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CTSL crash on the national news today


Skunkworks85

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Bummer…looks like it was a nice bird. I wonder, being a newly delivered aircraft, if the pilot wasn’t very familiar with the Flight design and how it flies. 
 

I lived in Vegas for 13 years, but it was all prior to my time flying. Thinking of Boulder City and the airport there, I don’t see any major hurdles to an approach there, but I’ll admit I’ve never really looked. 
 

edit - reading the story it seems they crashed near I11…I think that’s the US 93 for those who don’t keep track of silly US interstate additions. 

additionally there are no solar farms on the I11. The solar farms are on the US95 just south of the I11. Standard poor reporting for Vegas newspapers. The crash appears to be roughly 8 miles (or more depending on where on the solar farm) from Boulder City airport, so I doubt this is approach related. 

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Without knowing all the facts it is not wise to speculate on the cause.  Having said that, a new aircraft  can have any number of problems from the start and take time to get all the bugs out. My first new bird CTSW was perfect from the start with no faults at all, however my second new bird CTLSt I had a number of problems resulting in several forced landings in the first 25hrs. fortunately with no damage but stressful just the same. 

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I was looking through Kathryn's report yesterday, apparently that's the second CT to crash at Boulder City, a CTLS came to grief there in 2019:

http://www.kathrynsreport.com/2019/05/flight-design-ctls-n423eb-accident.html

I wonder if that place if known for high winds or other challenging conditions.

That seems like a weird place for that CTSL to end up.  Looks like a fenced in solar farm off the airport...?
 

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On 8/30/2022 at 7:41 AM, ct9000 said:

Without knowing all the facts it is not wise to speculate on the cause.  Having said that, a new aircraft  can have any number of problems from the start and take time to get all the bugs out. My first new bird CTSW was perfect from the start with no faults at all, however my second new bird CTLSt I had a number of problems resulting in several forced landings in the first 25hrs. fortunately with no damage but stressful just the same. 

Care to share CTLSi type problems? Are they unique to your plane or somewhat common or even heard of by Si owners? Thank you!

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22 hours ago, airhound said:

Care to share CTLSi type problems? Are they unique to your plane or somewhat common or even heard of by Si owners? Thank you!

Problems basically caused by lack of quality control at factory. Aircraft sat half finished for a long time due to financial problem at FD.  1/  A lot of carbon fiber dust in tanks caused fuel pressure loss. Gascolator connected backward and screen blocked up instead of debris going into bowl. 2/  Fuel pressure loss due to pumps clogging with carbon dust.  3/  On test flight after swabbing out tanks and a full system clean, forced landing due to fuel pouring out of roof lining due to fuel line fitting at bulk head not done up.  4/  Loss of oil pressure, cause was only a sender fault.  These were the forced landings but there were a number of other faults as well.  To their credit FD sent an engineer out from Europe on two occasions to fix various faults.

As I said these problems were mainly caused by financial woes and delays and not systemic or design fault.  Ps. it is a CTLSt not an i  

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Too bad for all the issues with FD. I think it will take some time to work out all the production and financial issues. Kherson is gone, Taiwan is becoming questionable with China issues , and now the Czech Republic today is having some issues with massive demonstrations against western policies. Talk about bad timing. I hope it all works out, the CT is a great plane.

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Ct9000, thanks for the insight of your experience.
 

Were your forced landings off field?…Engine outs??. I only ask because of the old truism, “there are those that have, and those who will”……for example, I have never glided with a stopped prop, if you’ve experience this, how different was it from a glide at idle?

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3 hours ago, Madhatter said:

Too bad for all the issues with FD. I think it will take some time to work out all the production and financial issues. Kherson is gone, Taiwan is becoming questionable with China issues , and now the Czech Republic today is having some issues with massive demonstrations against western policies. Talk about bad timing. I hope it all works out, the CT is a great plane.

 

6 minutes ago, airhound said:

Ct9000, thanks for the insight of your experience.
 

Were your forced landings off field?…Engine outs??. I only ask because of the old truism, “there are those that have, and those who will”……for example, I have never glided with a stopped prop, if you’ve experience this, how different was it from a an idle glidee

Hey Madhatter, per chance are you a Citadel grad?

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11 hours ago, Madhatter said:

Too bad for all the issues with FD. I think it will take some time to work out all the production and financial issues. Kherson is gone, Taiwan is becoming questionable with China issues , and now the Czech Republic today is having some issues with massive demonstrations against western policies. Talk about bad timing. I hope it all works out, the CT is a great plane.

I think parking their future production in Czech Republic is a safe bet - it is a NATO member and as far as demonstrations you will see similar in Germany and other places and these not really indicative of instability of that particular nation but rather larger macro-economic issues.

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8 hours ago, airhound said:

Ct9000, thanks for the insight of your experience.
 

Were your forced landings off field?…Engine outs??. I only ask because of the old truism, “there are those that have, and those who will”……for example, I have never glided with a stopped prop, if you’ve experience this, how different was it from a glide at idle?

The first one, the engine went to idle power with little warning turning downwind on climb out on the second circuit test flight. Completed the circuit landing on the departure runway, landed a bit long but no problem just as nervous as hell The second failure was with some warning after low fuel pressure alarm then running very rough and could only get about 3000 RPM not enough to maintain height was able to put it down on a model aircraft club facility. The next two I shut down and did a forced landing into open farm land. The glide performance with the prop stopped is marginally better than idle but not really much. I managed to get through my first 2300 hours without an engine/power loss then four in the next 30 hours. Since then another 250 hours and no engine problem..

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  • 3 months later...

Just came across this thread. I was the owner of the CT-Super that crashed in Boulder in August.

I cannot comment about the incident details but I will clarify a couple of things.

It was an engine out off field landing.

Both occupants were injured but survived!

Solar field was chosen as safest alternative.

NTSB is still investigating

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27 minutes ago, BoulderCrash said:

Just came across this thread. I was the owner of the CT-Super that crashed in Boulder in August.

I cannot comment about the incident details but I will clarify a couple of things.

It was an engine out off field landing.

Both occupants were injured but survived!

Solar field was chosen as safest alternative.

NTSB is still investigating

Are you buying another ctss?

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On 9/4/2022 at 10:09 AM, ct9000 said:

I managed to get through my first 2300 hours without an engine/power loss then four in the next 30 hours. Since then another 250 hours and no engine problem..

Just curious...was this all on the original engine, or did you overhaul/replace the engine at some point, and if so at how many hours? 

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On 12/7/2022 at 2:22 AM, FlyingMonkey said:

Just curious...was this all on the original engine, or did you overhaul/replace the engine at some point, and if so at how many hours? 

Hi Andy, just to clear up the confused messages. The 2300 hrs. was my total at the time. The failures happened on the new CTLSt. At delivery it had less than 4hrs. on the clock. The first engine failure happened on the second circuit after ground runs so at about 4.7 hrs. Happy that now no more engine failures.

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1 hour ago, ct9000 said:

Hi Andy, just to clear up the confused messages. The 2300 hrs. was my total at the time. The failures happened on the new CTLSt. At delivery it had less than 4hrs. on the clock. The first engine failure happened on the second circuit after ground runs so at about 4.7 hrs. Happy that now no more engine failures.

Ah, thanks for the info.  Wow, two failures on a new baby...so sad.

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