Shirl wrote:
A Lancair crashed just moments after takeoff here in Mesa, Arizona,
today, too. Plane was headed for California. There was smoke trailing
from the plane on takeoff and controllers cleared them to turn back
around and land. They tried -- they made the left turn but crashed into
the orange orchard. Three fatalities, all in their late 20s. Sympathies
and prayers to the families.

WingFlaps wrote:
When will pilots learn to stop trying to do the impossible turn... and
go for a straight ahead landing on soemthing horizontal?

In this case, straight ahead would have been into a shopping center,
buildings, houses, etc. Having been through an engine failure, I try
not to second guess, but he *may* have thought he had a better chance to
at least turn away from all that.

Dylan Smith wrote:
We don't know it was an 'impossible turn'. We don't even know what
altitude they were at,

Reports said they were only 400 to 500 feet from the field, but don't
know how high.

whether the engine was still developing power or
not, or whether the plane caught fire, or ... there simply isn't enough
information to condemn the PIC of this aircraft. There was obviously
enough time for ATC communications, so it's possible they had already
gained reasonable altitude from which turning around was eminently
feasable and not even difficult.

Define impossible turn. A friend of mine turned back from 600 feet in a
C150 after the engine ate a valve. (He kept the battered piston as a
soevenir).

Weird, the souveniers we keep. I have the two "dead" sticks from my
totaled plane (oil cooler failure resulting in seized engine 6 min into
the flight...just long enough out away from the runways!).

In my checkride, the examiner said many pilots die landing straight
ahead on unsuitable off-field areas because of the "impossible turn"
myth when there is at least one and sometimes two perfectly good runways
right behind them. He advocated pushing the nose over and making the
turn. Of course, this guy was a retired ag pilot, too.
;-)