AS AN INSTRUCTOR pilot with several thousand hours in my logbooks, I know it is really difficult to crash a Cessna Caravan on a straight-in approach to an airport. One crashed off the runway at Indreabhan, County Galway yesterday and was photographed by Joe O'Shaughnessy at left. It was probably not a straight-in approach. What bugs me is the soft waffling and erroneous information spouting from mainstream Irish media about this tragic accident. Nearly every Irish broadsheet misidentifies the type of aircraft. It was a Cessna Grand Caravan, not a Grand Camper. It was a single engine aircraft--the kind without a black box. It can land on a postage stamp--I've done that near Bodrum, Turkey on one occasion--but you need to know how to manage the power of the beast. A big, honking Pratt & Whitney PT6A-114A engine powers a three-blade prop through the air. This monster pulls you across the terrain and builds up momentum, even when carrying a full load of bricks (or coke as is the legend in South America). You could easily drop a load onto an Irish grass strip, originating as far east as west Germany with your cargo because this plane will fly for more than 1500km. Surely some aviation boffin could have elevated the flow of coverage given to this aircraft accident in the evening news yesterday. But no, the journalists opted for people who "saw nothing but heard a big bang" and for comments from the crash units, police nearly 100 miles away and aviation authorities in Dublin. Aviation weather reports are a matter of record but they did not merit mention in the first reports. Air traffic control would have told the reporters that two flights had diverted from the area due to low clouds but that did not get onto the national news until 15 hours after the accident.
Cessna is a proud name in aircraft manufacturing. Its high-wing design has endured through decades of turbulence. When the gusts pummeling Ireland subside and the investigation around this tragic mishap dribbles out, be sure to notice the qualifications of the pilot, the weather conditions around the landing strip and the cross-wind check-out techniques practised by the flight crew in the 90 days preceding this unfortunate incident. None of those things merited mention by the State broadcaster yesterday, continuing a tradition of never focusing on the real cause of most aircraft and road accidents: operator error.
Lorna Siggins -- "Two die and three critical in Connemara air crash" with photo by Joe O'Shaughnessy.
