An Epistemological Nightmare

Two flying accidents to discuss today. The first one has been all over the news recently, and I watched it in slow motion and freeze-frame via TiVo this morning. Experienced pilots will immediately see that this was a 'stall-spin accident;' the pilots failed to maintain flying speed and as a result they lost control and crashed. But I was interested in taking a more forensical look at what went wrong, therefore the slow-motion analysis. At first the airplane appeared to be in a normal turn, with the controls in neutral; however as the left wing dropped further, the pilots applied right aileron in an effort to raise that wing. The rudder remained in neutral. Despite full right aileron the left wing continued to drop, along with the nose, and the airplane crashed. These were all the clues I needed to confirm the stall-spin theory. The major clue was that the rudder remained centered throughout the entire process.

What happened was this: when the pilots realized that the turn was becoming too steep they tried to correct with opposite aileron, forgetting that the down aileron causes drag whereas the up aileron decreases drag. The technical term for this is, 'adverse aileron drag.' So when they applied opposite aileron they should have applied full right rudder too, to counteract the dragging effect of the down aileron. But with no right rudder input, the left wing slowed further, stalling deeper, and the right wing sped up, rolling the airplane to the left. This failure to coordinate the controls contributed to the crash.

The other flying accident involved a very large black fly. I found him floating in the pee pot just before I took a shower today. He was inverted, motionless, so I assumed he had drowned. I took my shower and returned to empty the pee pot, but when I picked it up he began to move. I took pity on the poor fly, who must have been enduring an epistemological nightmare, and fished him out with a fork and put him on a newspaper to dry. I told Kootch about the fly and she suggested that I put him out right away. I should have heeded her advice, because when I got home from the store the fly was was gone.

No crash video was available in the case of the fly accident, so I am unable do a forensic analysis.