Page 37 - Volume 16 Number 5

On April 19, 2008, a Cessna Citation Mustang suffered substantial damage when its pilot ground-looped the light jet to prevent a runway overshoot at Carlsbad, California. According to the NTSB, this was anintentional act, performed to prevent going off a cliff past the end of the runway after the pilot landed “fast” and beyond the mid-point of Carlsbad’s 4600-foot available landing surface. The pilot’s quick action is credited with sparing injury(or worse) to the four on board.Like most accidents, the impact was the end result of a long chain of events that grew to overcome the airplane’s and/or the pilot’s capabilities. In this case, theNTSB report suggests......the threatened runway overrun resulted from excess speed (15 knots above VREF on final approach)....the excess speed on final resulted from being high and close to the airport....excess altitude for the visual approach may have resulted from a heightened desire to get on the ground quickly....that heightened desire to land may have been an outcome of pilot fatigue. The NTSB quotes the pilot as saying he was “fatigued from maneuvering the airplane by hand for such a long duration (which he approximatedwas around 45 minutes).”...pilot fatigue likely resulted from difficulty flying the airplane with instrument (PFD), autopilot and trim failures resulting from an electrical malfunction....delay in reverting to manual trim operation and hand- flying faced with erroneous flight director indications might have been the result of an over-reliance on cockpit automation, to the exclusion of practice with reversion to manual flying.MTWIN & TURBINE • 35MAAYY 220122