A very important poster on an aircraft forum was always making experimental ultralight airplanes and reporting on a forum and answering our questions. He was a loved poster. He spent his retirement years doing what he loved. I planned to build my own ultralight, especially since no license is legally required. Other people told me that I should get a license anyway so I can fly more safely, and that I should build from a kit instead of from my own design. Well, I had not been on that forum in two years when I stumbled on a thread asking why Mark had not posted since 2010. The answer was he died in a crash in October, 2010. BTW, on that forum, people know each other's faces.
They then started looking over his airplane designs and getting news from witnesses, trying to figure out why he crashed. They figured that was what he would want us to do so it does not happen to us. The moderator, a very experienced engineer, then pointed out several design flaws, stuff that I did not know was a flaw. Just amazed me knowing someone much more experienced and educated than me could make those mistakes. His plane got 50 feet into the air and then lost lift and plunged into the ground.
Light planes are very dependent on wind speeds not suddenly changing. And when you are close to the ground, you don't have much time to react but are too close for the ballistic parachute to open in time.
I just felt very strange all of a sudden knowing he is dead. I don't know exactly what I was doing at the moment of his crash, except that I was about a hundred miles away and completely unaware of it until 2 years later, powerless to help him. Amazing how not only don't you know when you will die, you often don't even know who had died. R.I.P.
They then started looking over his airplane designs and getting news from witnesses, trying to figure out why he crashed. They figured that was what he would want us to do so it does not happen to us. The moderator, a very experienced engineer, then pointed out several design flaws, stuff that I did not know was a flaw. Just amazed me knowing someone much more experienced and educated than me could make those mistakes. His plane got 50 feet into the air and then lost lift and plunged into the ground.
Light planes are very dependent on wind speeds not suddenly changing. And when you are close to the ground, you don't have much time to react but are too close for the ballistic parachute to open in time.
I just felt very strange all of a sudden knowing he is dead. I don't know exactly what I was doing at the moment of his crash, except that I was about a hundred miles away and completely unaware of it until 2 years later, powerless to help him. Amazing how not only don't you know when you will die, you often don't even know who had died. R.I.P.
