Medical jet with six aboard crashes

Unimaginable to have a child’s receive life-saving surgery and then have this happen on the way home.

The videos are terrifying. It looks like it was almost a 90 degree dive.
 
They were in IFR conditions. It’s very easy to become disoriented and lose spatial awareness. My guess is that the crew stalled the aircraft, didn’t believe they were in a stall and entered an accelerated spin. Hopefully they’ll be able to get some recoverable data and actually determine if the cause was pilot error or if the aircraft broke up mid-air.

However, that does not make this tragic outcome any less tragic. That patient and her mom should have been safely flown home and the family should have been celebrating her recovery after successful treatment at the hospital she was just discharged from.
 
Akulahawk said:
They were in IFR conditions. It’s very easy to become disoriented and lose spatial awareness. My guess is that the crew stalled the aircraft, didn’t believe they were in a stall and entered an accelerated spin. Hopefully they’ll be able to get some recoverable data and actually determine if the cause was pilot error or if the aircraft broke up mid-air.

However, that does not make this tragic outcome any less tragic. That patient and her mom should have been safely flown home and the family should have been celebrating her recovery after successful treatment at the hospital she was just discharged from.
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Everything released so far only references a small right turn that was followed by a slight left turn and then a steep decent with a max altitude of 1,500 with the flight in the air for less than a minute. A lot of things would have had to go wrong for them to enter a stall
 
DesertMedic66 said:
Everything released so far only references a small right turn that was followed by a slight left turn and then a steep decent with a max altitude of 1,500 with the flight in the air for less than a minute. A lot of things would have had to go wrong for them to enter a stall
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That's one of the things that's got me concerned. This shouldn't be anything other than a typical departure under IFR or very quickly going to IFR as the flight plan was to be at FL 380. As I see it, something either went very wrong with the flight crew OR something went very wrong with the aircraft. Even losing both engines at 1600 feet and even losing all electrical power shouldn't result in dropping out of the sky like it did. I think the CVR will give quite a bit of insight as to what caused this... other systems/computers recovered may also provide some flight data if it survived.

In any event, I think that spatial disorientation is probably what happened here. A slow right turn followed by a turn to the left during a climb, in the soup... I read that one of the last ADSB entries had a descent of about 11,000 feet, but just before was climbing at about 2300 ft/min at about 230 MPH. So while a stall/spin is probably out of consideration as spins don't descend that quickly, if you're disoriented and then pop out under the clouds, possibly inverted and suddenly descending at a huge rate, that's not a good recipe.

If the CVR has anything recoverable that's useful, the last 10-20 seconds will probably tell the tale.
 
I hate to speculate, but such a drastic nosedive right after takeoff, could be a collision (birds, someones drone?) Possibly the load breaking loose and shifting as the plane pitched up? There was a dramatic cargo plane crash at Bagram in Afghanistan that stalled a min into take off and came straight down because of that. Impossible to tell without the data recorders
 
My theory is cockpit fire. It is not likely statistically nor is there evidence for it yet, but it would explain what happened.
 
Summit said:
My theory is cockpit fire. It is not likely statistically nor is there evidence for it yet, but it would explain what happened.
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Fire in the cockpit is a potential cause... I suspect the CVR would help determine if this is remains a possibility. It'll be difficult to determine from wreckage I think though... so CVR will help answer the question of what was the cause.
 
Akulahawk said:
Fire in the cockpit is a potential cause... I suspect the CVR would help determine if this is remains a possibility. It'll be difficult to determine from wreckage I think though... so CVR will help answer the question of what was the cause.
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It's pretty amazing what air crash investigators can determine from pulverized burned debris. They can tell whether an indicator light was on or off. They can tell whether some types of fire damage occurred before or after the crash.
 
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