Please check this thread on Sunday's plane crash - I would be interested in hearing y'all's theories about what may have happened. NC plane crash

Way too many unknowns to make even an educated guess but I’ll try. I will say, the PC12 is an extremely advanced aircraft that is sold to “owner/operators” and can be very challenging if things go wrong. I did a lot of mentoring for newly trained “owner/operators” and without exception their minds were rarely on the flying and were on something else. (i.e. business deals, home life issues, next meeting…) the PC12 is highly automated which relieves the pilots workload. One simple failure of a component or a little WX that was unexpected and things need concentration fast.

To be clear, I AM NOT BLAMING THE PILOT! I’m just giving a VERY early educated guess of a POSSIBLE situation.

I can see that being the case here. The owner (and pilot at the time) was supposedly a middle-aged wealthy "entrepreneur" - although he was supposedly instrument-qualified, he probably had "too much plane for his experience". Total speculation on my part, though - but that is so often the case with business owners, doctors, lawyers, etc. who have a little bit of money and decide to get themselves a plane. My wealthy contractor cousin bought himself a Beachcraft Baron to hop around the U.S. on, but thankfully he kept a professional pilot on standby to fly the thing for him instead of doing it himself.

OP, don't forget to include John Burns in any analysis. John had dinner with a pilot last year.

So no pilot on board other than the owner? The news articles I’ve read all mentioned a pilot in addition to the owner.

There was another pilot on board, and he was a friend of mine; as was his son, who was on board the plane as well. A wife/ mother and daughter/sister survive them. So very sad for all who are impacted, myself included.

Condolences There ya go.
So sorry for your loss.
I can’t imagine what the families are going through.

Thanks.

Sorry for the loss of your friend and his son. Was your friend flying as co-pilot of the plane, or was he just another person on board who happened to be a pilot?

Heh
Double ace?

A friend of my son’s is a pilot. He called the PC-12 a “dope ass turbo prop.”

Yes, he’s a kid, but he thinks highly of the model.

Prayers to the survivors.



P

I’ve had a chance to spend a few hours in the right seat of one as a passenger.
I would agree with his assessment. Incredible machine.

Aircraft accident investigation is a painstaking analysis and it serves no purpose to speculate what caused the accident. Condolences to family and friends, but let the pros do their work.

The PC12 is an amazing aircraft. Another thing to consider is that it is a single pilot aircraft. Having more than one pilot in the plane can be both helpful and confusing, especially when things go wrong. If the 2nd pilot wasn’t actively engaged as a pilot while the flight was going well, he/she may have been confused about the state of the aircraft when something goes wrong. Tying to give advice without knowing the whole picture is sometimes not good.

Being trained on instruments, or having an instrument rating is a far cry from being instrument current and competent.

Again, I have no idea what happened here and all of my comments are pure speculation.

This is totally correct. I would add though, that speculating about what may have happened can make people think before acting. We won’t know what happened here until they find the plane, put it back together, and analyze lots of data. Possibly years if ever before we know. Talking about it may make people realize the dangers that are inevitably involved.

Neither he nor his son were duck hunters, so I am assuming at this point that the only reason for him to have been on board was to pilot the plane. His son, I would assume, was simply along for the ride, spending time with his Dad.

Sending you a PM.

10-4. I just saw that the Carteret County Sheriff's Office released the names of everyone - the pilot was a 67 year old with 20+ years experience and multi-rated.

So damn sad.
Ernest Durwood Rawls, 67, Greenville, NC, Pilot
Jeffrey Worthington Rawls, 28, Greenville, NC
Stephanie Ann McInnis Fulcher, 42, Sea Level, NC
Jonathan Kole McInnis, 15, Sea Level, NC
Douglas Hunter Parks, 45, Sea Level, NC
Noah Lee Styron, 15, Cedar Island, NC
Michael Daily Shepard, 15, Atlantic, NC
Jacob Nolan Taylor, 16, Atlantic, NC

The NTSB will eventually figure it out but it’ll take a while. Radar tapes with altitudes, track, etc along with any communications will probably play a big part. The way recovered parts are bent and torn can give an idea of the attitude of the aircraft when it hit and what it was doing. Being over water will make it that much harder.

I posted on the previous thread. IMC conditions, spatial disorientation, stall...

It's a double edged sword. Informed speculation by those with type/model/environment experience sometimes keeps us from repeating mistakes and sometimes those mistakes keep those of us still flying from repeating them. The NTSB takes time but their root cause is usually right. 16 pages of the topic on an aviation board I follow with lots of folks who have time in the PC-12.

I was on my way back from FL with our club's Archer and it's new panel yesterday. Moving to an all glass panel I felt a little like a dog watching TV "there's something going on here, not sure what" but after about 6 hours getting the hang of it. Done not far from you at Marion County Airport Dan and if I'd had a little time would have pinged you for lunch.

My guess is VFR into IMC with spatial disorientation. I did not see anything that looked like a stall on the track log. More like an inverted dive. The stall speed of the PC-12 is very slow for a plane that big. We put ours into some pretty tight spots and it flies slow and low quite well. All speculation of course, but he had more than enough room to recover from a stall if that's what it was.