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He had only taken the VFR phase of Cirrus transition training his registration cited 20 hours of flight time in the preceding year, four of them by instruments. Almost 80 percent of his flight time was multiengine, and he had previously owned a Beech Duke, so he knew how fast things can happen in high-performance aircraft, but he may have been a little rusty. When he had taken delivery of it six months earlier, he had claimed 400 hours of instrument time, unusually high for a 1,300-hour pilot. He was not a novice instrument pilot, but he was fairly new to the Cirrus. In the confusion of that brief, chaotic flight, however, he didn’t do either one. And at least three times after control of the airplane had been compromised, it reached altitudes that would have allowed successful deployment of the ballistic parachute. Once he had leveled off at a safe altitude, ATC could have provided vectors if he needed time to sort out the box. The most obvious would have been to disconnect the autopilot and hand-fly the climb.
#Stec 50 autopilot oscillation series#
The series of inputs recorded during the subsequent oscillations led the NTSB to conclude that “the pilot never adequately regained control of the airplane” while attempting to reset the altitude and heading bugs. This automatically set the altitude bug to 940 feet msl, which the autopilot attempted to recapture as the airplane climbed. However, instead of altitude preselect mode (already programmed for 3,000 feet with an 850 fpm rate of climb), it was set for altitude hold. The data logger also recorded that the autopilot was engaged about five seconds after takeoff at an altitude of 940 feet msl, just 61 feet above field elevation. The final data point showed the airplane pitched 30 degrees nose down and partially inverted, banked 120 degrees over the right wing. Pitch angle ranged from 50-degrees nose up to 60-degrees nose down and airspeed varied between 50 knots and 172 kt. It then climbed from 1,200 feet msl to 2,700 feet msl in 17 seconds as its airspeed decayed to 50 knots before it fell back to 1,600 feet msl, reversing heading yet again.ĭuring the next two minutes, it climbed and dropped two more times, reaching a peak altitude of 3,200 feet msl. The right turn continued through about 540 degrees-one and a half complete revolutions-before the airplane finally rolled out on a southerly heading. Data recovered from its avionics suite showed that it began turning right almost immediately. The Cirrus was cleared to take off from Runway 6 with instructions to fly runway heading and climb to 3,000 feet msl. The pilot acknowledged the tower controller’s hand-off, but never made contact with departure control. It crashed four and a half minutes later, killing both on board. On the afternoon of April 28, 2009, a Cirrus SR22 took off into a 200-foot overcast from Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County Airport.