Best Phone Call Ever!

I received a cell phone call from a friend at KSUS (St. Louis Spirit) this afternoon at about 1:35 pm. He was upset and could hardly say what had just seen. From his open hangar he witnessed a mutual friend on down wind leg suddenly pitch up, roll nearly inverted and disappear behind an adjacent row of hangers in what appeared to be 45 degree dive. He said we just lost Olie.

Olie is one of the guys in a local group messing around with experimental airplanes, he was trying to get the one and only metal built VariViggin to fly with a Mazda rotary engine. This was the second or third time Olie had attempted to fly the airplane in the past several years. It was a beautiful machine copied from original drawings and built by a couple engineers in Canada and painted like a Blue Angel F-18. Olie bought it and had it trucked in. We were in total shock and not feeling well at all about this happening to a guy we knew so well.

I was really in the dumps when the phone rang again about 20 minutes later. It was the same friend calling to say local guys were reporting Olie was walking around the wreckage which was up in a tree. I said, this is the best phone call I have ever received, wow!

I had Olie's cell phone number and called him. Sure enough, he was alive and well, and I said man am I glad to hear your voice. He said things happened real quick and he would brief everyone as soon as possible, meanwhile he was waiting for the FAA and also looking for a ride back to the airport. (he may not have been aware of it, but there was quite a traffic jam developing on Airport Road as a number of people saw him go in, one said he couldn't believe he was not killed, all this on a local TV web site)

This evening I received more info on what happened. The engine quit at about 90 knots on down wind leg and the airplane pitched up immediately, probably due to a high thrust line, speed dropped off to about 70, and the machine rolled nearly inverted about that quick. Olie said "some basic instinct kicked in - I pushed the nose down trying to recover some speed and kicked rudder real hard trying to get the airplane to roll back up right" - it did just that before it hit the trees. He climbed down with hardly a scratch.

We are thankful our friend Olie is with us tonight....

Amazing story. I haven't had a real great day today and you just made it a lot better. Who would have thought that second call would come in?

Do me a favor, call Olie back and have him pick some Lottery numbers. That dude is lucky!

That is a great story.

Oh my!

Dayum!

Thankful he's OK

Frank

David said:

... Olie said "some basic instinct kicked in - I pushed the nose down trying to recover some speed and kicked rudder real hard trying to get the airplane to roll back up right" - it did just that before it hit the trees. He climbed down with hardly a scratch.

We are thankful our friend Olie is with us tonight....

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Excellent news! Getting the stick forward is the instinct we should all have in this situation - this is further proof that it is the right reaction.

http://www.fox2now.com/ktvi-plane-crash-near-i-64-0700809,0,4878108.story

It's nice to hear stories like this. It's a shame it happened, but at least he walked away.

Good on ya, Olie. Well done.

Good news!

It sure is good news that he survived the accident, apparently unscathed.

The flip side of this is that the more "experimental" the aircraft is, the greater the risk of an event. And none of us seem willing to break the taboo and talk openly about the risks we take, only about how cool things are when things go right.

I've been lucky in my flying career, but on my RV-4 I bought already flying, I've had (with no scratches to the airframe or to me) -- exhaust system fractured in flight and part fell off; aluminum fuel line broke in flight; rudder cable came loose on preflight; disk brake rotor separated from the wheel. And on another homebuilt I bought, discovered a major builder error (not mine) on a vertical fin spar with 200 hours on the airframe.

And on spam cans, have had a voltage regulator failure, vacuum pump failure (so glad I had a cover for the attitude indicator), hit a bird, high oil pressure, and spark plug failure leading to partial power loss.

I've not counted how many experimentals and aerobatic airplanes I've flown that were later wrecked by somebody else, maybe a dozen, sometimes with loss of life. And I've been to entirely too many funerals of good friends killed in small airplanes.

One of the slogans that served me well on the RV-4 was, "Every flight is a test flight." That slogan works well on spam cans, too.

As they used to say on Hill Street Blues, "be careful out there!"

Ed Wischmeyer
370 hours in 20 different RVs, 2600 hours otherwise

rv8ch said:

Excellent news! Getting the stick forward is the instinct we should all have in this situation - this is further proof that it is the right reaction.

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Only if it rolled inverted he would have to pull back to get the nose down and then roll it right side up. That would be tough to do when low to the ground and close to trees. I?m not sure I could do it.

Still good work by the pilot.

Still good work by the pilot.

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Good work by his guardian angel too.

WOW!! praise God He walked away from that!!

Post Accident Wrap

[img=http://img166.imageshack.us/img166/1000/olyolsonviggen.jpg]


This is Oly Olson's Viggen before the wreck. I saw it yesterday in his hangar and it is TOTALED, like class 26 in the USAF. The only part not damaged is the front seat area, the rest of the airplane is beat up junk. Had there been a back seat person, he would have been hurt big time as the fuselage and canopy were collapsed around it.

Oly, a former RV3 owner and pilot, added a bit more info to what happened. When the engine quit, it pitched up but not out of control or violently. It just started climbing and no amount of forward stick would stop the increasing nose up attitude. As the ASI bled off to about 70, Oly had no option but to roll the airplane into a sort of split S in an attempt to get the nose down and avoid a stall. He said it went into a zero G mode momentarily and the nose finally started to come down with full aft stick and once below the horizon, speed began to build up and the machine was rolled back up right just before the first tree showed up in the windscreen. The airplane went through that tree and a second one before coming to a stop, once again inverted, on the forest floor. Fuel and electric were shut down before impact so there was no fire.

Oly says two things need further mention. First, he was strapped in real tight and wearing a hard hat. Second, he has the worst case of poison ivy anyone could imagine. When he crawled out, there was poison ivy every where.

We figure the entire event was monitored by a guardian angle or the holy spirit and they decided not to let him off scott free. Like, just in case you did not get the message....it's time to fly something different.

Oly has sized up the next airplane. It will have a wheel in the back - an aircraft engine up front - and straight wings. Sure sounds like another RV to me!

David-aviator said:

Oly has sized up the next airplane. It will have a wheel in the back - an aircraft engine up front - and straight wings. Sure sounds like another RV to me!

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Sounds like his old Cessna 140. I looked at it 5-6 years ago when he was selling it but it was full IFR so i did not want to spend the money. I ended up buy a different one. He sold his 140 to a friend of mine and it is still located a few rows over at my airport.