Three Words: Traffic In Sight

[Brad]

http://www.break.com/index/in-air-near-miss-causes-crash.html


Anyone able to tell me what kind of aircraft that is?

[NIN]

The one that crumped in, or the one that crossed his nose?

I wasn't able to get a good freeze frame on the one that crossed the nose (too many compression artifacts mixed with the interlacing of that video to even tell.  Looked even low-wing!), but the crashed plane looks like a Zenith Air CH-701. (I'm not sure if the 701 has those sort of Aeronca-style wing struts with the cabane wires...)

I could not figure out why it looked at first like a stall-spin situation, but without what I would expect to be a fair amount of nose-down pitch and the associated wind noise (even sans engine).  Then I realized it sounds like the pilot says "I have deployed my parachute" (if he were a pilot *wearing* a parachute, I would expect you wouldn't have heard him say that, since he'd have elected to stop being a pilot and start being a skydiver well before announcing his intentions on the CTAF) which seems to indicate to me he has one of those 'airframe mounted ballistic recovery systems' that uses a mortar -deployed round to lower you to the ground.  His arrival in the field also confirms a nice straight down arrival lacking airspeed, like under a BRS parachute.

Hell, he even walked away. Nice one.

EDIT: on second thought, its probably not a 701 or its larger sister the 801.  They have a very exaggerated "wing leading edge to upper windscreen" difference due to the 701/801 series STOL wing, and the plane in this video does not have that same feature.

[Brad]

Well according to the description, the crossing plane was towing a banner, although Break is notorious for erroneous descriptions; plus the cable would probably shred once it contacted the propeller, wouldn't it?

[Pace]

It's hard to tell from the video, but it didn't look like he was in any dangerous attitude that would prevent a safe off-field power off landing.

[rant]
I thought was was going to need a parachute today when the student I was giving a stage check to put us into a spin twice during power on stalls and later on exercised poor power off stall recovery technique.  I earned my paycheck today...
[/rant]

[NIN]

Discovered some info about this:

It was a German Rans R6 collided with a French glider tug's tow rope over France.

The German pilot in his Rans S6 Ultralight plane was flying in formation with friends across France. A French towplane crossed his flight path a few moments after he released a glider. Its 60meter long glider tow line gets caught into the propeller of the UL plane and forced the pilot to pull his safety parachute. - In Germany it's required for every UL plane to have an emergency parachute. - Nobody was injured.

http://blog.flightstory.net/category/videos/page/2/

[lordmonar]

In the last few frames you can see the bright blue BRS chute on the lower left corner.

[♠SARKID♠]

Ouch, that ones going on the favorites list.