Accident analysis: Heads up!

At about 9:20 p.m. on February 21, 2018, a Diamond DA42 taxied into the tail of a Cessna 172 that was holding short of the runway while its pilot ran the pretakeoff checklist. Skies were clear and visibility reported as 10 miles—ample for the 500-foot journey from ramp to runway. The Diamond’s nose gear doors sliced clear through the Cessna’s elevator, grounding both airplanes. No one was hurt, but five people unexpectedly had to stay overnight in the vicinity of St. Simons Island, Georgia—and two busy flight schools lost the use of an airplane for days.

Darkness wasn’t the problem—the Skyhawk’s nav lights were on, although its pilot had (appropriately) left the strobes off to avoid dazzling other pilots on the ramp. Neither was inexperience: The left seat of the Twin Star was occupied by a 22-year old single-engine commercial pilot with 271 hours of flight time under the supervision of a 24-year-old multiengine instructor with 1,145 total hours. There was also a back-seat passenger whose credentials were not described in the NTSB report, but under the circumstances was most likely another multiengine student.

Instead, blame a lapse in both communication and discipline. The Diamond was on an IFR flight plan back to its home base on the southwest side of Atlanta. The student began to taxi as the instructor entered their flight plan into the flight management system, then pulled up the airport diagram on his iPad to check their taxi route without stopping the airplane or asking the CFI to take the controls. Neither was aware of their increasing encroachment on the Skyhawk until the passenger yelled “Stop!” and the student “stomped on the brakes”—too late to avoid the collision. Both front-seat pilots later admitted that neither had been aware the other was also head-down.

Mistakes often seem obvious once someone else makes them. Positive exchange of flight controls gets heavy emphasis in the airman certification standards, and for good reason: Confusion over who’s got the controls is a reliable invitation to catastrophe. Crew resource management is another crucial concept. There’s a reason professional two-pilot cockpits designate a pilot flying—who does nothing else—and assign all other responsibilities to the pilot monitoring. First and foremost, though, are the necessity of keeping your eyes outside whenever moving on the ground—and the fact that no matter how accomplished the student, the CFI is the one who will be held to account if anything goes wrong. FT