Dave Hadfield wrote:
The other complicating factor no one is mentioning here is that it has 2 engines.
If you lose one while going up into the top of a loop, or cuban, you're below Vmca I strongly suspect, in an A-26, and at an airshow you're not very high.
Quite out of options -- if you pull the power back you stall, and if you don't you roll uncontrollably, and probably spin. At low altitude.
This is what nailed that Mosquito in England a few years back, as I understand it.
Dave
The video clip of the accident crossed our display safety work group some time ago and was carefully studied in stop sequence. I could write a book on just what I saw improperly done with the roll let alone considering the regulating authority factors that failed leading up to the roll being attempted.
One can point in several directions in assigning a cause for this unfortunate incident.
What I found simply from the display pilot's viewpoint was that this aircraft by design simply bleeds too much energy during the initial pull into the roll set to handle the massive roll inertia problem and slow roll rate encountered as the roll is initiated.
In other words, even if forward pitch is used between the first knife edge position through inverted and through the second knife edge position, the A26 doesn't retain enough energy to cancel out the extreme nose down pitch rate through inverted the aircraft will experience as the aircraft is rolled.
This scenario of high drag rise into the roll set, high roll inertia, and slow roll rate would be enough for me anyway to recommend that the A26 NEVER be rolled during a display at low altitude.
The clip shows no high speed stall. The airspeed/g profile used by the pilot to initiate the roll in my opinion would have been ample to produce the predictable dishout and recovery from the roll at altitude, but initiated from a level 1 altitude, the roll was doomed to need more altitude than was necessary for the recovery.
Accidents like this one are especially tragic as they both can be abd should be avoided by the governing authority before the actual event is allowed.
Dudley Henriques