Looking into the Feb. 25th Winter Haven, FL plane crash.
A Beech A23 Musketeer similar to the C23 Sundowner. (Photo by AHunt via Wikipedia)
A couple of weeks ago I reported on a February 25, 2010 plane crash in which two people were killed (one at the scene of the accident and one in the hospital) and a dog named Zulu (belonging to the pilot) survived. If you need to read the original post, you can do so HERE, but I will cover most of the accident information again in this post. I’d also like to present some additional information which the National Transportation and Safety Board (NTSB) released in their preliminary accident report on March 3, 2010. James “Jim” Trefz and George Azize were killed in the Beechcraft C23 Sundowner (registration N180ED) crash.
The pilot and his passenger departed Winter Haven’s Gilbert Airport (GIF) just before 9:30 AM EST on a short flight to Lakeland Linder Regional Airport (LAL). The aircraft lifted off runway 29 at GIF and as it began to climb out of the airport area, the engine lost power, and the plane eventually crashed into the median of US Highway 92, skidding across the westbound lanes, and eventually ending up against a tree on a ditch on the north side of the highway. Witnesses to the crash rushed to scene and pulled the pilot out (reportedly) alive (although he died seconds later). The passenger was taken in critical condition to a nearby hospital, but he died of complications. Miraculously, as mentioned above, Zulu survived the crash and was found at the scene of the crash and taken to a veterinarian.
Witnesses, a few who were pilots themselves, said that as the plane was at about 150-200 feet, the engine cut out as if someone had pulled the mixture back. For those of you who don’t know what a mixture is, it is a control (usually next to the throttle) that controls the amount of fuel the engine receives (rough definition). When you pull it back to its lowest position, the engine quits altogether as no fuel is being provided for combustion. The witnesses’ statement that the engine failed in a similar fashion to the mixture being pulled back just means that it quit altogether with no rough running or sputtering beforehand. In other words it quit cold-turkey you could say. The plane then entered a right turn before impacting the road.
I am a little bit familiar with GIF, having departed out of the airport a few times during my flight training days. It’s definitely not one of the best airports to deal with an engine failure on climb out. For starters, the area is somewhat populated. There are very few open (and large enough) fields nearby and small lakes surround the airport in every direction (probably why nearby Lakeland is called so). If your altitude is too low, U.S. 92 (or its median) becomes the only alternative. A little bit higher and a lake’s shore may be a viable (but dangerous) alternative. This is probably one of those places were banking the plane quite a bit so as not to land in a house may be recommended, although with dire consequences to your altitude. I imagine the pilot was trying to turn the plane into the highway median or maybe to the open area between Pickney Dr and Lake Marianna Dr (north of the highway) when the plane slammed into the median. There was also a large open field on the northern side of the airport property. However, who knows what the pilot was intending to do at this point. Like I stated, this is a very dangerous place to lose an engine.
The airplane was last fueled a month before the accident flight, so the fuel had been sitting in the tanks for a while, but on a flight the day before there had been no reported problems. It does appear the pilot checked the fuel quality before setting off and some on the airport say that they think that a pre-flight engine run-up was performed. There were about 21 other planes fueled with the same batch of fuel as the accident airplane and none of those planes reported any problem with the fuel. Both the pilot that flew the airplane the day before and another pilot who checked the fuel tanks on the day of the accident claim that the tanks were near full (both wings). So the aircraft had fuel and since it was in both tanks it is unlikely a fuel selector problem was at hand here. If you rule out fuel quality, the only other fuel related problem (other than a problem with the fuel lines/fuel pump) that could be involved here is if the fuel vents were blocked somehow, causing too much back pressure on the line and fuel would stop flowing towards the engine. Of course, a lot of other things could have gone wrong outside of the fuel or the fuel system. Any engine component could have failed or the mixture somehow was pulled back (remember there was a dog on board so there is more than one possibility as to how this may have happened). I myself have accidentally pulled back a mixture control, although I was at a very high altitude when I did it.
The NTSB will have to look at the engine and fuel system and see if they can determine if there was any malfunction with them and what exactly it was. The pilot of the aircraft had nearly 470 flight hours, with just fewer than 5 of them being in the accident plane.
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