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5xad0w OP t1_ja6f4w3 wrote

The flight was in the air for about 14 minutes and had reached an altitude of just over 19,000 when radar noticed the plane was in a descending right turn at a high rate of descent, Landsberg said.

Obviously no idea what happened, but sounds like they went into a dive that exceeded the airframes survivable speed.

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AnonymousShmuck t1_ja8b2pd wrote

Weren't there reports of extreme turbulence in the area?? I know there's a certain YouTuber out there talking about spatial disorientation but I think this is leaning more to the plane just falling out of the sky due to something failing mechanically. They found the tail horizontal stabilizer about 3/4 of a mile from the airplane along with part of the right wing.

Edit*

If you look at the flight data, he was flying straight and climbing before the right hand turn into the dive. It seemed to me that a mechanical issue might have caused loss of control which then caused additional breakage aka that right wing tip. There is a weird right turn left. Turn correction but at that point he starts climbing for quite a distance before the issue seems to happen. Therefore, leading me to believe that it wasn't necessarily spatial disorientation but mechanical failure. I'm no way educated to make this guess.

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MalabaristaEnFuego t1_ja900i4 wrote

Likely a mid air collision with an object, strong likelihood it was a large bird. I worked for a different medical aviation company and they had a similar type of wreck with a bird collision. Bird crashed through a windshield on the pilot's side killing the pilot or disabling him, and the whole thing crashed. There may be a news article somewhere to dig up. I can't remember exactly where it happened though, somewhere in the northern midwest of the US.

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galspanic t1_ja9mezl wrote

Likely? At 19,000 feet you’re not running many birds and during a winter storm you’ll see even fewer.

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AnonymousShmuck t1_ja9dwe4 wrote

It's possible a bird might have struck the tail horizontal stabilizer. That piece along with the tip of the right wing was missing from the wreckage (by 1/2-3/4 mile) implying that it came off prior to the aircraft hitting the ground.

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[deleted] t1_ja6g69y wrote

[deleted]

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5xad0w OP t1_ja6ieqe wrote

I'm hoping (relatively speaking) that it was catastrophic failure and not suicide.

The fact that radar showed it in a turn kind of makes me think it was mechanical. I'd assume with suicide you would just point the nose straight down or fly into a mountain.

Don't know what, if anything, was said over the radio but the turn may have even been started as an attempt to turn back when they realized something was wrong.

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Affectionate-Park-15 t1_ja6lchl wrote

Could have been icing on the wing. Pilot tried to correct unsuccessful. I used to fly as a medical crew in the PC12 and it’s a tough aircraft, but icing was always a concern.

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EmotionalSuportPenis t1_ja6zxck wrote

Icing should be pretty easily detectable in the PC-12, though, and I'm not sure Pilatus even sells any of them without ice control systems. Not to say it couldn't be a factor, but the pilots are trained and the planes are built to deal with it, and they tend to fly in icing conditions a lot.

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ilikemrrogers t1_jaee4gq wrote

I’m a former aviation meteorologist, and icing was my first thought. It would cause a nose-up AOA and eventual stall. Looking at the obs, there was a ceiling at 060 with light snow. Temps at the surface hovering around freezing. You can get a fast accumulation of clear ice in those conditions. You can also get induction freezing in the engines when they are revved up for climbing.

Combine a frozen engine, clear ice, and a sudden stall and spin, and it wouldn’t take much for something to break off.

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michal_hanu_la t1_ja6hqua wrote

Blancolirio has a hypothesis about going off autopilot (for which there are many possible reasons) and spatial disorientation (which happens a lot when one is hand-flying in extreme IMC).

Of course we're all waiting for the actual investigation.

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