Katz crash; I don't get it

[Oldman731]

A bit over a year ago a very well liked Philadelphia philanthropist, and some of his closest friends, were killed when his jet crashed on takeoff at Hanscom Field up by Boston.  It's been bigger news around here than it likely has been elsewhere.  Today the local paper ran a very good article on the crash, which leaves me scratching my head.

The mechanical cause of the crash turned out to be that the control surfaces were locked (same thing that destroyed the original B-17 prototype).  The pilots had thousands of flight hours, yet in their past 175+ takeoffs they had pre-flight checked to see if their control surfaces worked only 18 times. 

For a casual GA pilot like me, this is incomprehensible.  I know that some of us here are professional pilots.  How is it possible to get to the stage where you don't bother to move the control surfaces as part of your pre-flight - in fact, how do you get to the stage, especially with a co-pilot, where you don't run the complete checklist?  Are safety systems just so good now that people get lulled into complacency?

Article is here:

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/Deadly_failure_on_the_runway_in_Katz_crash.html

- oldman

[Karnak]

They were relying on the throttle lock which, as designed, didn't function correctly.  Their trust in the aircraft systems led them to cut corners on their pre-flight and cost them and their passengers their lives.

[colmbo]

I've always wondered the same thing.  It's such a simple, quick, easy check "controls free and correct"…why not do it?

I did a lot of flying off of gravel and grass runways as well as off field operations and just before adding power did a quick control check in case a rock or other debris had blown into a control service jamming it.  (While a rare thing it can happen, I had a glove from a skydiver exiting at 11,000 jam my elevator at about 2/3 up….it can happen).

Back in the 80s there were two fatal Beaver crashes here where airplanes just out of maintenance had the ailerons hooked up backward (evidently an easy thing to do on a Beaver)…a simple "controls free and correct" would have caught the maintenance error.

All that being said I've screwed the pooch before and missed something I shouldn't have…..I was lucky enough it was something small enough it didn't kill me or bend an airplane.

[Puma44]

Complacency kills.