Accident Report: Low Blows

Whatever your goals or motivations, some risk factors tend to become amplified at night, challenging you to make decisions to minimize those hazards—without being able to tap the bulk of your overall body of experience. Piloting errors compounded by disorientation, distractions, or confusion as to what to do next is never a good safety scenario. In the dark, your ability to recover from the resulting chaos can be severely impaired.

That’s especially true low to the ground, as when on approach to land. A pair of flights that had little in common except that they both eventually trended below a safe glidepath were described in two National Transportation Safety Board accident reports from December 2015.

December 10, 2015, was a student pilot’s first dual instructional flight at night in a Piper PA–28, with takeoffs and landings on the lesson plan at an eastern Maryland airport equipped with visual approach slope guidance.

“The flight instructor reported that the student pilot held the approach path ‘for a while’ then drifted below the approach path, as indicated by the visual approach slope indicator. The flight instructor told the student that he needed to climb and reestablish the airplane on the approach path,” the NTSB summarized.

Unfortunately, the instructor also lost situational awareness at this key moment just long enough to prevent a safe exit from the destabilized approach.

It may not be surprising that an aircraft that is low and slow at night can quickly experience an accident when the pilot is unable to react.“The flight instructor reported that subsequently he [the instructor] ‘became confused’ and could not determine the airplane’s position relative to the runway. The flight instructor reported that he ‘snapped out of the condition,’ but the airplane collided with trees and impacted the ground short of the runway before a recovery could be made. The airplane sustained substantial damage to the left wing.” Neither occupant was injured.

It may not be surprising that an aircraft that is low and slow at night can quickly experience an accident when the pilot is unable to react—but high and fast isn’t a better scenario for a safe outcome.

When a Grumman American AA–5 single-engine airplane broke out of instrument conditions “400 feet high and fast” the night of December 1, 2015, at Middle Peninsula Regional Airport in West Point, Virginia, the pilot chose to continue the landing, touching down more than halfway down the wet runway, and “then decided to abort the landing,” said the NTSB.

The go-around (the first of two that would be attempted in a brief span of time) produced the intended result. But, “Instead of performing the published missed approach procedure, the pilot turned left and entered the traffic pattern.”

On the left base leg, the aircraft again entered instrument conditions, and a loss-of-control scenario began to develop. The pilot “heard the stall warning horn, and felt buffeting. During the inadvertent aerodynamic stall, the pilot added power but continued the descent to land.”

On regaining visual references (the runway lights) the pilot “realized he was too low. As he attempted to add full power to go around, the airplane impacted terrain about 1,300 feet west of the runway in a left-wing-down attitude. The vertical stabilizer, fuselage, and both wings sustained substantial damage.” The pilot wasn’t injured. The NTSB strung the series of events and responses that formed the accident chain together concisely in its determination of the probable causes of the accident: “The pilot’s decision to fly a traffic pattern following an aborted instrument landing in night instrument metrological conditions, which resulted in a loss of visual reference to the runway, an inadvertent aerodynamic stall, and a collision with terrain.”

Night flying is demanding. For most general aviation pilots, whether instrument-rated or VFR-only, practical experience with night flying makes up only a small percentage of total flying time. Before your next practice session, review appropriate texts such as night operations and procedures unique to them in the Private Pilot Airman Certification Standards. Remember to prepare mentally for flying while depending
more heavily on your instruments than during day VFR—especially if you will
fly on a moonless night or away from urban lights.

Then ratchet up your situational awareness and your ability to deflect distractions during low-to-the-ground phases of your night flight.