He thinks that Michael Alsbury threw the switch. Since the NTSB concluded that the switch to feather the aircraft hadn't been activated, this suggest that Alsbury threw the switch then desperately tried to unthrow the switch.

IMO, Whittle is thinking like a hobbyist in this case. Professional pilots have certainly made careless errors that led to deadly wrecks, but these two were test pilots in a new machine with very little flight time. I'd expect them to be very careful of procedure since they were studying it. I'd also expect them not to make the kind of unthinking error that Whittle suggests at this stage in the operation of the aircraft. A few years from now, when the thing has been through thousands of flights and the pilot is distracted by the events at the company and in his own life: maybe. Probably not, since human beings fly airplanes thousands of times a day and manage not to wreck them regardless of stress, but it is possible.

Right now, I think he's fishing for an excuse to blame the accident on something other than Burt Rutan.

It's already been established that he unlocked it early, right?

The FDR should be capable of showing if the switch was thrown, and then moved back.   (?)

I agree that I hate when know-it-alls talk shit prematurely about things they don't understand.

That said, I was curious about the "experimental test pilot"  and this is what I found:



So according to this info, they hired an Ab Initio "Test Pilot".        I'm not sure if that bio is true, and it's too early to say if it played a part in the accident.

However, we can all agree, it would be extraordinarily unwise to hire a 200 pilot for such a program.   I hope it isn't true.

There are a lot of people who do experimental test piloting without having graduated from one of the schools.  Generally they have some normal flying experience, get a job with a manufacturer, and move into experimental flying after having proven themselves capable testing non flight-critical systems or doing maintenance flying.  

And hours mean little in the world of experimental flying, either you can do it or you can't.  Whether you have 1000 hours or 10,000 hours doesn't matter.  


Hours are a pet peeve of mine - hours are a poor indicator of how much experience you have.  Hours tells you nothing about a person's skill level.  

I had to google this whittle guy.... so he's got an instrument rating and he "intended to join the air force".  And he obviously wrote his own wikipedia page.  Sounds like he knows what he's talking about!

pretty sure he was one of the few self made test pilots (none military route); heard he was good at what he did.  If hours make the difference, I'd rather have a guy with 1600 of his 1800 hours in experimental in the aircraft, rather than someone with 100 of their 10,000 hours in experimental.  Pretty sure they had telemetry on a test flight, no need for an FDR.

Hours are a measure of experience.  Enough experience generally means you have enough skill to handle most situations.  It is absurd to say a 10 hour pilot is just as good as a 1,000 hour pilot.  Pet peeve or not.

I agree about an amount of hours not saying a damn thing about a skill level; in fact, I equate it to the same thing as number of posts in a technical or other forum making you an expert.

I've flown with pilots with thousands of hours logged and was not impressed at all and I've flown with pilots with 100 hours that flew with great finesse and I've done the converse.
The high time pilots that are not airline captains often ARE the ones with high skill levels.

As far as Whittle goes, he's like all the aviation mouthpieces looking for a sound bite. I wonder if he's related to Frank Whittle who was directly responsible for creating the first jet engine for the Allied Powers.

Anyone watching the video needs to pay close attention near the 4:15 mark.

Mr. Whittle's guess (that's what he called it) is predicated on alleged post accident statements attributed to Pete Siebold, the only guy alive capable of having first hand knowledge of what happened.

Here is one of the articles he's referring to.

UK Daily Mail article

I don't know what happened and I'm not a big fan of public speculation about it, informed or not.

But, whether I agree that Whittle should have made this video or not (FTR- I don't), it doesn't sound like he's very far off the most likely base.

You statement implies that experience correlates directly with skill, which is not the case.  
You realize that monkeys have been trained to fly right?  



Not really, but it depends on what your definition of "good" is.  Can a 10 hour pilot fly an airliner through busy airspace in the clouds and get to the gate at Atlanta?  No, because that requires experience to push the right buttons at the right time.  Can a 10 hour helicopter pilot hover a helicopter better than a 1000 hour airplane pilot?  Yes, because that requires a skill that the 10 hour pilot has had 10 hours to develop.  


Test pilots are humans, and all humans can make mistakes.  Based only on the fact that he has 1800 hours and 1600 of them are while working at scaled you can't say anything about the dead guy.  He might have been the best choice for the job or he might be all thumbs and drool on himself while flying.

I would assume they had cockpit cameras, recorded data, and telemetry.  I would assume they know exactly what happened already.  They probably knew the day of the crash.  

141?  142?

Bill is a smart guy who fell into a smart person trap; he thinks he's smarter than everyone else.  I think I know where he was trying to go with his video but he overshot his approach.  The point he may have been trying to make is that progress shouldn't stop because of a tragic accident and that our checklists are written in blood.  During his analysis it becomes fairly obvious he's never flown anything that goes faster or higher than a RV-6.  Once you enter the crewed environment of something with a mach number display your life changes.  There is no touching things that don't need to be touched because fucking that up at 600kts has exactly the consequences we saw in Mohave.

As far as the co-pilots experience, the investigation will work that out.  Maybe they wanted an engineer who was a pilot in the right seat to compliment the pilot in the left seat.  That may have allowed them to gain more design knowledge from the practical experience an engineer would compile over the course of the test flights.  There is a big difference between someone who is a pilot first and an engineer second and vise versa.

There is also a big difference between someone with 1000hrs and a guy who has the same hour 2000 times.

i just hope they find out exactly what went wrong and put an end to the speculation.

I think your assumptions are probably close to reality.  TM, cameras, and recorded data have been the norm for decades.

I think you wrote an excellent assessment of the video. Whittle is generally spot on regarding politics, but he threw this out there and I think he misunderstands the mentality of the job. As I said, it's an assumption I could see a hobbyist make. (I was a hobbyist.) But I think it's a deflection from examining a faulty design.