Canadair's Canadair CL-600 aircraft accident near Mojave

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Canadair's Canadair CL-600 aircraft accident near Mojave
Canadair CL-600-1A11 Challenger 600, Bombardier AN1006238.jpg

Another prototype CL-600 from Canadair (now Bombardier Aerospace )
Accident summary
Accident type Deep stall , failure of anti-spin and rescue parachute
place near Mojave , California , United States
United StatesUnited States 
date April 3, 1980
Fatalities 1
Survivors 2
Injured 1
Aircraft
Aircraft type CanadaCanada Canadair CL-600-1A11 Challenger 600
operator CanadaCanada Canadair
Mark CanadaCanada C-GCGR-X
Departure airport Mojave Airport , California , United StatesUnited StatesUnited States 
Destination airport Mojave Airport , California , United StatesUnited StatesUnited States 
Passengers 0
crew 3
Lists of aviation accidents

The flight accident of a Canadair CL-600 from Canadair near Mojave occurred on April 3, 1980. A Canadair CL-600-1A11 Challenger 600 crashed during a test flight of the Canadair after a loss of control with Deep Stall , with neither the anti-spin parachute one of the pilots' rescue parachute was still working properly. One crew member died as a result of the events.

plane

The CL-600, which was an independent design from 1976 by Bill Lear who had stepped down as chairman of Lear Jet seven years earlier , was originally referred to as the LearStar 600. Before a first prototype of the machine could start, he sold the exclusive rights to manufacture and develop the design to Canadair, which renamed the machine the CL-600 Challenger.

The assembly of the first built Canadair Limited CL-600 with the model serial number 1001 and the aircraft registration C-GCGR-X began in September 1977. The first flight with the machine on November 8, 1978, in Montreal, Québec, Canada was also the first flight of this aircraft type . In December 1978, the aircraft was taken to Mojave for a series of flight tests. At the time of the accident, this machine was one year and five months old. The twin-engine business aircraft was equipped with two turbofan engines of the type Avco Lycoming ALF-502L equipped.

Inmates

On board the machine were the 52-year-old flight captain Eric Norman Ronaasen, the 39-year-old first officer David Gollings and the 33-year-old flight engineer Bill Scott. Captain Ronaasen, who was piloting the machine at the time of the accident, had 7,782 hours of flight experience, 468 of which he had completed in the cockpit of the Canadair CL-600. Ronaasen and Golings were Canadair employees, while Scott was an employee of Flight Systems Inc. of Mojave.

the accident

On the morning of April 3, 1980, the machine was taken on a test flight from Mojave Airport in California . As part of the routine test flight, the flight behavior of the machine should be evaluated in various configurations in the event of stall. Identical test flights had already been flown with the machine several times before. On that day, the crew intended to investigate more closely a noise that had occurred during previous stall.

During a stall at an altitude of 17,000 feet, the machine's angle of attack increased above the maximum allowable value of 34 degrees. It then came to the Deep Stall . As a last attempt to get the machine under control again, the pilots activated the anti-spin parachute, which extended, but did not open properly. Gollings and Scott then jumped off the machine through the rear door with their parachutes. Ronaasen jumped out of the side door, but his parachute failed and he died on impact with the ground. The machine fell to the ground near the village of Cantil at 9:10 a.m. and burned out after the impact.

consequences

Flight captain Ronaasen was killed in the accident. First Officer Gollings broke an ankle. Flight engineer Scott was unharmed.

Accident investigation

The accident investigation was conducted by the National Transportation Safety Board . The investigators found four technical failures that occurred independently of one another, three of which had already occurred on the aircraft concerned. One of these defects, a left engine failure, had occurred 11 times in the previous seven months. The likely main cause of the accident was given as a problem with the angle of attack display, which was caused by a fault in the seals of the hydraulic system.

The CL-600 design was certified for flight by both Transport Canada and the Federal Aviation Administration in 1980, both of which included some restrictions on pilots, including a limited maximum take-off weight. An extensive program to reduce the weight of the aircraft was then carried out to improve the range of the aircraft.

Months after the accident, a flight engineer analyzed computer data from CL-600 machines and came to the conclusion that the noise that was to be checked during the stall tests was caused by an engine problem.

See also

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