in feb. i started a thread in the 3d forom about how i felt 3d flying was geting out of hand at some events i got crusifid by the guys who thought i was trying to cut into there fun it became a ego thing but we were having at least a debate about saftey when RCU locked the thread and ended the thread now that this tragic event has happend lets see if they lock this out [:@]

Thanks Lee,

To me this full deflection failsafe will serve also the second purpose. It will tell the others, that something is wrong, at least in the case of Jets, that we try to fly smooth. If the plane does a sudden "snap", it will tell the fellow modellers the situation, before anyone can hit the horn for alarm. The horn alarm sounds also as a good idea. Will get one for our events.

Also the kill of the engine will ensure, that full throttle will not be returned, if the failsafe goes away, maybe just a sec before hitting the ground.

BR,
Jussi

I don't think the type of flying (3D, F3A, scale, turbines or whatever) makes a whole lot of difference -- in fact a 3D plane is more likely to be flying low and slow if/when problems hit and is therefore less likely to have a lot of kinetic energy or travel as far before hitting the ground.

I think I'd rather be hit by a large, slow-flying plane than a smaller one with a sharp nose and wings travelling at 200mph.

But the bottom line is that it behoves *all* fliers to consider safety as their *first* priority at all times.

Plan your turns and flight paths so that if something does happen, the plane is pointing in a safe direction as often as possible throughout the flight (ie: limit the amount of time the model spends pointed directly at the flight-line/public.

We have a lot of turbine activity at our field and I've only seen one plan crash (just) behind the area we consider to be the safety line. Neither PCM nor PPM would have saved that baby -- an onboard fire burnt up the servo leads and all control was lost at the last minute. All the other (not too infrequent) crashes have been well away from the flight line and public area -- due mainly to very sensible and safe flying practices.

Hi all

Just for my 2 penny worth, we live in an age of people still not accepting the neccesary rules and regulations that are inposed on us under the Health and Safety Legislation, if we want to keep the freedom that we have to fly almost where we want we must legislate ourselves, why do we fly so close to the out of bounds area's? why do we fly so close to the strip where all the other pilots stand? its all bravado, get yourselves a good Safety Officer in your club and listen to them.

My heart felt sypathy for the bereved and the pilot who has to live with this.

MIke

Hey please stop these useless discussions! Keep in mind that two people where died!

I know the Pilot personally. Talking about his flying capabilities, he is one of the best I have ever seen!
So talking about failsafe and which rudder/function should do what -----> forget it!

There is no, nada absolutely noooooo safe condition for a plane to tell in case of a failsafe what a rudder should do. Flying inverted and have the rudder deflect full means maybe an immediately crash but in case the plane is high enough it will start to fly a loop and what after that?
What if it wasn't level and had a light bank to any side?
Having the engine immediately shut down, what will you do if this happens with cross wind, close to the spectators, getting back signal but then the engine is gone and you cannot reach enough height to fly over the crowd ---->bang!

Accept that the technology we are using is that much timeworn that our models plus the engines are not a tight fit to our transmitters anymore!
Everything else is just to make you feel comfortable, but shows more the unability to accept that at a certain point fortune will take place!

There are only some parameters you are responsible for:

never fly a plane that it stress the body (High speed circels) anyway highspeed passes with jets are irresponsible having spectators on a show
keep distance and if you think this distance is good even keep more distance to the spectators
maximum two planes in the air the same time onn a show
negotiate the way where to fly a low pass BEFORE doin so! (from left to right or vice versa just talk about!)
never have alcohol befor a flight
on airshows, collect every transmitter before the show starts, control by the pilots list!
If there are pilots who just "short test" their transmitters without asking for permission --->ground them the whole day, If they shout, send them away!
I already did this several times and I dont care if they like me, security counts!
check your equipment ones and after that check it again
fly save, fly smooth
stop to excite spectators by flying risky manouevers like high speed low passes. Murphy will let it happen exactly this moment!

Sorry but you don't know what you are talking about in this matter. If you ever attended any international giant scale aerobatic fly-in (like the 3W show, which I have) you would see many 3W factory pilots flying other brands of aircraft. It's very common. The two gentlemen who own and run 3W were not there (I know them also). The radio station was transmitting from a remote site on the airfield so again, you talk out of your rear end.

I have associates who were at the event and witnessed this unfold so while my information is factual and correct, you have no idea about what you are talking about.

The news report said he was an engine and airframe manufacturer...and it says 3W on the tail, you don't see engine manufacturers flying somebody else's brand in demos, and the news told where in Germany he lived, so it's not really a big mystery to most to figure out who he is. Does not really matter, though.
As far as the "local pop station" being the culprit, I seriously, seriously doubt that. It was rather sudden interference(if it WAS interference) I don't know of too many radio stations that suddenly switch on during the middle of the day. While it is possible, it's rather doubtful, I think it would be better to wait for more facts to come in before accepting such a conclusion.
[/quote]

The problem of safety is amplified when you have large crowds of people such as at airshows.
The crowds cover more area so there is a greater chance the plane will hit someone. The best
safety feature I can think of (especially for large airshows) would be a chain linked fence that
people would have to stand behind and that would also extend diagonally above thier heads. This
in addition to the requirement that the the engine MUST be programmed to shut down in failsafe
would make these events 90% safer. Of course people would still have to leave the fenced off area
to get food or go to the rest room...etc. But at least the masses will be behind some protective
barrier.

Greg

Right. So, anyway...two questions:
Was the pilot using a failsafe PCM system?

Was there previous interference that day or the day before? I heard at least one model crashed previously due to interference.

So, basically it seems you are now admitting that you have absolutely no hard data as to whether the injuries & fatalities in this case were caused by an impact to the head, or a prop cutting a vital artery, or even someone having a heart attack coz he got a heck of a scare... and you're just guessing - in which case your point blank assertion that PCM would have made no difference there is simply invalid. If you don't have hard facts as to what the COD was, then you don't know that a programmed engine kill would have been totally ineffective as you clearly asserted. I can no more accurately say that engine kill would have saved either of those lives, than you can say that it would not have. We simply do not have adequate facts from which to make such bold assertions.

Now you're saying that you doubt that both victims got a direct prop strike... so you're apparently no longer dismissing the possibility that at least ONE of them was hit by the prop -- and even in the event that only ONE of the two victims was killed by injuries inflicted by the prop, that's still one too many is it not ?


Lower speed is only one of the important advantages when it comes to large aircraft like this - removing the killing power of a large prop being swung by a large number of horsepower is a vital consideration, and one that can be largely controlled by appropriate use of engine kill upon failsafe activation. (Same goes for turbines - killing the engine on failsafe is not just to reduce speed, it's also to cool the engine as much as possible before impact, to reduce the risk of a fireball). Just because there are additional ways to be killed by the model (such as impact to the head), that does not in any way justify us ignoring our ability to remove or reduce as many of the risk factors as possible.

Seems to me that we should be considering what tools and procedures we have at our disposal and examining how we can best combine them to reduce the risk that our hobby poses to life & limb, rather than dismissing tools as "that wouldn't have helped at all" when we don't actually know that that is in fact the case. Let's try have an open mind as to what can be learned from this terrible tragedy, rather than closing off various avenues of learning due to personal preconceptions.

Gordon

Very eloquently stated. When I grow up, I would love to write like you. (lol)

Sorry, but you can't have it both ways ... you try to tell us not to talk about failsafe, then go on to discuss it yourself.

If your engine shuts down "in a crosswind, close to the spectators" as in your scenario, then the pilot screwed the pooch totally because he should not be flying close to the spectators in the first place.

Attached are two graphs of the Probability of getting hit with an airplane.

There are a few assumptions but all are reasonable.

1) Every flight crashes
2) Each Person is 5 ft^2 and the plane does not have area

More info at
http://www.corpcomp.com/weeks1/Prob/...iles/frame.htm
Power Point
http://www.corpcomp.com/weeks1/Prob/Prob.ppt


In the first graph, This is real data collect from a Turbine plane.
The second graph is the same data divided by two. Not a prop plane
(I assumed a prop plane Goes 1/2 as fast and 1/2 as far)

Also in the second graph I calculated the odds with 1681 people standing 30 feet
Behind the pilot. Then I calculated the odds of any one of these people getting
Hit with an out of control plane..


Graph 1:
One Pilot flying a turbine, Odds of getting hit are ~1,000,000 to 1

Graph 2:
1681 people 30 feet from pilot Odds of getting hit are 213 to 1

This Probability calculation may or may not be accurate but its very good at
showing us what is important.

Eddie Weeks

The logic of setting failsafe to anything but engine shutdown and spin the airplane in, to me, means simply one thing:
"I want to rationalize the fact that my wish to save the model is greater than my wish for safety." Just my two cents.
I have heard variously that it was "the local pop station" and in another thread, "it was a taxi radio"...but the fact is the pilot took off, knowing the crowd was way too close. Period. It was not safe, in my opinion. And I BELEVE(but do not know) that there was previous known interference. Looks like the police are not letting him leave Hungary for the moment.

Why are you trying to make it look like I'm dismissing failsafe ? I'm all for engine to idle failsafe. I'm also for doing away with the 60 year old technology we use to control our models and get FCC to allow us to use the latest stuff available.

Everybody in this thread is just guessing what exactly happened based on the video they saw. I'm just posting my observations and combining it with my personal experience with the same model airplanes. I'm also putting well known energy calculations behind the video - the combined kinetic energy of the plane will be reduced by 50% with the engine off for 5 seconds (compared to WOT). If it took 20 seconds of level flight between the interference and impact, the energy could have been reduced much further, upto a point of being non-lethal.

If the accident occured with the plane coming down from 1200 ft with engine screaming compared to a plane coming down from 1200ft with engine at idle, the difference of the energy at impact will be much more significant and failsafe wold have played the DECIDING role in such scenario.

I hope you can accept the above.

P.

Guys,

some good food for thought being debated, BUT please let's have it in a way that suggests it is "part" and not the "whole" of the matter. Safety is a process not an item.

Safety is about many things but being dynamic to change is one of them. If the wind direction changed during a display, your considerations for safety might also need to change..... Thus risk is dynamic, so is safety, move with the situations.

Like when you break down on a motorway, the safest thing is to be up on the bank away from the traffic. But safer still is not to be a pedestrian on the motorway, but when you started to drive down it, you didn't think you would break down.

Inert engines are safer than firing engines, so in loss of control, it would seem that it would be logical to turn the motor off. But gravity might well be your engine in a loss of control situation, and although it would therefore be of mute advantage, its still something to do. Good example is the helicopter. When I smashed mine up it took me a mintue to catch hold of it, the battery ejected on impact with the throttle at 3/4. If it had been a failsafe, the motor would have probably shut down. Have you tried to catch a raging heli on the floor, not risk free I can tell you!

We have to depart a little from full size practice as in loss of control situations, they will do everything they can to ensure that they survive and in most cases cause less danger to other life, and yep the pain of a few thousand bucks or quid is a hard one to bear, but who would be the hero?

Perhaps as an example of dynamic thinking what we should be considering is whether PCM is THE answer for all situations, or is PPM, and the answer probably is in different situations one could be more appropriate that the other. Let's get the views.

In reality and Eddies post was most interesting, all we can really do is our utmost to avoid aircraft to person contact in terms of flying, and attempt to eliminate ground incidents which could range through compressor explosion, fingers etc being ingested to burns, fires and battery explosions. The danger comes from various sources such as batteries, fuel, tubing etc etc.

But note, the lottery odds are greater than Eddies and there are hundreds of winners, and those odds proved tragically what statistics can show us to two people who had come to enjoy some of our hobby.

Maybe we could all together structure this debate one item at a time, and draw up a list of best practices. I know there are lots of rules here and there, but is there any harm in going through them again, and writing up new and non considered ones? Like I say all we are doing is getting people to think and act safely.

I've seen horrible things down to human behaviour, but when I don my uniform I still try to make it better, and educate as many as I can in the hope that we will ALL be safer,

Gazzer

----

edited..not more actual...

I'm simply refuting your assertion that PCM "would have made no difference there " , because IMO such unsubstantiated assertions are potentially dangerous.

What is the name of the pilot in the picture?

This looks like a great idea to me. If it can be done with full size way not RC planes. A rocket assisted chute can work in as little as one second.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6749412/

this photo is taken from italian forum where the topic is found..
the name of pilot are not publicated,
the photo would be rapresent only the model aircraft...and was taken probably
at italian meeting last years

regard's

x Alessio : la foto è stata trovata su un forum italiano dove è scritto anche il nom del pilota
qui è stata pubblicata per rappresentare solo il modello....
è stata probabilmente scattata l'anno scorso ad OZZANO 2005

remember this

Chrigui:

With all respect, I don't think any of the pictures you posted are contributing to the discussion. We are talking about how to prevent accidents not studying their aftermath.

Ben, perhaps they should be removed -- at least the accident photos.

Antony

the picture is found on other web site...and give a GOOD IDEA about danger of our models....
and help to search a the max of safety during flying session

i'm much shocked by image than only write report..and helped me to search the safety in my jet...

the image store in human mind much time than olly write article...

regard's

I agree.