Sir, - Shortly after reading, the splendid review by Mary Morrissy of Take Off I chanced upon a back issue of Flight magazine while detained in a waiting room. The issue included the cold accident statistics of world aviation in 1993. One entry described an accident which involved an Embraer Brasilia operated by Continental Express, climbing through 17,000 feet above Pine Bluff, Arizona. There were 27 passengers and three crew aboard.
The left propeller lost several blades, and the imbalance caused, the engine to break its mounts and hang off the wing, creating enormous drag. The aircraft rolled on its back, entered an inverted spin and fell two miles. How sad, I thought, lamenting the death of the thirty souls on board.
Then, to my astonishment, I saw that the entry was under "Non fatal accidents". I thought of Mary's quote: "reduced to bewildered silence in the face of procedural routine." Though upside down, disoriented, spinning rapidly and in command of an out of balance machine with all the aerodynamic qualities of a concrete mixer, the pilot somehow countered the spin, rolled upright and regained a semblance of flying at 5,000 feet. He landed at a disused airfield and ran off the runway, but there were no injuries.
I have no idea who the skipper was, but it seems likely that he or she was fortuitously inbued with the same mania as Del Giudice, a childhood spent running through the fields with arms outstretched wing like, while mentally rehearsing that part of the flight training syllabus which has the heading "Recovery from unusual attitudes". - Yours, etc.,
Ashford,
Co Wicklow.