An ultralight aircraft tips over near Gelnhausen during a training flight and falls almost vertically to the ground – the two occupants die. Almost a year and a half after the accident, the cause has now been determined.
Gelnhausen (dpa/lhe) – According to investigators, a failed emergency landing exercise was the cause of the crash of an ultralight aircraft near Gelnhausen, killing two. In June last year, a 53-year-old man from Wächtersbach (Main-Kinzig district) and a 67-year-old from Alzenau in northern Bavaria died in the accident. “The accident is due to the fact that during an emergency landing exercise in transverse take-off at low altitude, the minimum flight speed was undershot and there was an unexpected stall,” says the investigation report of the Federal Bureau of Aircraft Accident Investigation (BFU), which was published on Thursday.
According to the experts, the 53-year-old pilot of the ultralight aircraft was “probably not adequately prepared for the emergency landing exercise”. “It is therefore extremely likely that he was initially surprised by the situation, did not counteract the rapid deceleration by pressing the control stick and possibly also did not realize that the aircraft was in an uncoordinated flight condition.”
The flight instructor sitting next to him probably had confidence in the pilot’s ability to act, partly because of his training and previous joint flights. “During the emergency landing exercise, he may have been distracted or did not pay the required attention to the exercise,” the report said. A corrective reaction to the sudden stall had therefore come too late.
Basically, the following applies: During flight training and check flights, the responsible flight instructor or examiner must weigh up the success of the teaching, the realistic approach and a sufficient safety reserve, explained the BFU. “Frequently, being close to reality and having a safety reserve are in conflict. It is usually not possible to have both at the same time.” The methodology and didactics of the flight instructor are required here in order to combine both “and to create realism despite sufficient safety reserves”.
The crash happened shortly after takeoff from the nearby Gelnhausen airfield. The wreckage of the Ikarus C42 single-engine propeller aircraft was recovered and secured with the help of a truck-mounted crane. The machine had come to a standstill with the front hanging on the embankment of a state road and the rear hanging in trees and hedges. At first, emergency services could not rescue the two dead from the wreckage because an emergency rescue system that had not yet been triggered was installed in the plane. In order to trigger a detonator in a controlled manner, they first set up a safety radius. Only then was it possible to rescue the two men.
