Over in the Cirrus Flying forum, Ted Cohen posted a link to one of the best summaries of this accident that I've seen yet. AOPA did the study and has actual audio from the accident overlain into a pretty thorough discussion of the decision making points leading to the occurrence.
The results aren't exactly new but there is still a lot of misinformation out there about this accident. The icing was not forecast and the NTSB actually cited the National Weather Service as partially at fault for not having a better prediction. There was even a PIREP passed along by Southwest Airlines but the report came in too late to help the accident pilot. As the flight progresses, the accident pilot makes some decisions that ultimately cost him his life... and even though the situation was a surprise to him, there was a point where he could have avoided it.
You can view the comment thread here: http://www.cirruspilots.org/forums/p/116149/478054.aspx#478054
Or, for those who aren't COPA members (yet), you can go right to the course here: http://flash.aopa.org/asf/acs_airframe_icing/?WT.mc_id=091127epilot&WT.mc_sect=sap You do NOT need to be an AOPA member to take the course, just sign up as a guest.
It doesn't take very long to complete this course, maybe 15 minutes. If you complete the very short quiz they have after there's even an option to get a certificate from AOPA stating that you've done so. Print it off and send it to your insurance people... who knows? Maybe they'll give you a bit of a break.
One of the spookiest things to me was the last transmission made by the pilot. They have a recording of it on the course so you can listen to it there. Basically, the pilot (seemingly calmly) tells the controller that he's icing up and going down. The thing that caught my attention was that he held his push-to-talk switch down for quite a while after he stopped talking, a sign that he was mentally locking up. I see that a lot in training when a pilot is overloaded. Anyway, during those last few seconds after he's done talking but still transmitting you can hear the incredible speed of the airplane coming through his mic. They estimate he was coming down at over 5,000 feet per minute and his speed was well over the red line of 201 knots.
It was spooky because I've heard that noise of rushing air before but didn't realize how accurate it is. When I'm teaching in our sim and working with an instrument pilot, one of the things I like to demonstrate is an elevator stall as brought on by icing (largely suspected to be the reason this accident airplane entered the dive). The reason for this is because I want the pilot to see just how fast he or she must react to the situation before it's too late to do anything other than hit the ground... and it averages 5 seconds from the time the elevator fails til it's far too late to do anything about it. If you've never seen or experienced anything like this before, the chances that you'll react in that timeframe by pulling the chute are virtually nil. To date, nobody that I've put in this situation has done it the first time and most of them I specifically *told it was going to happen* right before I did it. How's that for a giveaway?
Our sim makes the exact same noise of the rushing air, quite loudly, just like I heard in that last transmission. I got a bit of a shudder when I heard it again for real.
Icing is very avoidable. There's no need for it to take as many pilots each year. As we continue through this time of year where icing is so prolific, we need to make sure we're making conservative decisions based only on the safety of our flight... not how inconvenient it would be to not make the flight.
Now, go watch that video!
Safe flying,
-John Fiscus
Chief Pilot, The Flight Academy
www.theflightacademy.com 
Posted
28 Nov 2009 11:50
by
John Fiscus