Federal Aviation Administration / International Field Office; Los Angeles
A Roseau, Minnesota man who died while piloting a small plane on the Canadian side of Lake of the Woods this week has been identified as Joshua Broten.
Aircraft crashed under unknown circumstances while conducting low fly-by of cottage.
Date: 21-SEP-22
Time: 24:00:00Z
Regis#: N638JM
Aircraft Make: ARION
Aircraft Model: LIGHTNING
Event Type: ACCIDENT
Highest Injury: FATAL
Total Fatal: 1
Flight Crew: 1 Fatal
Pax: 0
Aircraft Missing: No
Damage: UNKNOWN
Activity: PERSONAL
Flight Phase: MANEUVERING (MNV)
Operation: 91
City: KENORA
State: ONTARIO
Country: CANADA
A Roseau, Minnesota man who died while piloting a small plane on the Canadian side of Lake of the Woods this week has been identified as Joshua Broten.
Buzzing a house seems like fun, but it is often deadly. The problem is they get into a tighter and tighter spiral and don’t realize the air speed is dropping. By the time they realize it, or even if they don’t, they stall and spin into the ground.
ReplyDeleteThat or after their low pass, they try to perform a rapid climb and pull back too much on the stick thinking that being level with sufficient airspeed will avoid a stall, but they quickly discover that an aircraft will indeed stall at any airspeed and attitude with improper control inputs.
DeleteCmon, it's not dangerous to fly circles around your house. I've done it since I was a student pilot and never had any problems.
DeleteIf what you said were true then students, commercial, and CFI applicants would be dropping dead from doing turns around a point and other ground reference maneuvers.
There's a lot of dead pilots down the decades who might like to take issue with the "C'mon, it's not dangerous to fly circles around your house..." sentiment, if given a second chance. IF you're a pilot, and continue to hold this rather remarkably blinkered (and factually-incorrect) view of the flying world, your potential PIC longevity may be improved by imagination-improving exercises. Start by imagining, "What could POSSIBLY go wrong?!?"
Delete"Cmon, it's not dangerous to fly circles around your house." Ever heard of a moose stall? Also, turns around a point are NOT done at 100 AGL. Flying that low is dangerous and illegal for a reason. And it's also completely pointless, unless you need to compensate for other deficiencies in your life.
DeleteHe might have been a safe pilot, but buzzing a house and not recognizing that his air speed was too low is a mistake, pure and simple. Instead of leveling off and applying power, he did what almost everyone does, which is to reactively pull up the nose and stall the plane too close to the ground.
DeleteLow fly-bys are fun...until they aren't. During WWII an AAF pilot and crew on a training flight dipped down over his folks on their farm and left his B-24 tail in a tree in the front yard. Made it 1.5 miles before the inevitable crash and burn. It was about 3 miles from my place.
ReplyDeleteHey, SkyKing, are you in Blockville, NY ? An incident like that happened there (about three miles from *my* house!) with the crew on its way to overseas deployment.
DeleteFor those who like to do it, it's fun, until it isn't. The Top Gun mentality got him
ReplyDeleteWe use to buzz friends houses in Texas all the time. I lived just 1.3 miles from our private grass strip and got a buzz almost anytime someone we knew flew in. Main difference is we lived in a very sparsely populated area with nothing but large farm fields. You could ditch a plane almost anywhere with minimal damage. In the 20 years I lived there we had 2 ditching due to engine issues in single-engine planes. In both cases we were able to repair the airplane on site and after, one took off from a road, other from a grass waterway. FAA never found out.
ReplyDeleteWe did have one airplane crash on our runway due to a hard landing from an unstabilized approach. Main thing to check after that is the ELT. It got triggered and they showed up in the middle of the night, so that one is on the books. News camera are like vultures after that too.
This was all also about 20 years ago, before every tom, dick and harry got a security camera in their back yard.
I buzzed my parent's house in a King Air in 1984, after flying pretty low over a corn field just west of Fort Wayne. When the feds called me a few days later, I lied my ass off (it wasn't me, I wasn't that low, etc.).
DeleteIt didn't work.
They suspended my privileges for six months.
I don't think they believed me.
I was flying as a maintenance test pilot for Beech Aircraft.
I just kept flying.
Different times, I guess.
If I were the FAA POI, I would have put in a 12-month suspension for legal to apply. A letter certainly would have been sent to Beech about your careless and reckless behavior. I grow tired at looking at the remains of pilots who do things like buzzing and then get whacked. Wake up, this isn't a strafing exercise or real war time efforts at knocking off some enemy. All it takes is one event to ruin the day for many people.
DeleteBuzzing and low fly-by's might be fun to some. However, as stated within this report's comments, pooh-pooh happens and the ultimate price is paid. In this case it appears two good-looking little boys will be without a Dad because Dad didn't use his sense and went beyond his piloting capabilities in an airplane that most likely was pushed beyond it's capabilities too. Heck of a formula.
ReplyDeleteI read that he had five kids, all of whom must be young. Whatever happens to the families of these victims, mainly the wife/mother who is alone all of a sudden? Is there a website that deals with this type of thing?
DeleteFortunately, the family has a very supportive community and extended family. Also a close knit church family. However, I agree. I think that a widow/widowers group would be a great idea for an additional support system for families. Having others to relate is certainly helpful in the grieving process.
DeleteThe FBO I worked at had a flight instructor who thought that buzzing a friend was a good idea, till he caught the landing gear on a power line. He took down almost a mile of line, destroyed 10 acres of wheat, killed 10 cows, and burned up a 3-year-old Arrow. Luckily no one got killed.
ReplyDeleteHe was flying with the gear down?
DeleteSorry, Archer, not Arrow.
DeleteBuzzing, just like Off Airport Landings and Agriculture Operations, can be done safe is the proper planning and precautions are taken. If you are not prepared for an engine outage at the lowest point with a suitable landing spot in range, you are just asking for trouble. Then again, I guess if people are disregarding the FARs to buzz, they are asking for trouble anyway...
ReplyDeleteThis dummy is the poster boy for horseplay.
ReplyDeleteIf you are going to do something reckless: "one pass, haul ass!"
ReplyDeleteYou also have to gamble that you don't get caught by an angry person's security camera. Even if you are following the FARs to the letter, the FAA can still pull your license. Just look at Trent Palmer.
DeletePeople always bring up Trent Palmer, but we only know one side of that story and that's Trent Palmer's side. Sure, he says he followed the FARs to the letter, but with his ticket on the line why would he say otherwise. So far, no actual evidence or documentation has been released by anyone, nor have we seen the actual details on the FAA's case. One shouldn't come to judgement on an issue based solely on one person's word with zero solid evidence to back it up.
DeleteTrent was instigating a situation that him and his buddy had with the buddy neighbor about RC airplanes and such. Trent did not need to do a buzz job to inspect his buddy possible landing area. It is a motocross style track and this buddy he spoke of lived 1 or 2 miles from Trents house. A house he had been to before according to comments about them flying RC planes there.
DeleteI don't know why you people assume he was "buzzing" anyone. I know him personally and also know the person who saw his plane seconds before he crashed. From what he says it was his normal routine of flying by his lake cabin. He has flown by my house many times in the past and never got low. I am not a pilot but am told by his closest pilot friends that he was a very safe pilot. He flew a lot and loved it and loved to give others rides so they could enjoy it. It was very sad he died but it isn't due to doing dangerous maneuvers. This comes from knowing him personally and speaking with the person who witnessed it.
ReplyDeleteIt was insufficient airspeed AND being too low.
ReplyDelete