Henry Bowman wrote: I wrestled with the " hope it was medical" for a long while after Doug's accident.
Then again after Marks. Both seemingly healthy and both good pilots who have been in the air.
As I study all the details of all the accidents I read of, I am less and less led to believe these friends of ours are being struck by emergent medical situations, and are instead experiencing some catastrophic loss of control.
Statistically speaking if there were medical issues than we would be losing our friends to motorcycle and car wrecks as well...and that folks just ain't happening.
No, I'm not suggesting I know what it is, but the numbers don't add up.
For such a small community to have such a high death toll, there is something else at play.
Back before they started putting props behind us, did they have the same death toll? My research says no.
Is it when they started to use cables instead of push rods? Or maybe trim springs? I don't know.
But hoping it is a medical reason is a salve we apply to our conscience to help us make sense of our loss.
I don't mean for this to upset anyone, but instead to reflect on any possible way to improve the safety record for our community. I have lost more friends to gyroplanes than EOD brothers in combat zones defuzing IEDs.
Let that sink in.
My own situation that I repeat often is how close I came to a catastrophic failure that I am sure would have resulted in a similar accident crash site picture. Due to a build oversight, the rear bolt holding the horizontal control rod along the frame in place was not torqued when inserted. It loosened completely, and I was saved completely by the fact that the the vertical frame(mast) was close enough that the bolt was too long to actually fall out. The other thing that saved me is that I was in the pattern when it happened and the bolt staying partially in place allowed me to keep a reasonable glide approach with the stick full back as far as it would go. I know there may be a tendency to 'hope' it was a medical issue for the family's sake, though I don't really see any logic in this. None of us or our machines are perfect. We have all been guilty of mistakes, and weak spots can present in any machine. In addition to the initial fault in my situation of not torquing the bolt - I did not complete that part of the build, but I was still responsible as the official builder. Ignorance is no excuse. But I was also guilty of a subpar preflight which likely would have caught a loosening bolt. I also think it is a design issue as I think that bolt should be safety wired in the MTO. I drilled a new bolt head and did exactly that when I replaced it. The most important thing for everybody's benefit is to establish in the most detached and truthful way what happened. At this time establishing blame is much less important than trying to make sure that it does not happen again to other pilots and their families.
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