It was a quiet afternoon at the Triangle Airpark (AZ50) in White Hills, Arizona. Picture a completely clear sapphire sky above dusty brown mountains, a dry 70 degrees in what passes for winter along the border between Arizona and Nevada.
Missing its tail, pointing almost straight down, a Van’s RV-7A single-engine, two-seat homebuilt plummeted out of the blue and into the rocky ground. The pilot died instantly. Alongside a nearby highway, some recognizable bits of airplane, the vertical stabilizer and rudder, a horizontal stabilizer and elevator, fell separately to Earth.
On that day, February 19, 2022, it was obvious that the plane had suffered an in-flight breakup, leaving it an uncontrollable falling object. But why? This wasn’t the first Van’s homebuilt to experience an in-flight tail separation. Was there a design or construction problem with the fleet? What would cause, with apparently no warning, such a catastrophic failure?
A TV news crew interviewed a local flyer who knew the accident pilot well since both had planes at the Boulder City Municipal Airport (KBVU) in Nevada.
“I think there are only about 150 hours on it,” he said when asked about the plane and pilot. “He’s a pretty mellow flyer, not like some of us who like doing a little more aerobatics and formation flying. [He] really wasn’t into that, so we’re all really curious what happened.”
The…
Source www.planeandpilotmag.com
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