Video of Miami Crash

[YourNameHere]

CNN showing amateur video of Mallard crash in Miami. Looks like a wing seperated in flight.

http://www.cnn.com/video/player/player.html?url=/video/us/2005/12/19/vo.amateur.crash.video.affl&wm=10

 

[urflyingme?!]

That's exactly the kind of thing we all like to think doesn't happen anymore to properly maintained aircraft....

 

[agpilot34]

That can happen to ANY 40 or 50 year old airframe, I dont care HOW well it's maintained, and I can give you several instances of just exactly that. How about we save the shoddy maintainance speculations until the wreckage is at least brought up from the bottom.

 

[FN FAL]

That's exactly the kind of thing we all like to think doesn't happen anymore to properly maintained aircraft....

Or in theory, to an airplane where the co-pilot wants to tell the captain's wife about their affair and the captain don't want nunna dat happening.

 

[avbug]

Age isn't necessarily relevant...but speculation is the halmark of unprofessionalism. One should be ashamed of guesswork; it belies everything we do in this industry.

We don't guess at performance numbers, we don't guess at anything we do. We know.

We don't know what happened to this aircraft. We will, at some future date. How about leaving guesswork and speculation to the National Enquirer and little old ladies in small towns with nothing better to do?

 

[Gorilla]

Oh for goodness sake, there is nothing wrong with speculating. Stop assuming that our opinions/speculations have some special meaning because most of us are pilots. You must think lawyers are reading this board and will somehow introduce our wild theories into court as expert testimony. So long as we respect the dead, and speculate in a reasonable manner, I see nothing inherently evil about it.

As for this crash, I am going to go out on a limb here - given the evidence and the video, I'm going to strongly speculate that there was a failure of the structure inflight, causing the aircraft to crash.

God bless those who lost their lives.

 

[Launchpad]

I'm guessing corrosion.... Pretty common for salt water operators, easy way for parts to fall off.

 

[PsubS]

Avbug: "..speculation is the halmark of unprofessionalism."

Gorilla: "there is nothing wrong with speculating..."

uh ohhhh, I feel a "brightspark" moment quickly approaching...

 

[av8orboy]

Wow.. That would suck. My heart goes out to everybody involved.

 

[Flyerjosh]

It's human nature to speculate. We're all professionals, so we in particular take interest in what happened, even if it is out of some sort of morbid curiosity (but more likely because we can learn from any accident).

The video will offer a lot of insight during the crash investigation. I'm no expert and don't work for the NTSB, but do have some crash investigation background... and can say that every little piece of info, particularly that which is available from the "pre impact" timeframe is of great value.

Looking at the video, it looks like the wing separated at the root, rather than midpoint, which points towards structural failure (corrosion/improper assembly following overhaul/metal fatigue) as opposed to an engine issue leading to failure. (of course, the angle and video quality could mean that this surmise is incorrect... only seeing the actual wreckage and conducting metallurgic analysis will clear things up).

I would rule out an explosion/bomb as the cause... simply because the fuselage isn't burning/smoking after the separation. Most likely the wing ignited right after the separation from the plane.

Very unfortunate indeed. If anybody sees a passenger manifest anywhere can you please PM me or email it to me? I would like to add it to my aviation memorials site. Thanks.