Dylan Smith wrote:
On 2006-10-13, Mike wrote:
The type of aircraft he was in was utterly irrelevant. Smashing into a
building in a Cessna 150 is just as fatal as hitting a building in a
Cirrus, or a Learjet, or an ultralight.


How do you know the aircraft is irrelevant? Please post your source.

F=ma (force = mass x acceleration). Or in this case, deceleration.

A 100kg human in an ultralight travelling at 25 metres/sec hitting a
building and decelerating to zero in 0.5 sec (entirely plausable) will
experience a force of 100 * 50 newtons (5,000 newtons) in the initial
impact. Not to mention the bits of the building which are likely to
shatter and pierce the body. But a force of 5,000 newtons against a
human body is usually enough to kill. So it's pretty irrelevant whether
a plane is a slow one or a fast one like a Cirrus - slamming (to use
Lune's favorite word) into the side of a building is usually not going
to be survivable.

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You've only argued that the type of aircraft was irrelevant at the
point of impact. I think we can all agree on that! But that dismisses
the possibility that this accident might not have happened if the
aircraft had been slower - like a C150. (more time to react and less
radius to turn, etc...). I don't believe this was a case of a pilot
blindly flying into an object that was not easily visible from the
cockpit (like hitting a mountain at night or in the fog). It seems
more likely that either they were incapable of making the required
tight turn (poor planning, staying ahead of the aircraft) and hit the
building while trying to turn, or they lost control for some unknown
reason (stall, aircraft malfunction, etc) and the building simply got
in the way of the uncontroled flight/fall to earth. In either of those
scenerios, aircraft type could very well be relevant.