Sikorskysjefen Jeff Pino med mulig "flagrant disregard of the flight handbook" - Forbes

Ex-Sikorsky Exec Pushed WWII Fighter Beyond Its Limits In Crash That Killed Him

Christine Negroni , CONTRIBUTOR

I write about the business of aviation and travel. Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Jeffrey Pino at an event in Shanghai, China in 2005. (Photo by China Photos/Getty Images)

The former president of Sikorsky, Jeffrey Pino, appears to have mishandled his World War II-era fighter plane by doing acrobatics, leading to a fatal crash in February 2016. The details are included in the factual report released by the National Transportation Safety Board as part of its investigation into the accident.

Pino, 61, who served as the president of the Connecticut-based helicopter company for six years until retiring in 2012, was flying with a fellow pilot and friend Nick Tramontano in the restored P-51, dubbed "Big Beautiful Doll," near Maricopa, Arizona.

Witnesses said they saw the aircraft do a loop and then descend nose down.

Richard Terry Brown, a private pilot in Arizona, said he saw the plane performing an acrobatic maneuver he described as a “regular loop.” The airplane never came out of the turn. Brown was one of three men who gave similar accounts of the P-51's last minutes flying.

The NTSB's analysis of airport surveillance radar, suggests in the minutes before the crash, the airplane climbed for 14 seconds at a rate of speed as high as 8,000 feet per minute.

In the flight handbook for the single engine 51D, which was written for the Air Force pilots who would fly the airplane and is part of the NTSB report, pilots are specifically warned not to do the kind of abrupt pull up required for loops, with more than 25 gallons of fuel or about 150 pounds in the fuselage tank. This creates a "tail heavy" condition, the handbook says, that could "cause a reversal of control stick forces."

In Pino's airplane, the tank had been replaced by a second seat which was occupied by Tramontano, who weighed considerably more than 150 pounds. In addition to the restriction on abrupt pull ups, acrobatics are prohibited with any weight in the tank.

It looks like a "terrible, a gross disregard, a flagrant disregard of the flight handbook," I was told by an experienced pilot who read through the report and the P-51 handbook before talking to me. He asked that I not identify him by name.

Christine Negroni

Nick Tramontano was killed in the P-51 crash.

While Pino was an experienced helicopter pilot with 6,700 hours of flight time in both helicopters and fixed wing aircraft, he was reportedly new to the P-51, having purchased the plane two years earlier. The 73 year old Tramontano, had 26,000 hours in his log book.

The report says the plane belonged to and was operated by Pino, however, each of the tandem seats had working flight controls. A spokesman for the NTSB said on Monday, "it’s not possible for us to definitely determine who was manipulating the controls."  

The factual report suggests that the handling of the airplane will probably be cited as a factor leading to the crash when the final report is released sometime in the next two months.

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