L'Accident dramatique que personne ne comprend !

Hello my friends. Every year fuel management in passenger aircraft causes widows and orphans a disaster that is so closely linked that it is extremely mysterious. You will see that at the end of this video. We may come up with theories and hypotheses, but the accident itself is extremely mysterious. It is April 2020 in Arizona. We have a single engine, high performance bonanza, A35 aircraft. It is a very distinctive aircraft, as you see in an Aero Club. It is a little larger than the others. It is quite high on its legs. It has a V shaped tail instead of having the classic T shaped tail. It has two inclined surfaces like this in a V, very powerful and retractable landing gear. Most passenger aircraft have fixed landing gear. This one has landing gear that retracts and extends. So it is going to take off with three people on board. The people are the pilot who is an engineer at Intel Corporation. There is a woman, his wife sitting on his right. She is a real estate agent. And that day one of their children is with them. It is an 8 year old child who is leaving with them. They have two other children, girls, but they are not part of the trip on this occasion. So as I was saying, they are taking off from Chandler, Arizona and they are heading north. Their goal is to reach the destination which is Colorado City, Arizona. But the destination is not important. It is mainly to travel this route with an absolutely extraordinary view of the canyons. So in this region most of the airspace is prohibited to flights. They have planned a certain number of corridors. There are a few corridors that are placed there and in fact these corridors concentrate all the traffic. On the lower part of these corridors we will find the operators who go by helicopter and plane to give tours to tourists. And on the upper floors we'll find general aviation traffic with corridors to go down to the south and other corridors above to go back up to the north. So roughly speaking, this is the structure of the area the plane took off. It was April 24, took off around 9:30 in the morning and then made a little turn, a loop and headed north. It disappeared about three hours after its departure. We no longer see it on radar. There was no flight plan. So if it always delays the search a little bit, at some point someone, typically a family member, has to realize that these people haven't arrived for the alert to be given. On this occasion, the alert was given by the USAR force because it should be noted that in the region where it is forbidden for civilians, there is a lot of activity linked to the USR force. They noticed that a plane had crashed. They probably flew over it with their fighter jets or helicopters and they got the exact position and they called the sheriff. Hello, this is the US Forces. We would like to inform you that there is a single engine plane that is in the air somewhere. If you have anything, please write and I will give you the coordinates. They hung up the same day. There was nothing more to do. It was too late. It is a very rugged area. It was in a valley. And so the next day what they did was they prepared rescuers. They came with 44s and then they went to attack that area. So they arrived in a valley. Indeed, despite the fact that when you fly over the area, you see it from above. It looks like a landscape on the planet Mars. It is red, it is rugged, There are gorges, there are reliefs, geological structures. The place where the plain was found was relatively flat. It was a fairly long step, a sort of valley with cacti and grass growing in some places up to the knees of a normal sized man and even up to the waist. In some places there was the plane. So the inspection of the plane left these rescuers a little short, especially when it came to explaining, when it came to forming an idea, a scenario about what could have happened. Let me tell you. When they arrived, they found the plane dumped in the bush. When they approached it, the three occupants were inside. In the front there was the couple, in the back there was the child and they were all dead. The plane showed signs of significant damage, consisting of an impact with the ground at an angle of, lets say 30 degrees. That means you can imagine that the plane came in at a 30 degrees angle. So that's very important, right? When you're in a plane just for training or whatever, and you put 30 degrees, you put 30 degrees, it's impressive, right? You feel like you're going to crash into the ground. 30 degrees is huge, and that's in normal flight. It's unlikely that someone would do that intentionally. So that angle is probably unintentional. If we look at the plane even more closely, we can see that the front part is extremely damaged, which is normal because it hit the ground nose first. The rear part, the impendage in particular is relatively intact. What we also see is that there is something very interesting that the rescuers will see. The landing gear is broken, but it seems to have gone through most of the wings. This means that at the time of this impact, the landing gear was extended. If it had been retracted, it would not have caused this kind of damage. So it was extended and locked so that the landing gear shaft caused very characteristic damage. What we also see is that the flaps were extended. So all of this is consistent with an aircraft that wanted to land. These people at one point had a situation and they said we had to land. The weather. Just to be clear, it's not a weather problem because the day before, as is often the case in this place, there was absolutely nothing. Blue skies, hot weather, night, no clouds, nothing special, absolutely nothing to see. Well, there was a little bit of, as is often the case above these areas where there is relief and everything, there was a little bit of turbulence, but nothing more. So we can't say that this is a plane that got lost in the clouds, in the fog, or that it was thrown there by extreme weather. It was rather in flight, at a good attitude and suddenly a decision was made. Now what is extremely strange, what is extremely strange is that if we look at the transit altitudes of the PHA that it put there, the lowest altitude for transiting north, it is around 11,500ft. Right? That's a lot. Right? That's really a lot. These are altitudes where you have to start thinking about taking oxygen with you. These are altitudes where most planes that don't have powerful engines, that aren't turbocharged, as they say, that don't have a turbo. These are altitudes where many planes can't make it. So this is a pilot who also, just for information, used to make this trip. Sometimes he stopped along the way to refuel, sometimes not. On this occasion we think that he didn't stop to refuel and he crashed three hours after his departure. Okay, now several questions come to mind. First, if he had a problem and decided to make an emergency landing, why didn't he inform anyone? Especially since the region is so hot, even in April that you can easily land and find yourself a few days later, like an anatomy lab skeleton. It's so hot. So the least we can do is imagine that the guy would have picked up the radio and on the frequency he would have issued maydays and all that saying I'm going to land in everything. That's not something that seems to have happened. There's no trace of a message of a message of that sort. Okay, now in the rescuers observations, what are we going to see? We're going to see that this aircraft has three tanks. So it has tanks, let's say by default, that come as standard. These are tanks that are one per L, huh? One on each half L to be precise. So we have one on the left, one on the Right. And at the back, where there normally is a luggage compartment. Well, what we're doing is that we can have a version to extend the. Extend the. Store the. Extend the. The range of these aircraft. It can be installed by an approved workshop. An additional tank can be installed. And that day there was an additional tank. Now, did they have fuel or not? A very tricky question. Why? Because since there is no black box, and since we don't know how much fuel they took on board at the start, well, the gumballs are a bit of a mystery. But what do we know? We know one, all three tanks were ripped open. Three tanks were ripped open, that's for sure. So even if one or the other of the tanks had contained fuel, we wouldn't have found it the next day in any case. It had been ripped open, torn, it was extremely hot, so any fuel would have already evaporated. That's the first point. Secondly, there is no smell of fuel because often when these tanks are ripped open, the fuel is sprayed onto the wings, onto the trim, sprayed everywhere. And there is a persistent smell of fuel that remains for days and days. Here there is absolutely no smell of fuel. Another thing is that this fuel tends to stain. It is fuel. And if it spills on the plane, on the wings, on the ground, etc. It tends to leave traces that will not disappear immediately. Such traces did not exist. So logically, one of two things happened. Either the plane ran out of fuel. Ran out of fuel and had to make an emergency landing. First possibility. Either it had to make an emergency landing, there was still fuel in one of the tanks. But after the impact, this fuel was released so scattered we couldn't find it and we couldn't find any trace of it, said the very delicate one. Now something else, and this is where it gets crazy. This is where we practically get into. The mystery is that there is one thing that we look at right away in these accidents. We're going to look at the propeller. What was the propeller doing? We look at it. Propellers that were turning, well, when they hit the ground, they tend to deform in a very particular way because they are turning at the moment they hit the ground. And, well, there is a very characteristic and inevitable deformation that will occur. The propellers that are stationary at the moment they hit the ground means the engine was stopped. And, well, they don't have this kind of damage. The blade underneath will rub against the ground and twist backwards while the blade above will remain intact. The problem is that the blades were torn from their hubs. This means that at the moment of impact, the blades jumped off their hubs, which is quite surprising because when the engine is stopped, the blades do not jump off their hubs. The engine is spinning on its own. This means that the engine has run out of fuel, but is spinning on its own due to the aerodynamic force of the air when it hits the ground. Since there is no torque reaching the propeller, the propeller stops dead. It is twisted, but it will not show. The deformations associated with a propeller are consistent with a propeller receiving powerful torque from the motorcyclist. So we have the blades that were thrown away. The hub has absolutely no blades. And in fact, there's no fuel. You see, it's quite astounding. We wonder what's the problem? What got into him to land and why didn't he tell anyone? So we continue. The engine was transported to the NTSB workshops. Now, there's one thing you need to know, and that's why sometimes these general aviation reports, these investigation reports are very frustrating. Because like in this case, the TSB didn't go to the site. They didn't think it was necessary because they just had other accidents. They had other things to do. It was a single engine aircraft accident. They didn't see. They didn't see that the public's interest was to go and see all that. So they didn't go. So when they don't sell, what they do is they exchange emails or telephone calls with the local sheriff, the firefighters, the emergency services, the medical examiner, the insurance adjuster, all of that. They make a few exchanges here and there. And from there they compile a report. And when the report is done this way, well, very often it. It's not very thorough. And this report in particular, I can tell you, it leaves a lot of gray areas. There you have it. Now, one thing you need to know that I'm adding to this puzzle here. The pilot, the one I told you, he works at Intel Corporation. He wears glasses. He has myopia glasses. The NTSB report doesn't mention his glasses. But something else in the report. There is a trace link to his medical certificate. Because pilots regularly undergo medical examinations to maintain their certificate, this medical certificate was subject to a restriction, this type of restriction related to colors. He was not allowed to fly at night. If there was a context where colored signals, colored lights were used, this type of remark, when we find it on a medical certificate, it means that the person is colorblind. Okay, so we have someone who is colorblind, that's for sure. We can see it from the medical certificate. Even if it doesn't say colorblind, but the restriction suggests it. We have someone who wears glasses, so he is nearsighted. Okay, there may be something else. There may be that, but there's always something else. So if his vision is very limited, very, very deficient, sometimes even more deficient than the medical certificate suggests, let's imagine that his vision is literally monochrome in 16 levels of gray. We are on an Arri screen from 1989. Literally. He can't see much. He can always land on a Runway, a black Runway that stands out from a green field or a field of another color. Even if he can't see the colors very well, he can still make out a black rectangle. Right? That's the Runway. Okay. So he takes off from a Runway. He's flying, he's flying. And then suddenly he realizes that there's no more fuel. Boom. He realizes that the fuel is gone. There's no more. So what does he want to do? He wants to make an emergency landing. There's something. If you're in flight. If you're in flight, let's say you're flying over the Grand Canyon or the Alps or whatever, and suddenly you realize that you're almost out of fuel, that the engine is going to stop very soon, what are you going to do as a pilot? Well, it's always much easier to make an emergency landing quickly as long as you have an engine running. Because, of course, planes glide, and you can make an emergency landing even without an engine. But in terms of difficulty, it's another world when you don't have an engine. Why? When you don't have an engine, you can't correct your glide path at all. You're descending, you're going to the maximum glide speed, you're descending. And then suddenly you realize that the terrain you were considering over there is actually a bit too far away. And that before that, terrain, for example, there are cacti or rock faces or something. You're going to hit the cacti or the rock face. There's nothing to do. You can't extend without flying. It's a shooting technique to try not to. It's a shooting technique to try to get further. Anyway, we won't get any further. We'll instead lose speed and lose glide path even faster. We'll touch down even faster. So having an engine running even if we still have 90 seconds of fuel always helps. We go for it. We go for it. And if we see that we're maybe a little too low compared to what we're aiming for. We can heat up a little, buy a little gas, and then we keep flying until we're ready to land and we land. Well, we can say that maybe our pilot didn't wait for the time being that he landed with an engine running, but which was going to stop very soon. So that at the moment of impact there was no fuel, there was no fire, there was nothing. All that, because in fact it was, it was screwed. So he lowered the landing gear, extended the flaps, and then landed. He hit the ground with almost empty tanks. So nothing happened. And the little fuel that was there evaporated by the time the rescuers arrived the next day. We can always consider that why is it hitting minus 30 degrees Celsius? Well, maybe I say maybe it means that I am reasoning from a situation. We have an airplane that took a 30 degrees nose down attitude that hit the ground at 30 degrees Celsius. We can say that it was flying, believe again, on the glide path. They did not reach the ground. It hit it. Yes, but that is not enough, because in a glide path you do not descend at 30 degrees Celsius. And so the glide path is too high, too pronounced to say that it did not see the ground coming. So maybe, I say maybe, given his impaired vision and since it was the first time in his life that he was landing not on a Runway, but on a vacant lot with no visual references, especially for those with impaired vision. Well, maybe, for example, he gets to 50 meters and then he starts to flare because he feels like he's going to hit the ground at any moment. So he starts to flare, slow down, slow down, pulls on the sticks, the plane pitches, pitches, pitches, pitches. We have the stall indicator and then instead of having boom, the wheels touch down. Well, the wheels don't touch down. The plane stalls, it falls, the nose goes forward and the next moment we touch down and bam. That could be an option. Another thing, the landing gear is down. It's a bit weird, though. It's a bit weird because if you have to land on a field like this in open country, in general, but hey, that's the rule. But maybe he didn't follow it. We land with the landing gear retracted because with the landing gear retracted, we'll be able to stop faster than with a landing gear that's going to hit really hard and make the plane tip onto its nose. There's also this option, you know, you hit it and the landing gear will immediately sink into the ground. Because imagine soft ground, sand, all that. When the main landing gear touches down it's not like on a Runway where the wheels start to turn. No, no. When the landing gear touches down, it gets caught on, for example, big rocks. And the next moment the nose of the plane takes a nosedive. You see. Could this give the 30 degrees Celsius we're talking about? Maybe, maybe. You know, mystery and bubble gum. Really important to end this video where we may not have, as usual, we may not have a formal definitive explanation. I'll give you the pieces of the puzzle and then everyone tries to put together their own theory. Another thing, a really important thing is that when you look at the tanks of single engine planes, generally they all have complicated systems, sometimes even more complicated than this airliner. Sometimes airliners have automated systems and they just fly. You set it and you forget it. It's not like that. You can't set it and forget it in a small plane. Why? Let me give you an example. I flew once in a plane where there were two tanks, one on the left and one on the right. But the engine only takes fuel from the left wing. So what do we do with the right wing? So we have a transfer pump, we have a button, and when we have used up a bit of fuel from the left wing, what do we do? We press a button and there is a pump that will transfer. Then after a while it stops. And also I would have liked, I would have liked this to have a spring loaded button. That means that you push it and when you let go, it comes back on its own. No, we don't have that. We had a button. You press on, it starts and then it stays on until you miss it. It is capable of transferring you until the tank on the left is completely full unbalancing the plane. So what I personally did was I had the discipline to always keep my finger on it. I put it on, I kept my finger on it. If, for example, I had to let go of my hand to go and adjust something else or whatever before letting go, I would turn it off, adjust the settings, come back and turn it back on. It's a personal discipline that I developed to avoid forgetting. Because, you know, there are concrete and abstract functions in the human brain. There are things that exist that are well configured in the human brain and things that are not. What is not configured in the human brain is doing something after a certain amount of time. For example, if I say I'm turning it on and in five minutes I have to remember to turn it off. My brain is intellectualized, but my brain doesn't have this function. So If I turn it on, I risk forgetting thinks it. You see, that's why, for example, in ovens, if you look at the oven at home, you see that there's always a timer. It's very important. Otherwise you'll burn the pizza, you'll burn your food. It's obvious, because we probably don't have a timer. And if you look at our everyday lives, you can easily find a list of the functions that exist, that are configured from birth, and the functions that don't exist. Now, another thing about this plane. I'll also give you an oddity that this plane had. The oddity I'm talking about doesn't come from that. But if we look at the A35, the there's a characteristic thing in it that's weird. You have three tanks in this one. Left, right, auxiliary. Okay, let's continue. You also have something else. The pump. The fuel pump takes fuel from the carburetor, but it doesn't take too much. It can take up to 15L more per hour than the engine consumes. What do we do with these 15L per hour? What do we do with them? Well, we reinject them. Not into the tank from which we took them. No, we reinject them into the left tank. It doesn't matter where we took them from. Did you see how weird this is? So imagine the following situation. Imagine someone taking off in this plane and both tanks are full and he's taking fuel from the right tank. Okay, perfect. So he flies for one hour on the right tank. During that hour, what does the pump do? It takes 15L more from the right tank. And what does it do with? Makes it full again. What is it going to do? There's an overflow valve. While we're pumping fuel into it, the overflow valve opens and the plane starts ejecting fuel into the air. So the plane is flying and behind it there is a trail of fuel. The pilot doesn't see it. 15L over one hour. You won't see it. It won't make a mega cloud for you. You won't see it. So these 15L are lost to everyone because they were taken outside, but were never available. They were thrown overboard. So in reality, it can look as if we have artificially increased the plane's consumption. It's as if I had increased the consumption by 15L per hour. So if, for example, we take off and for three hours on the left tank, then the rear tank, and then off for three hours, we have already used 45L fuel. Okay, so that can Cause this kind of problem, you see. And very often when you look at ICLUB planes, there are always oddities. It's not always about running out of fuel when there are fuel problems, but sometimes there are tank management problems. There are a lot of planes that crash every year not because there was no fuel, but because the fuel was mismanaged and the pilot thought there wasn't any. Or sometimes we even see the engine stop when there was plenty of fuel in the plane. It's just because it was mismanaged. Or sometimes, you know, those selectors that switch from one tank to another are sometimes rotten, right? I've seen selectors. You put it in the position, for example, right tank, it clicks. And then you take the, the, the, the maneuver there, the lever, you move it and you see that it can sometimes move 15, 20 degrees to the left and to the right without you hearing anything clicking or anything. And you wonder if it's not holding properly. Then you see that it's a little bit disapp. Disconnected from its, from its big screw in the center. It's always rotten, right? Because with so much use. These are planes that have been manufactured since the 60s, 70s and with so much use. Clicks, clicks, clicks. With thousands of pilots who come to do this gesture, sooner or later you're going to see that your thing, it's a little bit. And sometimes you're not even sure you've put it exactly in the right place. And if it's in between, that can cause problems too. It can cause problems. It can even stop your engine. There you go. So listen, if you want to win the Nobel Prize for aviation, try to invent a fuel management system that is super simple. Like I take off and forget about it. That would be really great. Thank you my friends, for watching this video. That's three deaths. The reason, well, the reason for all this is that we don't know anything about it. There are so many theories. I've just given you all the pieces of the puzzle. If you have another theory, if you can put it together in a special or interesting way, feel free to say it in the comments. Thank you my friends, for watching this video so far. In the next one. See you soon.