Plane crashes during mid-air pilot swap challenge

A plane crashed in Arizona (USA) after two paratrooper pilots attempted a maneuver in the air for the “Red Bull Plane Swap” challenge. The aircraft were of the Cessna 182 type.

As the name of the challenge implies, the objective was for the paratroopers to take off flying one plane and land the other. In the air, with the aircraft diving, with the nose towards the ground, both would jump out of the aircraft and change places in free fall. Went wrong.

During the maneuver, one of the planes went out of control and the pilot who was supposed to take over it opened his parachute. The other plane landed as scheduled.

The project included detailed studies and the participation of aeronautical engineer Paulo Iscold, who develops airplanes and has productions in his curriculum that have broken world speed records.

Iscold and the team involved in the project installed air brakes to stabilize and control the speed of the aircraft during the dive, adapted the autopilot system to the unusual situation of flight towards the ground.

According to a document from the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration of the United States), issued last Friday (22), pilot Luke Aikins’ request for the planes to be without a pilot on board during the challenge had not been authorized.

“The FAA has considered the petition and understands that granting an exemption [à regra de avião] would not be in the public interest and cannot conclude that the proposed operation would not adversely affect security.”

The planes remained stable during test dives with the air brakes open. However, even in the tests, the planes had never been without anyone on board, as it should have been during the maneuver.

Iscolad suspects that the autopilot was not able to handle the extra weight of the fuel and that this was a determining factor in the failure of the maneuver. That’s because the fuel is in the wings, above the aircraft’s center of gravity. “I had talked about the [peso do] fuel. It was the only thing we couldn’t test,” Iscold told the riders already on the ground after the crash.