The remains of the Carat Motorglider have been placed
in its trailer and are awaiting the investigation by the NTSB
at Minden Airport.
I spoke to Larry Mansberger about the possibility of a wing
failure similar to those experienced by the Duo Discus and
the Discus CS a year or so ago. For those of you unfamiliar
to the Schempp-Hirth problems I will give you a little history.
The wings were manufactured in Eastern Europe and because
of quality assurance problems it was discovered that, after
a couple of wings disintegrated in the air, the glue used was
too thin and the parts that were expected to be glued together
had large voids where there should have been joined. This
weakened the wings causing in the air failures. Larry showed
me, using a boroscope, such defects in a Duo Discus wing
he was inspecting after the LBA and the FAA grounded
certain models of the Discus single and dual place gliders.
The Carat uses a modified std Discus wing. No problems
have ever been reported in the Carat wing. Larry helped
transport Alan's Carat back to the airport after the accident
and carefully checked to see if there were any similar
problems to those seen in the Duo's wings. There were non.
Mike More flew a Grob 103 with a student at the same time
Alan was in the air. They were also north of the airport. They
were flying above 14,000 feet, spoke of moderate turbulence,
but more importantly of the closure of layers of cloud below
them. Mike said to me that he had to be vigilant of the forming
and dissolving cloud layers and position himself so that there
was always a blue hole to get himself down in. A less
experienced pilot might not have been so aware of the dangers
of getting trapped in cloud.
Lets get the most out of this tragic accident. Lets learn and
in so doing become wiser. The wave can be a monster in more
than one sense. It can cause extreme rotor - read turbulence -
it can produce extreme lift greater than 1500 ft per minute; how
do you get down? You had better have a plan! Cloud layers can
form almost instantly - a big blue hole might disappear in
seconds. Most of the time wave is enjoyable and reasonably
safe, but it can so quickly turn into a monster. When it does
look out. Have a plan.
Copied below is an initial accident review from the US Carat
distributor.
Dave Bingham
---------------------

Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 04:23:53 -0000

Dear Saddened Carat Fans;

After a through investigation of the accident by AMS Flight d.o.o.,
Schempp-Hirth GmbH, Mansberger Aviation and AMS-USA it has been
determined that inflight structural failure was not the cause of this
accident.

On this flight, N418AP, went through an in flight envelope of
aproximately, a 15-20 positive G load, and an airspeed of 200+ knots.

The likely cause of the accident was a combination of high altitude
hypoxia and flying in IMC conditions, which lead to loss of control
of the aircraft and it exceeding its design limitations.

Oliver Dyer-Bennet
AMS-USA