 Welcome. Our speaker today hails from North Carolina. Years ago his grandfather flew PBY's and when Eric was about 12 years old his grandfather took him to the airport where Eric met a gentleman who was building his own plane. From 12 years on Eric was lost. Eric was going to be in aviation. He graduated from his technical college and was immediately picked up by General Electric who had him on certifying new engines. Eric loves to fly and his favorite is flying aerobatics and flying antique aircraft. He has a very good, strong technical background and still his passion for flying. So today please welcome Eric Minnis. Thank you Kathleen. Thank you very much. Good morning. My name is Eric Minnis. I'm with the FAA's safety team and I'm the data analyst. I also am addicted to flying as was previously mentioned and would like to talk to you a little bit today about experimental aircraft accidents, some of the causal information, how they compare to certificated aircraft and some things that you can do to minimize your risk. So let's get started. There's several generic reasons that aircraft crash. We have C-Fit, medical issues, pilot air, maintenance issues, mechanical failures, weather and none of these issues are unique to experimental aircraft. They apply to all aircraft. The main difference between standard and certificated aircraft is of course the builder. Certificated aircraft goes through a rigorous FAA certification standard and we as home builders have the leeway to experiment. We are amateurs. We're amateur builders and we make mistakes. Every one of the centers don't apply to experimental aircraft but they are a good starting point. They are an excellent starting point whenever you begin the construction of your aircraft and especially as you progress and get ready to fly the aircraft. So this next slide, whoever took this photo was thinking about me. It could be that the purpose of my life is to serve as a warning to others. That's very true. By the time I was 14 I would have been in the hospital probably half of my life, various accidents. So anyway, this is my slide. And here's another one. This is not funny, I'm going to tell you. It's not funny. So nobody laugh. Maybe it's a little bit funny. At least the guy's got a good sense of humor and he's kind of hanging out next to his airplane. That by the way was not an accident. The float simply filled with water so we can laugh a little bit. Okay, does anyone want to take a stab at guessing what these four photos are showing? Anybody? Any volunteers? I'm sorry? First fatal accident. That's exactly right. This picture is of a crash that occurred when Wilbur Wright took a gentleman, Thomas Selfridge, for a flight and they simply held on to the wing struts. And Wilbur did an investigation after the event and they deemed that the crash may have been caused by broken propeller blade. In those days they called accidents like this acts of God, as they did many auto accidents as well. However, who would have thought everyone was so amazed to be flying in those days that you would need something as simple as a safety harness or a safety belt? We really do learn from accidents and we try to pass along what we learn. Accidents are usually what generate many regulations. And again, I can totally relate to this. Whenever I'm flying I'm so into the fact that I'm actually in the air and the houses get smaller and sometimes it's easy to forget about the important stuff. In the early days 20% of all accidents were caused by pilots and 80% were caused by mechanical failures. Engine failures, airframe failures, the aircraft were not very reliable. The engines weren't very reliable. And we've made a fundamental shift now. Today less than 20% of all accidents are caused by mechanical failures. We as pilots are the source or the cause of the majority of all airplane accidents. We reached a sort of technological floor where our designs and what we know about flight, we've gotten pretty smart and we're having a hard time breaking through that technological floor. I want to share a quote. This is from Igor Sikorsky. I think most everybody's heard of Igor Sikorsky. I think he built a few helicopters. But Igor said that in the early days of aviation, the designers were also the test pilots. This had the effect of weeding out the bad designs. I like Igor. Okay, EAA. How many EAA members do we have? All right, great. Okay, this is what EAA has to say about homebuilt aircraft accident initiators. And if you look, we have the overall accident, the test period in the first flight. And we see that there's a lot of accidents happening in the first flight due to pilot miscontrol or builder maintenance error. So EAA does an awesome job of monitoring the pulse of what goes on in experimental aviation. And this is one of their charts that actually borrowed from one of their magazines. This chart shows our five year, actually six year, NTSB hit accident history for experimental aircraft only. And you can see that we have our injury codes. The blue is fatal. The maroon is serious. The beige is minor and then the light blue is no injury. You see that it's relatively flat. Each year we average about 225 experimental aircraft accidents. And about one fourth of those slightly higher are fatal accidents. As far as what causes experimental accidents, we have several different cause factors. And again, we have the fatality index that you'll see on the right side of the screen. Loss of directional control, loss of aircraft control, failure to maintain airspeed, reason for occurrence undetermined. This one really bothers me. There's a lot of events that occur that we never can figure out exactly what happened. Clarence, that's clearance with objects, clearance with trees or ground. And we have some few exhaustion accidents as well. Now, if we compare experimental accident data with certificated accident data, we do see a difference. This next chart is our certificated counterpart. And we see that they do have some directional control issues. However, very rarely are they fatal. The fatality rate is also a little bit lower. You'll notice that. If we look at phase of flight for experimental aircraft, we have a very high rate of initial takeoff and maneuvering accidents. I'm sorry. You have a question? I'm sorry. Can someone get him on my mic, please? Accidents on the ground versus in the air? Not intending to fly? The airplanes on the ground. Okay. Are they separated by the airplane beyond the ground taxi and versus flying? Accident is we use the NTSB's definition of an accident. Right. So if it falls within that based on the amount of damage to the aircraft, then it would be classified as an accident. Yeah. Okay. So if we look at this phase of flight, look at maneuvering, cruise, takeoff and initial climb. If an accident occurs in any of those phases of flight, it's highly likely it may be fatal. And that makes sense. You're carrying a lot of energy, usually some airspeed and you're away from the ground. You know, they say that landing is the only optional part of a flight, or is the only mandatory part of a flight, everything else is optional. For experimental, there's not not as many landing accidents, because the majority of the accidents happen in other than the landing configuration. Here's certificated same same data set. Most certificated aircraft accidents occurred during the landing portion of the flight. They have a very, very low fatality rate as well. Landing landing flare, landing roll, those three columns account for probably 50% of all phases of flight that accidents occur for certificated aircraft. Now, I was mentioning fatality index. Let's take a look at this chart and really study it closely. This is certificated aircraft. And essentially, if you're involved in an accident and a certificated aircraft, this this says you're 58% likely to not be injured. This is what our history shows. In 2006, 58% of all certificated aircraft accidents, no injury resulted. 19% were fatal, 14 minor and 9% were serious. For certificated aircraft, we have a 27% fatality rate if an accident does occur. So we are a little bit more likely to get hurt in experimental aircraft, the main reason being the phase of flight that the accident occurs. And we're going to talk about a lot of this, we're going to review a few case studies. And I'm going to give you some examples of things that we can do to minimize our risk. Let's let's talk a little bit about experimental accidents. Before I move from this slide. You know, I'm also flew model airplanes for a long time remote control airplanes. That's how I got started. And we had a joke that we would often say if you want to see a good model airplane crash go to a scale model builders meet because the guys spend all their time building and no time flying. Well, I suffer from that a little bit whenever I spend a lot of time building and don't fly and I go up I'm a little bit rusty. So we have that factor going for us with our experiment experimental aircraft. And experimental means just that we have the leeway to try different things. And it's a wonderful, wonderful liberty that we share in the United States that not many countries have performance of experimental aircraft. And walking the flight line this week. There's airplanes that people build in their garage that will go 300 miles per hour. That's impressive. The average cruise speed of an experimental airplane is far faster than the average cruise speed of the certificated aircraft. So things happen a little bit faster. And experimental aircraft tend to focus on all field type, grass strip type activities and aerobatics. I'm a huge fan of aerobatics. I participate in that activity and absolutely love it. However, it carries additional risk. Okay, has everyone seen this warning? This aircraft is amateur built and does not comply with federal safety regulations for standard aircraft. And had a fella recently say it far exceeds them. In some cases, it may, it may. But in some cases, it may not. And we'll show you some examples where it may not. I do like to think that everything that I've built exceeded the standards. However, I've had had a technical counselors come in and really humble me by their knowledge and my lack of knowledge. It's humbling to have someone with that level of experience and expertise critique your work. Workmanship here, walking the flight line again is often higher than anything certificated because people take so much time and pride in what they do. However, there are a few areas that we can get in trouble. Yeah, so who needs standards anyway? I love this picture, especially like his saddle on the turtle deck. That's pretty nice. And I'm not sure if that's an oxygen mask or something to prevent him from built from breathing fumes, but but I love the photo. So who does need standards anyway? You I know what this is. And he guesses fuel filter, I heard that that's right. They're important to keep our fuel clean before we get to it before it gets to the carburetor of the fuel injection system. But this one was a little bit difficult to get to it was actually located beneath the floorboards of an aircraft. There's no bypass for the filter. There's no way to drain the sediment from from this inline filter. And it got dirty. And after it got dirty, the engine quit. And the gentleman was forced to make an emergency landing and any damages airplane. So this is an example of where using the regulations as a starting point to check your designer, your build or using a technical advisor from EA to identify risk like this can can help you. Okay, this is the lead end slide to a few slides. I'm going to show you and this is a this is a case is kind of like a case study of an accident. I want you guys to stop and ask any questions. But this is what can happen whenever whenever we make a mistake. So basically, this was in the news. An aircraft designer says that he wants a new law to increase inspections on people that build their own airplanes on the inspections. Because there was a structural failure. So just keep this slide in mind. This is kind of what can happen to us as a whole to aviation as a whole when bad things happen. So this little airplane, let me get my information. I want to make sure I get everything exactly right. Kind of a cute airplane, actually. But this was one of several designs constructed by the builder. He had a few accidents in his previous designs, but he was really perfecting what he was building. He was figuring it out. Of his previously built aircraft, a couple have been sold and they have been involved in accidents as well. This aircraft in the in the photo made almost six flights. On the fifth flight, the builder experienced a hard landing. The fuel started leaking, and he didn't have any inspection panels. So so we climbed out of the aircraft and decided he needed to figure out why it was leaking. So he takes the airplane and he puts it on saw horses, and he jumps up and down and it's trying to simulate loading and unloading of the wing. He has no way to inspect the structure around where the fuel tanks exist. So he jumps up, up and down, attempting to figure out what's causing the fuel leak. And apparently he chose he couldn't find anything wrong with it. And he chose to fly the airplane again. And turning base to final his wings separated. This was witnessed by several people at the airport. And it suffered an in flight breakup, which which of course was fatal. And we won't dwell on too many of these pictures here. Let's talk a little bit about the design and what we see. And some of the pictures you can't really see this, but I want to point out something on this one. Anyone that knows anything about woodworking would know that you would want your spar to be one piece. And this one actually stops at each rib and the rib passes through this far. So you have two cap strips. And let me get my mouse back here. Between your two crap strips is a piece of webbing and that webs actually stops between the two ribs. It's not consistent. I have some artwork here that will help show this. It was made of three millimeter Luanne plywood from Home Depot. This is the section the ribs were actually constructed of pink foam, which is an insulation material. Foam is a common building material for experimental airplanes. It's okay, it just has to use be used properly. The right type of foam has to be used as well. Okay, here's my diagram. The yellow portion this all let yellow line represents the length the spar actually protruded into the wing. So the wing panel was 12 feet and four feet of that actually encompassed a spar. The rest was without a spar. It had five or six ribs in it. And the blue area was actually an extension that had been added to the airplane at a later point simply screwed to the tip of the wing. Now, anybody tell me what that is? Everyone knows what a g force is, right? We're all experiencing about one g right now. Well, that's the formula that we used to determine that this wing would fail at about 1.28 g. So in a 20 degree bank, the wing should have folded. And it did. So back to our airworthiness standards, FAR part 23 is what we use the agency uses to certificate or to define the certification requirements and safety requirements for aircraft. It does not apply to experimental airplanes by rule or by law. However, most of the requirements, there are excellent things to keep in mind whenever you construct your aircraft, things like seat belt circuit protection, master switches, carburetor heat lights, all those go into making your aircraft safer. I'm going to show you a few examples of some publications that are available, both FAA publications and stuff that's from the EAA from other industry support groups that is extremely useful. And the reason I urge everyone to really pay attention to this is because although our certification requirements do not apply to experimental aircraft, the laws of physics still do. And a lot of the stuff will help keep you out of trouble. So AC 4313-1B and see it and CAM-18 are some great places for general workmanship type things. This is an example that I really wish that builder of that previous aircraft would have seen. And this is a table that talks about selection of properties of aircraft wood. It's an example. It shows you the different species of wood and its strength when compared to spruce, to aircraft spruce. And so maybe if that gentleman would have known about this or seen this, he may have chosen not to use some of the materials that he used. This is an example of other information that's included in 4313. And it simply shows how to safety wire properly and how to safety objects that if they fail could endanger the safety of the flight. It shows where to look for typical bolt cracks and cracks and defects in rod end bearings. Rod end bearings are commonly used for control actuation. And they do, if constructed improperly or the improper material, they have a tendency to fail. I've actually investigated two accidents where control system failure was involved. And they also talk about repair techniques for older type aircraft. This is a really helpful resource for anyone choosing to or thinking about building an aircraft. I want to spend a little bit of time with EA's with this EA technical counselor slide and also want to mention the flight advisors. I don't know of a better program in existence to abate risk encountered by home builders than the technical counselor program and flight advisor program. And in preparing for this presentation, I was walking around. And you EA members should receive this magazine. This is April Sport Aviation. And I want to point out a couple of things. First, I want to give kudos to Brian Meyer. He's a technical counselor and a EA member and he wrote an article about minimizing risk and the timing is perfect. If you've not read this article, please read it. I'll share with you a couple of interesting statistics here. 25% of all home-built accidents happened during the first few flights. So one in four. 18% of fatal accidents involving home-built happened within the first five flight hours. Risk comes from aircraft design, construction, flight testing, normal flying and performing maintenance on your aircraft. Those are things that influence or increase or decrease the risk. And here's one. I've actually lived through this one a little bit trying to fly a new airplane that's severely out of trim and multiple axes with a rough running engine that's losing oil pressure with a scratchy radio. Well, your shoelaces are wrapped around the rudder cables is not much fun. And that's there's a lot of truth to that. The first flight of of any new airplane is probably the most critical that you have your ducks in a row. And the flight advisor and technical advisor programs really help you do that they help you identify your high risk areas and put in place abatement plans. It may be that you, you're not the right person to fly the airplane the first time and a test pilot should be selected. This is directly from EA's webpage. And this is from the FAA. We have specifically recognized EA's home-built programs as a major factor leading to the reduced home-built accident rate. These programs include technical counselors and flight advisors as well as the home-built aircraft council and ABDARs or amateur built designated airworthiness inspectors or representatives. This is a huge peer influenced program. And that's one of the most important things to take from this from this slide is that peer influence is much better than being afraid of the FAA your peers are more likely to be there with you more. If you wait until an FAA inspector comes to certify your airplane, there's a lot of things that we simply cannot see whenever we do that. So please involve the EAA and their home their technical counselor and flight advisor program. Poor donkey. All right, we have an AC that talks about weight and balance as well. I think that donkey would be glad if his driver would have gotten the FAA's weight and balance handbook. Weight and balance is another thing that can get you in trouble as well. And this is a good source to properly figure weight and balance for your for your home-built aircraft. We have a flight testing handbook as well. These are all excellent sources of information. This is just a collage of many industry groups. aircraft spruce is on there. I think EA that is their Sky Ranch. Several books. There's a lot of stuff available. This is actually an excerpt from EA's web page. And so is that some more design type topics. There's a lot of help available. Any questions? No questions. All right. Well, I want to thank everyone for being here. I really enjoyed having the opportunity to talk with you and share a little bit about accident. Accidents involving experimental aircraft. And I hope that you enjoy the rest of sun and fun. Thank you.