Skymaster down!

[Ernie Martin]

This series of 2 Skymasters down within days should be of grave concern. In both instances the pilots were highly experienced (one flew for Northwest Airlines and had 30,000 hours, and the other had been a commercial pilot and flight instructor) and in one case the aircraft was state-owned and flying for a state agency (which suggests a more rigorous environment of maintenance and pre-flight checkout). And people, these were lightly loaded twin-engine Skymasters. I can see an overloaded Skymaster losing an engine at takeoff crashing, but these aircraft had a single passenger. And in the case of the state airplane witnesses saw the plane circling the fire area and then “it went straight down”.

Fuel exhaustion might explain one but not the one that "went straight down". We need to stay on top of these to find out what happened. I'm hoping a snapped flap cable (the subject of another message this morning) didn't play a part, since the aircraft that "went straight down" was not landing.

Ernie