Captain Avgas
Well Known Member
The attached video is of the crash of Vans RV6A VH-TJM on the 2nd of January 2017 at a private airstrip in Queensland, Australia. The video was shot with a GoPro camera mounted under the left wing. This video has never been previously released. I asked the pilot and owner of the aircraft, Ian Smith, to give me permission to upload this video to VansAirforce on the basis that it is totally unique and may go a long way in educating other RV pilots to the fact that it is relatively easy to collapse this type of nose gear.
The video is 20 seconds long and captures the aircraft on short final and touchdown. I have probably viewed this video 40 times or more because it is so fascinating. Ian Smith is to be highly commended for releasing it as an educational tool because the crash was highly traumatic for him. His daughter, who was a passenger, was very seriously injured and Ian himself suffered a broken neck which has left him as a quadriplegic.
The incident was the subject of an investigation by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau which has now issued their final report. That report can be viewed here:
https://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/investigation_reports/2017/aair/ao-2017-001/
The report claims that the aircraft "landed heavily at a high rate of descent". Undoubtedly the landing was extremely flat and there was a bounce. However I would suggest that student pilots flying Cessnas and Pipers frequently make similar landings without this catastrophic outcome. You have probably yourself made a similar flat landing with a small bounce when you were learning to fly. Here's the video.
https://youtu.be/RYfqnSXRFrI
The video is 20 seconds long and captures the aircraft on short final and touchdown. I have probably viewed this video 40 times or more because it is so fascinating. Ian Smith is to be highly commended for releasing it as an educational tool because the crash was highly traumatic for him. His daughter, who was a passenger, was very seriously injured and Ian himself suffered a broken neck which has left him as a quadriplegic.
The incident was the subject of an investigation by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau which has now issued their final report. That report can be viewed here:
https://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/investigation_reports/2017/aair/ao-2017-001/
The report claims that the aircraft "landed heavily at a high rate of descent". Undoubtedly the landing was extremely flat and there was a bounce. However I would suggest that student pilots flying Cessnas and Pipers frequently make similar landings without this catastrophic outcome. You have probably yourself made a similar flat landing with a small bounce when you were learning to fly. Here's the video.
https://youtu.be/RYfqnSXRFrI
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