less dense, narrowing the operating window so turbulence or a sudden dive could've spun out of control.
Whatever the cause, it seems like climbing to avoid turbulence in or near thunderstorm conditions when the pilot knows there is ice already was probably unwise. A more prudent course was probably to divert around it and/or to descend to de-ice the plane. If so, would this rise to the level of pilot error? I don't know but maybe.
Im not a pilot or meteorologist but from what others have said it seems that the plane would have been very cold from flying at 30k ft and if you fly into a thunderstorm like that where they have super saturated air just looking for any place to condense on, all that water would turn to ice immediatly on contact with the wings and as soon as the wings lose laminar flow they would stop providing any lift and the ice would increase weight and shift the center of gravity/rotation.
Im not sure how high the top of a thunderstorm can reach but if they could have gotten up and over the top above that 100%+ humidity before it had a chance to condense on the plane then i think that would have been the more prudent choice.
Generally in aviation more altitude is more safe. I think the only mistake was waiting too long to try and climb out of it rather than trying to climb over it to begin with. But im not a pilot so idk.
Icing was mentioned early in the ATC audio, then a request to increase altitude, then a comment that they encountered precipitation, implying the icing could get worse.
IANAP but the mention of precipitation points to conditions that could overwhelm anti-icing systems, which the Learjet was equipped with.
1) This plane made a break straight for Mar-A-Lago in it's final moments.
2) Trump installed anti-aircraft missile launchers and radar at Mar-A-Lago just a few days ago.
3) The rear horizontal stabilizer appears to be missing from the highest quality dashcam ... and debris was found over 4 miles away from the crash site.
4) The size of the fireball does not seem commensurate with the amount of fuel that would be remaining for just 28 minutes left in the flight.
64 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 53.9 ms ] threadIn this case though, it sounds like the icing was much worse than they thought and fatally compromised the aerodynamics of the wings, and then the overspeed would have torn at the wings and fuselage... In that circumstance, you're no longer flying a plane, you're riding a javelin.
Training would generally still encourage the pilots to apply power; in the worst-case scenario (here), failing to apply power would not have made the crash survivably slower, so the sum total of best bad actions is still "Apply power and hope you're not in the worst-case scenario."
I don't intend to listen to the audio. Second-hand, it sounds as though they did absolutely everything they could after hitting the cell, and the only way to have avoided this whole situation was "Don't fly that route that day."
... a problem that, in general, we see more often in private-jet and single-engine aviation than commercial-carrier aviation. Far more incentives to make a really, really bad call... And when the bad call happens, the Venn diagram of victims and responsible parties tends to have a lot more overlap, so there's, practically speaking, fewer consequences to discourage such bad decisionmaking in the future (can't meaningfully punish the dead, and the dead can't learn from experience what a bad call "smells" like on the lead-up to it).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_tuck
Another possibility is flutter. I read overspeed and icing mentioned by a pilot in the transcript. Therefore I think of those two elements conspiring in an edge case resulting in forces exceeding design limits, something broke, and made recovery impossible.
But anyway, the investigation will likely answer these questions.
My gut says this is a sudden icing incident. Folks are pointing out that they appear to have flown straight into the center of a cell at altitude. A developing thunderstorm is MUCH warmer than the surrounding air, because the water condensing out of the rising/cooling mass buffers the temperature (due to heat of fusion). It can even be supersaturated ("higher than 100% humidity") if this happens fast enough. The water vapor is just desperate for a nucleation site to condense on.
So you have a situation where a metal jet body that is maybe 30C colder than the medium suddenly flies through this soup. It can ice over in seconds to minutes, and the plane ends up with bricks for wings and much more weight than it was designed for, and simply can't stay in the air. Then it dives inexorably.
Sad story in this case. The cockpit audio was quite chilling.
At 30fps, I make that somewhere in the region of 1000mph.
Let's not argue over the approximate nature of "1000mph" given the measurement constraints.
I think it's pretty much a mercy that no-one aboard would have felt a thing in the last couple of dozen milliseconds.
(I thought ATC's cool as a cucumber 'altitude your discretion' was 'interesting' – presumably a formality they need to offer to clear the aircraft, since clearly no discretion was involved.)
Solves one problem, gives you a different problem...
The reply: "Oh you want me to be all fancy and make it a runway, do you? Well, we'll see..."
They got it pretty close to the runway and it all had a far happier ending than this one.
I think your 1000 is the right ballpark but the units are wrong.
Highly recommend anyone reading to not make the same mistake
In every thread on this not a single person I have expressed anything other than regret for having heard it
I think the worst crash i learned about was when maintenance let a rear stabilizer go 20 years without so much as a checkup and the screw that controls the positioning of the rear stabilizer ran out of lube and stripped all the threads off mid flight causing the plane to lose all pitch control.
You could really hear the emotion in the pilots voice as they realized they were now riding a terrifying rollercoaster with no control over their altitude.
I actually think they may have survived which is insane, they had to try to control the pitch of the plane with the engine throttles, if you start going down then increase engines until you start going up again and if you go up to fast then decrease throttle.
Absolute insanity, i think they lived but if that had happened in the middle of a thunder storm while the plane was covered in ice there would be no chance.
The other incident with loss of rear stabilizer control was alaska airlines flight 261 and all 88 people on board died when the plane crashed in the pacific ocean.
> In every thread on this not a single person I have expressed anything other than regret for having heard it
That's because most people who don't feel the need to be overdramatic also don't need to feel the need to comment about it.
She goes from the confident pilot speak to panicked reports to starting to scream and hyperventilate, while doing her best to recover and communicate what's happening to the tower. At some point you hear them acknowledge that it's too late and they're all going to die. And then one last scream before suddenly cutting out.
It's just that gut-wrenching empathy and feeling of helplessness.
I would personally say that people should listen to this stuff, though. Life is hard and fragile, and even though it's hard, empathizing with this suffering makes sure we understand the real costs of our mistakes.
I saw way too many dismiss a million deaths by COVID. So many people bat their eyes at 100 people dying in a plane crash now. If they heard the recordings of these kinds of last moments, I think we'd be at less risk of our (moral/procedural) standards slipping.
1. The so-called coffin corner [1] where the minimum safe speed for aerodynamic lift and the speed where the plane will stall narrows to a dangerously narrow window. This is caused in part because the speed of sound decreases at high altitude. Turbulence can throw you out of this window; and
2. It seems likely that control was lost because of ice. In released ATC recordings (which are awful to listen to, be warned) the pilot mentions ice. This is likely because of the bad weather over south Florida right now.
The pilot requested a new flight path and I believe tried to ascend from 35,000 feet to 37,000 feet and ended up in a spiral, banked at ~60 degrees, descending at ~30,000 feet per minute, crashing into the ground.
I'm not a pilot but I suspect there will be some element of this that is pilot error or at least could've been avoided and/or mitigated by an experienced pilot.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffin_corner_(aerodynamics)
Once the aircraft entered the conditions inside the storm, between the turbulence, icing, and up/down drafts it was likely an unrecoverable event.
In contrast, the coffin corner doesn't really have anything to do with this the plane would have been operating at standard enroute altitudes and speeds.
For context, I am in fact a pilot. I've read a little about what people are saying about this accident, but I've absolutely no new information or unique insight whatsoever.
Staying away from thunderstorms is a good rule of thumb no matter the aircraft and crew capabilities. Severe turbulence is expected within 20 miles of the visible portion of a severe thunderstorm.
AIM 7-1-26 paragraph c is in all caps:
NO FLIGHT PATH THROUGH AN AREA OF STRONG OR VERY STRONG RADAR ECHOES SEPARATED BY 20-30 MILES OR LESS MAY BE CONSIDERED FREE OF SEVERE TURBULENCE.
AIM 7-1-27 can be summarized as stay the fuck away from thunderstorms. This entire section is dedicated to avoidance.
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/aim_html...
Whatever the cause, it seems like climbing to avoid turbulence in or near thunderstorm conditions when the pilot knows there is ice already was probably unwise. A more prudent course was probably to divert around it and/or to descend to de-ice the plane. If so, would this rise to the level of pilot error? I don't know but maybe.
Im not sure how high the top of a thunderstorm can reach but if they could have gotten up and over the top above that 100%+ humidity before it had a chance to condense on the plane then i think that would have been the more prudent choice.
Generally in aviation more altitude is more safe. I think the only mistake was waiting too long to try and climb out of it rather than trying to climb over it to begin with. But im not a pilot so idk.
IANAP but the mention of precipitation points to conditions that could overwhelm anti-icing systems, which the Learjet was equipped with.
https://www.pprune.org/accidents-close-calls/674728-lear-60-...
2) Trump installed anti-aircraft missile launchers and radar at Mar-A-Lago just a few days ago.
3) The rear horizontal stabilizer appears to be missing from the highest quality dashcam ... and debris was found over 4 miles away from the crash site.
4) The size of the fireball does not seem commensurate with the amount of fuel that would be remaining for just 28 minutes left in the flight.
I am suspicious of the entire event.