• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Home
  • Contact

Golf Hotel Whiskey

Golf Hotel Whiskey: for pilots and aviation enthusiasts

Chilling Biggin Hill accident report

Sylvia, the blogger behind the Fear of Landing blog and Sulako of  Sulako’s Blog, have both recently written about a chilling accident report that is a must read by all pilots. The report tells what happened during a March 30th, 2008 incident where a Cessna Citation 500 took off from Biggin Hill and began to experience engine vibration. The pilots declared an emergency and declared their intent to return to Biggin Hill but they never made it. Instead, they crashed into a house and both the pilots and their three passengers were killed.

Sylvia does an excellent job of weaving the actual cockpit transmissions in with excerpts from the accident report plus her own commentary (along with some from Sulako). However and to make a long story short, the aircraft began to  experience vibrations and the pilots made the decision to shut down one of the engines. This caused the plane to descend – fatally.

Hence, Sylvia noted that:

The big question is: why were the pilots so insistent on shutting down the engines. If they had simply turned around and returned to Biggin Hill without doing anything else, it would have been a trivial incident. Having shut down an engine and discovered the pitch had changed but the vibration hadn’t stopped, they had a further chance to ignore the vibration and concentrate on reaching the airfield.

Sylvia also pointed out that one commenter on Sulako’s blog had asked whether or not the vibrations were so severe that the pilots thought structural damage might have occurred if it continued. Hence, the pilots may have felt that they NEEDED TO DO SOMETHING or anything to make the vibrations stop. 

However, Sylvia concluded that:

In this sad case, doing nothing would have been the best solution of all.

Certainly, the Biggin Hill accident offers a lesson for every pilot.

Biggin Hill Accident

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Matthew Stibbe
Matthew Stibbe is CEO of Articulate Marketing and Turbine, the easy, online way to deal with office paperwork. He has an FAA CPL/IR and an EASA PPL/IR and sometimes flies a Cirrus SR-22. He also writes about wine at Vincarta and being a better manager at Geek Boss.
Bureaucracy must die eBook
Subscribe via RSS

Recent Posts

  • IATA Airport Abbreviations
  • Upcoming Concorde and Apollo documentaries
  • Lie Back And Think Of England: London To Austin On BA’s New 787 Dreamliner
  • Video: Parachuting from the edge of space
  • Hilarious preflight safety video for GA aircraft
  • San Francisco Airport at night – beautiful time lapse video
  • A practical jetpack (finally) takes off
  • A man in a hot air balloon realises he is lost
  • Pegasus House: The former HQ of the Bristol Aeroplane Company is restored
  • Vintage British aviation posters from the 1920-1930s

Copyright © 2022 Golf Hotel Whiskey. All rights reserved.