Cessna 172 crash at EDXR - both elderly pilots unharmed.
October 2nd 2007 became a sad day for the local flying club I was a member of at the time. A Cessna172 crash ensued after not aborting a touch & go that should have been aborted. One of the photo’s further down this page shows what the results looked like after the Cessna Skyhawk had come to a grinding halt.
RWY 03 was in use at the time. The Cessna 172 crashed into a swampy field almost directly on the extended runway center line behind RWY 03. The swampy field - together with the airbags in the seat belts - might well have saved the life of both elderly pilots.
The husband/wife crew had flown an number of traffic patterns and touch & goes. After multiple bounces at the attempted landing, not a lot of runway was left to continue with yet another take-off. Why a takeoff wasn’t aborted after the last bounce is currently unclear. The Cessna 172 crashed almost exactly on the RWY 03 centerline extension, about 300-350 metres (appr. 1000′) on the NNE side of Jevenau Creek (see map further down below).
The aircraft crashed with its nose almost pointing back to the runway. Perhaps a post-rotation asymmetric stall situation - leading to the starboard wing tip to touch the ground, a fence at the end of the runway or something else - may have induced a rotation of the entire aircraft, which caused it to crash tail first. Again a lucky circumstance for the pilots involved, because if the Cessna 172 would have crashed with the nose in the intended direction of flight, mass moment of inertia would most likely have caused the plane to tumble over at impact and the aircraft could well have ended up on its back.
The picture below shows the Cessna 172 crash site in the direction of the runway, meaning that you’re actually looking into the direction of RWY 21. At the north-east side of the airport, the field is elevated quite a bit above the local swampy fields, as is convincingly illustrated here. Visiting pilots please take note!
What can I say? At the end of the day, an aircraft is merely a stack of material wrought into that lovely shape that intrigues us so much. The important thing is that for the two pilots involved, it was a landing they could walk away from…..