PA-46 & TBM Accident Analysis: What the Data Reveals | Part 1

0:00To me, I find it almost amazing that people are still dying and stall spin accidents. Every private pilot learns how to avoid stall. That's right. So what's happening? What are we doing wrong? Why are we still getting the stall spin accidents? As a CFI, we've done spin training. And invariably, every time we go up to do a spin for the first time with a student, an offer to my private students as well, and almost every one of them takes me up on it. The first time we do a spin, we recover out of the spin, and they look at me, why died? And I'm not sure what just happened. MUSIC MUSIC MUSIC MUSIC MUSIC MUSIC MUSIC MUSIC MUSIC Welcome to the Malibu Guru Podcast, where we talk all things PA-46. This is the place to hear from the owner-flown pilot community to learn from vendors that support our marketplace and to get better at piloting your PA-46, whether you fly a PA-46, TBM, or King Air, or if you dream of doing that one day, this is the podcast for you.

1:01Now, here's your host, Joe Casey. One of the most debatable aspects of all of aviation is accident analysis. Accident analysis, where do you get your data? How do you assimilate the data? Is it accurate data, or is it manipulated data that just really doesn't mean anything? And what does mean something with all the data? And it's just airplanes, there's not a whole bunch of them out there in the world compared to something like cars or skateboards or something where you can really get a big piece of data. But I've got a client that got a lot of data that went in there and investigated the data and it's data that's very, very compelling to me. So I wanted to let some of the data get out. I wanted them to be able to tell a story. I want to talk about the data. Dave Forster. Welcome to the Malibu Guru Podcast again. Pleasure to be here, Joe. Thank you. Yeah, I really do appreciate you being here for this because you came here earlier to do your recurrent training.

2:02We did a podcast where people got to know you. And if you're listening to this podcast and you haven't gone back to listen to the Dave's story, I want you to hear that story. You know, it was go back to that podcast. Here's a story about where he came from and what he's done because it lends credibility and credence to what you've done in terms of accident analysis in the PA 46 world. And so it just helps in that respect. But what you have done effectively is you've gone to every single NTSB report for every single PA 46 accident and TBM accident and read every single one. But not only did you read it, but you also basically categorized data. Go back to your, where did the genesis of this idea come from? And why did you do it? Well, I wanted to understand better the PA 46. I want to understand the airplane that I fly.

3:02And if there are any idiosyncrasies or special things about it that I wanted to know, I wanted to know better. I wanted to know if there were things out there and the community that had happened that would be reflected in the accident reports that would indicate to me where maybe I should be focusing my efforts in terms of training or effort, things that I needed to watch out for. And so I decided to go through and read all of the NTSB reports to try to get a handle on that. And before we get too far into the statistics, I just like to say that reading those NTSB reports, it's sobering. Every one of those reports represents a person, a fellow pilot who had a really bad day. And didn't intend to. And it was an intent. And was a good person with great intent and many of them are fatal. And to read those reports, you almost got to be just so thick skinned to be able to handle. They're reading all of that. There's times you just got to put the reports to one side and take a break because it just gets to be kind of overwhelming when you realize that each one of those reports

4:02is a person. Even if there's no injuries, even if it's just a little bent metal, if it's appearing in the NTSB report, there's bent metal involved, which means that that individual had a bad day. They incurred expenses of a blow to the ego. That accident may have encouraged them to come out of flying. And we need all the pilots we can get. We need to be safe and active. And for those accidents that were worse than that, involving injuries or fratalities, and obviously the implications are much more severe, much, much more broad. And so as we talk about the statistics, and we go through the numbers, I think it's important to just remember that behind those statistics are real people who incurred real injury, psychological, physical, financial, or whatever. And the efforts that we make to try to take something positive about that is about the only thing that we can do to turn a bad situation to something a little better. We are expanding M-Class this year. It used to be a one-day event where you came in the morning and left in the afternoon,

5:02but now we've expanded it to two days. On day one, we've got a golf tournament that's gonna happen in the morning. And in the afternoon, we're gonna have maintenance questions with Kenneth Hale, followed by cocktails with the Cases on Thursday evening. That's on November the 12th, on the 13th, we're gonna have academic training all day long with me and Deanna and a bunch of special guests that are gonna be there as well. It should be a great event. I hope you'll consider coming. It's aimed directly at the PA 46 market, both piston and turbine. I hope you join us. If you look back into, if I'm to bear my soul, and I'm pretty good, I have my approach to life is to bear my soul. And if I'm thinking it, you probably know it. I don't play a poker face, you know what I'm saying? Where I can hide things. I despise things that are under the table.

6:03I'd rather, if it's on top of the table, I can figure it out and deal with it and handle it. I'm fine. And I'm totally fine in that respect. If I'm to bear my soul about being a flight instructor, there are, I can think of just in my brain right now, a five accidents where my name is in the logbook of the person that died, meaning that a, my name's there. Whether it is where I gave direct instruction, or where 10 years ago I gave instruction on a subject that was germane to that, you know what I'm saying? Some of them are very near close, you know what I'm saying? Where probably the worst, I say the worst. I don't know, I don't know. I remember when Deborah Birch was a client of mine. I was teaching her how to fly.

7:03And she was doing touching goes with my name in her logbook is the instructor that signed her off. She ended up doing a touch and go and stalled the aircraft at about 200 feet above the ground on a touch and go, airplane spun to pull back on the oak too far, airplane spun and she went into the ground and of course we're there watching it. And it's, and you dealt with the aftermath, the immediate aftermath. You know, that extremely difficult when you think about that. I can think about pilots that I've given instruction to, the most latest would be Cliff Kaufman, who eight days after I gave him instruction, crashed his aircraft in a stall spin accident. And you know, we trained engine outlandings and we trained how to deal with this. But you know, eight days after I trained him,

8:04you know, here we are, where we're, you know, at his funeral and dealing with this whole thing. Kenny Hicks is another one that just rips me apart when I think about Kenny Hicks. So a guy that I, my name's in his logbook probably six or seven times, you know, of years that I trained with him. And so when I read these accident reports or talk about him or even go over him because I do, meaning in my job as an instructor and as an examiner, one of the best ways to talk to clients is hey, let me tell you why this is important because look what happened here. And one of the things that we, we do it pretty, I don't know if it's a real good job or a real bad job in the United States and that when we have an accident, there's a lot of pilots that will say, let's wait for the NTSB report to come out. And that's a great idea. It's a great thought because the NTSB is the,

9:05is the non-negotiable end, you know, which if you made it into an NTSB report and they gave a report on it, man, they do a good job and that's the government approved, no debate, that is the end state of what happened in that report. Sometimes they come back pretty quick, but most of the time it's a year and a half, two years later that the accident report comes out. And the question is, is there any thing that can be done in the meantime? Do you, do you even talk about a crash that occurred a month ago, two months ago, three months ago? And the answer to that question is, I have become, I've grown to the place where my answer is yes. And here's why is that sometimes you need the final NTSB report, but sometimes you make changes before it comes out. I'll give you a good example, a non-emotional one for most people is the Potomac crash where a black hawk runs into an airliner

10:07and crashes, everybody's killed on both aircraft, horrible, tragic accident, immense loss of life and seemingly meaningless, meaning it could have easily been avoided. Well, that NTSB report today is not out, it's not out. But we've already, the government, the FAAs, already made changes to the way helicopters fly in that part of the world around airliners that are going to make that safer, but the NTSB report's not out. But so do you wait the two years for that to make any changes? The answer's no. It is appropriate and good to look at an accident and figure out what happened because you can figure out the meat potatoes real quick. You may not have all the data and you may not get it all right, but you got enough right that might help the next person to not have an accident. And so to me, it's worthy of having that conversation. I've been sensitive to that in my experience.

11:09I remember with Kenny Hicks, actually, it was a jet prop that crashed in Texas. Four people were killed. I wrote a magazine article for MMOPA, pretty shortly afterwards, certainly before the NTSB report because it was fairly obvious what happened and we didn't need to wait very long. And it was a good number. And honestly, I thought to myself, where Kenny couldn't speak from the grave, but I know Kenny real well. And Kenny would have thought like me that he would want people to know what happened and would want people to read that report and will want people to talk about it. Oh, good. I'll say it right now. If I ever die in an aircraft crash, everybody come look at it. Everybody come figure it out. Everybody diagnose it and try to figure it out because I'm less, I am worried about my family and what they're gonna hear and read and the rumors and all that. I don't care about rumors and crap.

12:09I care about people in a specific area that are knowledgeable speaking into what happened there. I'll give you a good example is that the NTSB, very recently the NTSB came to us with inquiries on a specific accident that we're very familiar with. We know the familiar data, we know the data for this particular area and we know that stuff and they wanted our input into that. So they get it right. And we've got no money for it. It's not a thing. We get to speak into what that was and give a piece of data. That might be the thing that breaks open the case and tells everyone help some really figure out what goes on from there. But I guess my point is when you talk about NTSB reports and you talk about reading all of them and dealing with all of them, there is an emotional price that's paid. I was gonna say a penalty, but that's not gonna have to write a price.

13:10You're gonna read all that. You're gonna go down that road. You will be affected emotionally, absolutely. Yeah. So for you to read every single one, but you didn't just read every one of them, you also collected data. How'd you go about that? Well, you're right. I didn't want to just read the reports. I wanted to learn from them and for me, the way I learned from things to try to identify commonalities in the accident and what are the common factors. And specifically looking with an eye to, well, what might have been done differently? How could that accident have been avoided? What could be done in terms of training or technology or process or something that would have made that accident less severe than it was or maybe avoided it altogether? Right. And so with that in mind, I applied kind of a set of what I call ultimate causes or ultimate results, which kind of describes what happened at the end of it. What kind of an accident was it? What's the ultimate result of this accident? Was it a stall spin or was it a controlled flight into terrain or something?

14:11Kind of the end state, if you will. Yeah. But then looking behind that. Well, if you look at that, the end result, when you look at the end results, I see bird strike, a design flaw, electrical problem, pilot error, just an in-flight fire, fuel exhaustion, fuel starvation, a horribly bad judgment, icing pilot judgment, landing gear, loss of power, maintenance, mechanical, pilot medical, I can see where that would fit in, intermittent or partial loss of power, pilot skill, spatial disorientation, the ubiquitous unknown, where they just don't know, and then last one, weather. And you came up with those yourself, right? Pretty much. Now, the approach that I took was actually drawn from an approach that was developed in a group that I participated with through the Experimental Aircraft Association,

15:12where we were doing some work on an analyzing Experimental Aircraft accident. And so the methodology was something that I had to help develop with that group. But what you've just described actually were what we call the causes. So those are the things that contributed to the ultimate result. The ultimate results is going to be, I got a little disk right here. Control flight into terrain. Control flight into terrain aerobatic, which I found interesting. And by that, do I mean that they're intentionally doing aerobatics, okay? Yep. Ground, not in motion. Okay, so ground, we're talking about, sitting on the ground and somebody drives a truck into the airplane. Yeah, or it's my hand prop in an airplane, maybe. Yes, okay. The next one's in flight damage. Do you mean like a part fell off the airplane or structural failure? Structural failure of the aircraft in some form or fashion. Hard landing, what do you mean by that? Failure to flare correctly when you touch down. So hard landing or failure to lower the gear

16:15before you land it. There you go, it's going to be a hard one. Yeah. And we'll talk about some specific ones. Loss of control on the ground. So this means take off or landing is almost always going to be the case where somebody lands and runs off the runway or runs off the end, runs off the sides. Something happened where they lost control on the ground. Collision in the air, so that's going to be a mid-air. Yep, that's okay. Collision on the ground, which did happen in the PA-46 world. I know at least one, I'm sure we'll get to that. Emergency landing, what's emergency landing means? Emergency landing means you had to do the landing. You had no choice. So the engine quit, for example. So if we say the word engine, emergency landing, pretty much means engine loss of power or partial loss of power. Enough where you're coming down. Now you got to go figure it out. Yes. The next one, stall spin, which we, I know we're going to get into, uncontrolled flight into terrain.

17:15So this is not controlled flight, uncontrolled flight into terrain. What do you mean by that? That's right. And so that's distinct from a stall spin accident, which is very closely related. But I wanted to break out stall spin as its own category because it is such a significant category of accident. The uncontrolled flight into terrain might be something involving disorientation where the aircraft you think is under control, but it's not. It could involve a spiral dive, opposed to a stall spin. It's basically anything that doesn't fall into the other buckets in which the pilot was not in control of the aircraft, while out in with terrain. OK. And the last one, that big bucket, actually it's a little bucket of unknown. It's a bigger bucket than we would like. Right. There are certainly many reports where the NTSB looked at the accident and said, we just don't have enough evidence to come to a conclusion. And that's an interesting category because when I first started looking at that unknown category, I thought, wow, there's this big scary thing out there. Well, we don't know what happened. But as I started reading through the accidents

18:16and read through many of these and started to see the commonalities and the similarities, I came to realize that when the NTSB says unknown, all that means is they didn't have enough evidence. Doesn't mean that what actually caused the accident is an unknown thing. It's not like that. They just created your thing or something. That's right. They didn't have enough evidence to be able to conclusively identify what the cause was. And so they had to say unknown. Yeah. You know, that's getting better and better and better because the data we've got is getting more robust and more robust and more robust. Meaning like flight monitoring, meaning where the data while you're flying or even on the ground, if you have a Garmin navigator or a Garmin presentation in the cockpit of PDF of any sort, it's got gobs of data inside there. And the more recent you're airplane, the more data there is. There's also aircraft where pilots are using video where they're flying and having video going. And that video and the data logging is tremendously helpful.

19:19Certainly after the fact when the pilot can't speak to what happened or maybe even sometimes when they can, it provides a lot of insight as to what really happened. You know, there was a, this is probably eight years ago, 10 years ago or so, but I flew a Mitsubishi Marquis and we sold it to a pilot and the pilot and I ended up flying on a big flight up to Canada. We went to, what's the name of that? The Madeline Islands, which are way out out of the east on where the Hudson River comes in. There's a big bay and the Madeline Islands are there. And I flew that flight with him. And I knew the rigors of that flight, meaning icing a strong winds, a whole bunch of stuff. Well, what did it happen is that pilot was very interested at the time of putting cameras. And he put cameras all over the cockpit and when I flew out there with him, there were cameras that he installed in the cockpit. And there are two or three of them. And you know, he'd start up the airplane and crank up the cameras and we would just have them there

20:21because he wanted to know from a safety perspective. Well, a year later, he flew the same flight. It was like the annual, it was time for whatever event he was going to. He had the same people on board. Well, okay, his camera's going, sure enough, it, he's still spun the aircraft, killed everybody on board. But one of the things that came from that was all the cameras were going the entire time. And they knew exactly what was happening because there's cameras. And more and more and more times now, you'll find a crash, but somebody, will have a camera, either a door cam, you know, where the, you know, somebody caught the aircraft coming into the lake on that when the door cam was happened to look over the lake, well, they can look at the aircraft and get a mountain of data from that, just that one video or that one picture. So there's more, the unknown category, I think is going to go down as time progresses. The cameras and the data often help us to answer the question of why, as opposed to the what. So in the case of the example that you've described

21:23where the stall spin accident occurred, you know, we hear about stall spin accidents and we think, well, why are these happening? I mean, as pilots, we are all trained to avoid the stall. Why are people stalling and crashing airplanes? And what the camera can do is give us some insight as to what the why was, was he distracted, was he disoriented? These are questions you can't answer without a camera or some kind of logged data. Yep, and I'll tell you, I've talked to NDSB accident investigators more than I, well, actually, actually not more than I want, more than, like in other words, I just hate that you have to talk to him because the crash occurred. But we do get to talk to accident investigators. And I think it's actually a lot of fun for me in the sense of you're just dealing with somebody that's so knowledgeable and helpful. And so has all the data to be able to gather all that data that happens to be there. But whenever you do talk to somebody that is, when you talk to somebody that has all the data,

22:26they don't have all the data. Sometimes they have to make a guess. I'll give you a good example, spatial disorientation. It'll, you just can't prove that somebody was spatially disoriented at the time. You can look at the flight returns, the ADSB, you can see what's out there, but spatial disorientation is so hard at the end of this. And sometimes they go, I can't prove it was that. So we just have to say it's unknown, but they think it was that. And some of us can look at that and go, where the NTSB can't put out a something that says, it was this, they can give you enough data where people that are really smart in the marketplace in that particular area, like PA-46 instructors dealing with PA-46s can look at that data and go, you know, that was spatial disorientation. And I think the NTSB is getting much better at identifying cases where they suspect spatial disorientation

23:26was caused. When I look back at some of the history of these NTSB reports, what I see is in the past, they would often just say, you know, lost control for unknown reasons. Right. Whereas more recently, they'll say spatial disorientation. And I will say, when you said, when you say I've read every PA-46 and every TBM accident and categorized it as we've, and into ultimate results and factors with comments and information, when you talk about that, when you say that you did this, you're also talking about accident reports from 1984, which are done differently. They're not as complete. They're not as good. And so when you read all this data, we're harkening back to data from 1984. But I will tell you, there's nothing new under the sun. That's right. That's right. Meaning it's the crashed airplanes in 1984 in the same manner in which we do it now. We just have more data now to figure out what happened.

24:27More cameras, more information, more recording of events, more collecting of data to be able to figure out exactly what happened. Well, and you touched earlier on spatial disorientation that I don't know if we want to segue too far into that. But in my experience, I think it's important to distinguish between what I would call spatial disorientation and vertigo. A spatial disorientation to me is kind of a textbook description of not knowing your position in space, not knowing how your aircraft is situated, which is kind of an academic description. It's like, oh, we just look at your instruments and get it sorted out. Vertigo is a much more physiological response. It is an overwhelming disorientation, the feeling that makes it difficult to think straight. And I've personally experienced that. Absolutely. I had an experience once where I took off from my home field and was turning on course in visual conditions. And I looked down at something on the ground just as I was entering the clouds. I'm in the climb out and accelerating upwards

25:28on rolling, climbing, and coming up into the clouds as I move my head. For several seconds, I don't know if I could have told you my name. Correct. I mean, just flatlined. It's like somebody put a defibrillator on my brain. And it was, I had just enough presence of minds to push the level button on the autopilot. And a few seconds later, the feeling passes. I'm back to thinking again, no problem to interpret the instruments, no problem to fly. That's right. But after that event occurred to me, I got to thinking, I wonder if in many of these cases, these accident reports that we read about, if maybe it wasn't just spatial disorientation. Maybe there was some vertical involved. Maybe that pilot was descending at the time. Not climbing as I was. Maybe the time that they had to respond to recover, mentally recover, was less than what I had. Maybe they didn't have a level button on the rod. Maybe they didn't have a working autopilot. Yeah. You know, one of the, one of the, one of the complaints that I get from my clients, maybe I should put it that way,

26:29is a spatial disorientation video that I made probably eight years ago. And in the military, we, we, we discussed spatial disorientation in a classroom environment where everybody got signed off for this every single year. It was, it was, every military pilot goes through a spatial disorientation class every single year. So I taught that thing for 25 years, you know, as one of the instructor guys. And I brought that to the PA 46 world and talked about it where I went completely in depth. And one of the things I discovered that I think is related to where I think we'll agree with when you talk about spatial disorientation and vertigo. When you talk about the two, I think you would say, and I would think I would agree, that vertigo is going to be something where it, where your, the stimuler system has at least two of the semicircular canals conflicted. Like in other words, your role axis has been moved to your pitch axis because you moved your head

27:30or you bent down or the airplane did something. And where you, where you get what's effectively the Coriola solution, where you get this tumbling and turning sensation that's way beyond anything that's normal. But here's the kicker behind the whole thing is that your vestibular system that you're using right now to hold yourself up and where I'll do, it also holds what we call retinal stabilization. It holds your eye in the right spot in the right way. So that vestibular system, if it's all messed up, well guess what? Your eyes are being moved involuntarily by your vestibular system. And so a lot of times when we practice an unusual attitude, we'll put the aircraft in a high nose, or high nose high right bank and we'll say recover. Well, it's easy. Yeah. Cause your vestibular system's not all jacked up. You haven't, invite, you know, and a lot of times we'll jerk the airplane all over the places and instructor and then give you a nose low left banking turn

28:32and how do you recover? It's easy to do it because we're taught how to do it. But if you go get vertigo, you go get the real thing in the aircraft. Now your eyes are involuntarily being moved around the cockpit and you're disoriented all over. And now you're, I've got to recover. Completely different gain comes completely different experience. Absolutely. It's kind of fun. If you go to YouTube, it was called a barium chair, I think we're very in chair. And you can find videos of people that'll be sitting in a chair and they'll close their eyes and they lower their head and they spin them around and around the chair. And then they stop the chair and they open their eyes and lift their head. And every time they scream and their hands go in the air, they have to hold them because they're going to fall out of the chair. Exactly. That person is not telling you what their name is at that point. That person is not capable of flying an airplane until their system resets. And their system could reset. And if it did, they're okay and the NTSB doesn't know about it. Meaning that how do you approve that and fly?

29:33Right. And the answer is, I'm with the NTSB on this. There's some accidents that get lumped into the unknown because they just can't figure it out. But it's probably disorientation or probably something that goes along. And you can read all the data that comes with it and glean some really good stuff out of it. Right. So bottom line, you categorized it really in two big buckets. Number one, the ultimate result. What caused this accident? What caused that happen? But then factors that are at play. Yes. Yeah, the ultimate result is what ultimately happened? What was the final chapter, the final event? And then behind that, what were the causes? And just the causes, I think, that are very limiting. That's where we can focus and identify things that we can do better to avoid that kind of accident happening again. Okay. So if I look at, or if we look at your data with your permission, I'm gonna put this data, make it available to people. I'm gonna package it into a nice,

30:33well, you've already packaged it, but I'm gonna package it. So it's very clear, very easy to digest and make that publicly available with this podcast. Right. And that way people can review what you've done. They can then, I'll tell you, I have not read the entire thing because it's, we're talking about hundreds of, I mean, almost 300 sum of plus accidents that you reviewed everything. But I've spot checked about, probably 20% of what you did, I haven't found an error that you made. Well, meaning it's, but it's important to keep in mind that this is just the analysis that I did. And there probably are, either errors are certainly differences of opinion because two people can read the same accent report and come to slightly different conclusions. Even when the accent report says, certain things that are very clear, as pilots, we kinda read into that a little bit and we try to think about, what are they really saying or what's really behind this? And so I would certainly welcome constructive criticism with regard to the data and the conclusions. I think anything that we can do as a group or anything that your viewers might see that would help us to gain further insight

31:35as to what caused that accent or what we could do to avoid it happening again, that's a good thing. Right. And I think there's a number of data, review of it, great, especially if you have intimate knowledge of an accident. Like there's some accidents, I know really, really well, I've studied them all, all directions. And if somebody asked me about it, I could definitively give a good explanation of what happened at that accident. Another area that I think is worthy of comment is, there's a whole bunch of accidents that didn't make the NTSB report. Absolutely true. And this is one of the problems that people have with accident data is that they're all based on numbers that are just nebulous in the grand scheme. When we talk about percentages, we're talking about percentages of actual NTSB reports where there's hard data that we know, we know the accident occurred. Here's what happened. And the NTSB thought enough of this accident to go do the investigation. I know of gobs of accidents

32:36that did not make an NTSB report and did not, they're just simply not there. That's right. And when we talk about things like engine failures, well, there's a whole bunch of engine failures that the engine failed, they spiraled down, they landed on the runway and didn't bend any metal, did a beautiful job, pushed the airplane into a hanger and got a new engine. Yeah. And never appeared in NTSB report. Never appeared in any report. I mean, no one ever knew about that. And those are the ones that, honestly, those are the ones where one of the things that PMOPA does today is we have what we call the Broken Wingle Ward. To me, the Broken Wingle Ward is one of the best things that PMOPA does is all to be the thing that we go head over heels for, that we ought to just dive into completely, which is handing an award to somebody that had a bad event that didn't end up in an NTSB report, that was handled well

33:37because of good airmanship. And here you go. Absolutely. And as we'll see, as statistics, airmanship, the pilot, the weak point in the whole system, of course, is that fleshy bit in the pilot seat. Whoever's in the left front seat dictates the safety of that. No, and I say it differently, if you want to really impact the safety of your flying, if you want to make the biggest impact you can to the safety of flight, spend your money on the training of the whoever's in that left front seat. That's it. You want to hire a great pilot? That's your number one way to create safety. You can, there's a, in our world today, there's a million things you can bolt onto your aircraft from a, I mean, angle of attack to indicator to the button that'll auto land to the level button, which helped you that day, sure did, that no one reported on it.

34:37You know, there's a million things you can bolt to glass cock pits to them. There's just a gob of things out there today that I really do think help. They help the body of, of the help, they help the body be safer overall. I'm good with them. But if you're going to spend money, if you're going to, if you're going to, those gadgets will never overcome the need or a truly great pilot to be in the left front seat. Completely agree. Yeah. When we look at the statistics, we look at what's associated with skill and judgment and just error, human error. That is the lion's share of the oxen that we're seeing. Okay. And those are all things that people can change. Yeah. All right. So let's go, let's, you've, let's go down some accident, not some accidents. Let's go down, down some hard numbers here that we've got. The first one I want to look at is the piston P-A-46 accident analysis. And if you look at the ultimate result, first thing that steps jumps off the page here is there's only one percent that's undetermined.

35:38Y'all got this figured out. Not me. That's the anti-SME report. They were able, and, and, and the ultimate result is usually pretty clear. You can look at what's left and make a pretty clear determination as to what, what it is. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Now, if you were to look at this, there are 26% of the accidents that happened from the NTSB, of NTSME reports, 20%, 6% are in the E landing or emergency landing category. Now, if you contrast that to the PA-46 turbine world, again, in the in the in the piston, it's 26% in the turbine, it's 11. What's it tell you? Tell you the turbines more reliable. Period. Yep. Yeah. I don't, I don't think there's a way to get around it. Yeah. No, no, number one, the turbine is a, has all the parts moving in the same direction. The intake compression, power and exhaust strokes

36:39happen in separate areas of a turbine engine, not all happening in a cylinder head, basically. Six of them. Mm-hmm. There's just a lot. A few are moving parts. You've got a lot of things that don't happen in a turbine that happen in a piston, like if you get water in your fuel, I mean, in a turbine, you're probably just fine. And you know, I'm not even gonna hiccup, probably. But in a piston airplane, you get water in there, you're toast, you know, the engine's gonna die. But it's important to remember that that turbine number is still 11%. That's what I was going next. That's what they do happen. 11% of accidents in the turbine world, 11% are engine failures. Yes. Or engine loss of power. And if you go down the piston route, that can be everything from a turbocharger failure or the oil pumped over the side to a catastrophic engine failure to a maintenance event,

37:41where the meaning, like I'll give you a good example. I had an engine failure in a continental mile-bube. I'm not very well publicized, but this gives a good example. I want you to talk about the different one. And I survived this one. It was honestly not that big of a deal. In the grand scheme, until you look back on it. But basically what happened is the vacuum pump is on top of the engine. And there's a fuel line that goes over the top of the vacuum pump. Well, the vacuum pump failed, and so we needed to remove that. So they moved the fuel line. They pulled the vacuum pump. They put the new vacuum pump in, put the fuel line back on, but the twist, little buckle, the nut, then goes on the end, was hand tightened and not tightened to torque. And of course, you know what happened. We went flying, and I think I flew the airplane for three hours. But as I was probably 10 miles from the airport,

38:44all of a sudden the engine, with the car to Cuffin and Sputtern, I ended up going to high pressure on the fuel. The engine then ran normally, until at about 300 feet above the ground, the engine just stopped. Now, and ended up, I just glided in and landed. Very good. It was the way you wanted to move. You know, from whatsoever. And for the engine failed on me, okay? We landed, and now the horrifically dangerous part of that whole thing was when I went to high pressure, I'm now, it's pressurizing. Yeah, I'm spraying fuel all over that engine, which did not catch fire, thank goodness. And again, I landed there. I was incredible, but of course, when I'm from taxing in, the airplane is, like I had restarted the engine on the runway, just, you know, it started, so I'm great. I got off the runway when I pull over the guys like, you know, doing the, the cutting off sign because there's, you know, it just like, hey, now the side of them, well, it would ended up happening on this particular event,

39:45was we pulled the cowlion off. It was real easy, real quick to figure out where that little knob and a neural, whatever, I'm using the wrong word. Did you get the idea? All somebody had to do is go tighten that thing up. When they tightened it up, everything was perfect. We flew the airplane away. No one ever knew about my engine failure in that aircraft. Now, had I crashed? Had I crashed, you would have said the ultimate result, emergency landing, was an emergency landing, it would have fit into this category. A factor would have been maintenance. There you go. So that's a good example of how you categorize things. So how you, so that had I, that one had it been a report, it would have been an e landing, emergency landing report. Right. Okay. So again, you look at the turbine world, you look at the, at the piston world, 26% of PA 46 accidents of the 249 piston accidents that are, they're listed, e landings are 26%. That's a big number.

40:45Sure is. Okay. So if we're doing, talk about more than a quarter of our accidents are happening to the, are our engine failures into power loss. And to your earlier point, these are emergency landings that didn't work out as well as yours did. That's right. The other ones, again, the ones that happen, no one hears about them, right? So there's more than 26% that actually occur here. There's a lot more that occur, but the number of it 26% is a big number. Sure is. Okay. I'm going to tell you, we're straight up. There is a huge debate within PMOPA right now. A gigantic debate. It is one of the biggest debates I've ever heard in my life in terms of how to handle these aircraft. But there's a faction amongst the, the PMOPA world that is saying that we need to train our, train these, train engine failures differently and basically terminate at 500 feet. I'm going to get into a big discussion with this next month

41:48where I'm really going to debate, but I'm going to tell you straight up, we got 26% of the failures that are happening in the piston PAs 46, what, 26% are engine failures. We cannot not train. That's 26% of the NTSB reports. That's right. So you're right. There's a whole lot more out there that are happening. And I don't want to get into the debate. I'm looking forward to that debate. Yeah, it's sort of funny. It seems to me that landing an airplane successfully, in that case, is all about energy management. And being able to manage that energy right down to the point of a gentle contact with the Earth is important. I agree. 100% and as a little teaser, not as a teaser, but just this, there was a, there's the PMOPA forum. There's been a lot of writing about it. I wrote a lot. I'm kind of on the front edge of one aspect, Kim Coriatt is our, is our safety chairwoman. And she's on the other side. And honestly, I agree with her in the sense that we need to look at how we're training engine outs.

42:52But we have difference of opinions in the importance of the, of having, in other words, for her side is terminating above 500 feet AGL. My side is go all the way to the ground or near the ground. And we both have our reasons for this. Here's the big, overriding point that comes from the data you've gotten, which is at 26% of the accidents or engine failures, you better know how to land engine, you better know how to do an engine out. That's great. That's all there is to it. But let's go back to the turbine, accident analysis, or the turbines that are out there, 11%, much better. Yes. Now, I'm going to give some credence to your numbers because you also did the turbines. If you look at the turbines, you know what's interesting about it, it's 10%. The TBM. The TBM. So if you compare the PA 46 with the TBM turbines, all those turbines, the numbers virtually identical. Yes. Which gives credence to your numbers in the sense that

43:53it's the same engine. I mean, there are different, there's different size of the same engine. You know what I'm saying? It was a PT6-42A or a PT6-, you know, whatever you've gotten your TBM world. But the point is it's still PT6. And so basically engine failures and TBMs and PA 46s are the same, which tells us that there are engine failures in the turbine world as well. And I will tell you, I love how you put it down as E landing because that may be an engine failure. It also could be a power rollback. It could be any number of things that play into that number. But even if it's where it's 10% for TBMs or 11% for the PA 46 world, it is worthy even with 10% to do the training. Totally agree. Totally do do do do. OK. Another, interestingly, if you look at the stall spin, stall spins a big number, OK?

44:54Meaning that stall spins tend to be, it's 25% of the TBM world, which I find huge. If you look at the piston and turbine world, the piston world is 9%, the turbine is 14%. I find that to be interesting, but not. I believe it. Now here, here, here. I think it's an interesting data point. We have to be a little careful that when we're talking about, in all of these cases, relatively small numbers. You have to be careful about, you know, they're not statistically significant in any cases. But it certainly helps us to, to, to, to, to draw our attention to certain things that are worth talking about and worth thinking about. And I think the stall spin is a great example, not just in PA 46, but across the entire GA industry. To me, I find it almost amazing that people are still dying and stall spin accidents. Every private pilot learns how to avoid stall. That's right. So what's happening?

45:55What are we doing wrong? Why are we still getting the stall spin accidents? As a, as a CFI that has instructed people that are working on their commercial and there are other, and on their CFI licenses, we've done spin training. And invariably, every time we go up to do a spin for the first time with a student, an offer to my private students as well. And almost every one of them takes me up on it. The first time we do a spin, we recover out of the spin, they look at the wide eye and say, I'm not sure what just happened. Right. We talked about it before it was going to happen. We talked about it on the ground. We talked about it in the airplane. We talked about what it was going to look like. We talked about the recovery procedure. But in every case, they weren't sure that they would have been able to have done what they needed to do if they had ever been presented with that and had not seen it before. That's right. So I actually think that we are, we have made a mistake in this country by eliminating the spin training because I think you have to see that to know how to react if it ever happens to you. I agree with you. And there's been a lot of debate over this. To me, if you look at the problem with the stall spin where you say, okay, the turbines

46:58are 14%, not a big number. Well, except for the fact that the stall spin is almost always fatal. And there's your problem is that if you're going to die in a PA 46, your chances of dying from a stall spin are way far and above. And I shouldn't even say the word in a PA 46. It's all aircraft. You stall spin any of these aircraft. It's almost always fatal. Almost always fatal. The rate of descent is so great. It's just an unsurvivable rate of descent. Every now and then you'll have somebody survive. Ironically, in a PA 46, the people that survive a PA, if there is any survivor, which there's hardly ever a survivor. But if they are, they're in one of the aft facing seats, the middle seats because the aircraft is more nose down, it's spinning, hits the ground, and there's just a little more cushioning that occurs there. And if you're one of those aft facing seats, you might have a chance.

47:59Now, it's a horrifically low chance. I can think of two accidents off the top of my head. There was a cliff cough man had that accident in his jet prop a couple of years ago in Nebraska. The person in the middle seat survived it. There was also, there was a jet prop accident in Yokem, Texas, where five people on board and one lady survived, again, middle seat. And so there, when you say it's not survival, sometimes we say that because effectively, that's true. There are occasionally something. But if you get into a stall spin, you're probably not going to survive the accident. That's a, it's a, it's a very blunt. Sometimes people have, I don't know if the words chastise me or said, you know, you're being too strong or too aggrate. No, I'm not. I'm just telling you the truth. You stall spin this thing. You're probably going to die. That's, that's the end state of it. And the other thing to think about here, I think is, you know, one of the purposes of putting

49:01the causes in to this accident reporting is to help us identify, well, what can we do differently? Well, what tools or elements of training can we do differently to try to avoid that kind of accident from happening again? Or happening to us, happening to me. And so I kind of want to put in a little bit of a plug here for one thing that could be done that's pretty simple is to install an angle of attack system in the aircraft. Great. And many people think of an angle of attack as being kind of a glorified stall warning. It isn't. The stall warning is something that we train ourselves to ignore because we should be hearing it on every landing before we touch down. The angle of attack is something that we'll talk to you to tell you when you're on the appropriate speed for the approach. And so you train yourself on every landing to be on the appropriate speed for the approach. And you train that automatic action and pushing forward or pulling back to hold onto that speed. And so when something happens at distraction or something in the cockpit and things are going wrong and the aircraft is getting slow, you hear that hopefully beeping because I'm a firm believer in the audio type of angle of attack, not the visual display on the panel.

50:02To me, you need to hear it in your ear. When you hear that beeping, you react accordingly because you've trained forward on every landing. I'll agree with you to a point and then I'll put a caveat in there. The first part, first thing is you just took me up here for a flight and you're, let me say a mixture, I say this right, your F1 rocket. And you're getting that right. That's it. You built it yourself. Gorgeous airplane. I mean, it's just fabulous. You said you flew it to Oshkosh, but you need to do it every year because that's just it's an airplane worthy of looking at and flying. But anyway, I've got to fly with you this morning. The thing was I was in the back seat of the airplane. I have literally no cockpit, an instrumentation in the back. I can't see a single thing. One of the things that you have inside there is a lot of audio presentation to you. In other words, it comes in from the engine like one time the one of the cylinders got hot and it said, you know, CHT or something. It said some kind of a thing and one time there was either a getting slow or it had something

51:08all pressure because we pulled the power back real quick and oil pressure went down which it's supposed to. And so you know oil pressure, oil pressure, you know, something along this line and we add just a little bit. Anyway, but the thing that I was most impressed with was the angle of attack was audible, meaning that as you flew it, you knew what it would talk to you. And I am of the opinion, I did not make the land. Now as a matter of fact, if you just said, Joe, you want to land the airplane, I said new. And the reason why is because you built the aircraft and I am not going to land the crash that thing. And you probably wouldn't let anybody land it, but I would certainly be in that camp if I knew. But if you handed me the keys to that airplane and said, do that, I could have landed from the back seat with no instrumentation because you had an AOA that was audibly telling me what to do. Does that make sense? Absolutely. I could fly it. Absolutely. I could have had one with it without a doubt. Now I've got one argument against your thought on the stall warning and that is probably

52:12the biggest. Now there's two big gigantic pieces of crap on a PA 46. And number one is the nose gear, which will ensure we're going to get into in a minute. The second one is the stall warning. I can't tell you how many times the stall warning is misrigged. read, right, doesn't present. And there's two major areas that this thing conflicts with. Number one is a pile that they have to hear a stall warning every landing because sometimes the stupid thing just doesn't come on. The other one is that Garmin had put under speed protection where the activating factor for under speed protection is the stall warning. So you have to have men speed and the stall warning activate. Well, guess what? One of the biggest pieces of junk on a PA 46 is the stall warning system itself. And so my bet, I'm, this is pure anecdotal. I didn't write it down, but I bet you 30 to 40% of PA 46 fleet

53:16wide. The stall warning is either not calibrated, doesn't work right or just isn't accurate. There you go. So there you go. And which brings back a whole new discussion of the stall spin because I'm a huge fan of the of a stall warning indication. A good one. Now ironically, the best stall warning indicator in a PA 46 is an early continental Malibu. It's a different system than is on the Mirage and beyond. And the earliest ones are the simplest ones. It has no clue where the flat position is. So it's just a vein out there on the wing. Whereas the newer models have a vein, but a whole computer that's dealing with it is just not as good, you know, as far as that's concerned. So, but to me, one of the things that the FA has done that recently, they're trying to do that is, it is good. We used to teach when you practice stalls that you would stall the airplane and have minimum altitude loss. Okay. And and that's good. It's a good thing. I'm fine

54:24with it as far as that's concerned. But what ended up happening? We ended up with an entire generation of pilots that in practice would stall the airplane and to recover the only way to only way to minimize your altitude loss was to shove in the power. Okay. Now we've got a problem because we're at the stall and you just shoved in power. Now you just created the yaw because to get it spin, I need two things in the proper way to say it as I need to stall and a yaw. Those are the two things I need, not a stall and uncoordinated fly, but a stall and a yaw. And you created a pitch up. That's exactly right. So you got all the ingredients right there. So what the FA has done now is they took out the language of minimum loss of altitude. So now what with and when I give a check right to a private pilot, the private, the oftentimes the private pilot will bring the airplane to a stall and at the stall warning will recover. And I love it. And here's the reason why is because when we hear the stall

55:25warning, we should recover. Yes. And so in other words, we should, you hear that and we recover because that's our responsibility to avoid the stall. I think we actually created a generation of stall spin accidents from two things, Joseph, I'd love to hear yours. Two things. Number one, we took out the stall spin requirement. And I think we'd be better if pilots had to go stall spin and aircraft thing one and thing two, we have a whole generation where we said minimum loss of altitude, the recovery. I agree with you on both counts. But I think it's important to see the spin what it looks like. So you know how to recover from it. And I also think it's important to know how to recover from the stall without using the power. All you need to do is to lower the angle of attack. Well, we are just getting started. We got a whole another block of that we are going to discuss related aircraft accidents. It's going to be on the next podcast. I hope you'll listen to it. I've got David's going to come right back in here and we're going to finish up this good discussion

56:28and talk about things that happened on the ground. And we're going to talk about a whole bunch of other accidents in the PA 46 world. David, I appreciate you joining them. I will be guru podcast. I appreciate you doing the work you did to collect all this data. And I appreciate you talking and telling everybody about it. It's a pleasure to be here and I hope people find things in this. It's useful for them and helps them to be safe. Absolutely. Thank you for tuning into this episode of the Malibu guru podcast. Don't forget to subscribe to our channel and your favorite podcast platform. So you never miss a new episode. And we would love to get your five star reviews. Be sure to follow us on Facebook, Instagram and our brand new YouTube channel. We look forward to bringing you another great episode next week. We'll see you then.