REFLECTOR: Nosegear Forks

[Richard J. Gentil]

"but I'll bet that about $5000 of that went to help cover their liability insurance
that Piper has to have"

No doubt.

Right now I know of two law suits going against Piper. Here is the narrative:

http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/brief2.asp?ev_id=20020619X00932&ntsbno=MIA02FA111&akey=1

The guy was proud of telling people that he would pull the overspeed circuit breaker
so he did not have to listen to it chiming in his ear as he accelerated past the
barber poll.

Here are a couple of highlights from the report:

"At 2029:44, R02 instructed the pilot to contact R65. The pilot acknowledged and
stated "Ok
(unintelligible) and a little hole here." Radar indicated that at this
time, N9143B was in the vicinity of returns consistent with ARTCC long-range radar
weather depiction of both light and heavy intensity. The R65 controller stated that he
observed the weather area and was aware of other pilots deviating away from it on the
west side.

At 2029:49, the ground track plot showed the pilot had observed a 3-5 mile gap between
two thunderstorm clusters and attempted to fly through an area of light radar echoes
between the two large areas of heavier echoes."

and

"The CFI noticed during this training and subsequent refresher courses on this
aircraft, and the Malibu converted JetProp, that the pilot "pushed himself dangerously
close when making weather decisions in this class of airplane." He seem to "lack a
healthy respect" for the destructive forces of thunderstorms, and seemed to take
"delight" in how close he could come in pushing the envelope. The CFI said he had
cautioned him as late as "2 weeks" prior to the accident that his decision making in
this respect was deficient and he needed to exercise "greater care" when flying his
JetProp in and around "adverse weather systems.""

So now Piper, Honeywell, Pratt & Whitney, Rocket Engineering, Jet Prop DLX, the prior
owner of the aircraft (from 4 years prior), two flight schools and maintenance shops
are being sued over it.

Go figure. I guess the problem is Piper did not build the plane to be stronger than a
Battleship.

Richard

Alex Balic wrote:

> yes, but I'll bet that about $5000 of that went to help cover their
> liability insurance that Piper has to have- they don't put all of the bill
> into the price of the new aircraft to keep them competitive, so they dump it
> onto the parts.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: reflector-bounces at tvbf.org [mailto:reflector-bounces at tvbf.org]On
> Behalf Of Richard J. Gentil
> Sent: Tuesday, July 06, 2004 5:26 PM
> To: Velocity Aircraft Owners and Builders list
> Subject: Re: REFLECTOR: Nosegear Forks
>
> I just had to replace both of the lower Main Gear halves for our Seminole.
> (Student had
> a hard landing and did not bother to tell anyone. Found it on the 100hr.) My
> cost as a
> Piper Service Center was $6,000.00 for the pair with Freight from Vero
> Beach, FL to
> Naples, FL. I do not mind the price Velocity charges for the Nose Fork. ;-)
>
> Richard
>
> Tstockmn at aol.com wrote:
>
> > I've got a FG 173 with 300 hrs and after all the fork discussions, took a
> > closer look at mine and found some tiny cracks on each side.   The factory
> > quickly sent out a replacement (I paid for it).   I have no problem paying
> the token
> > amount they charged for the fork.   Take a look sometime at what a similar
> > fork costs for a piper or cessna.
> >
> > bill.
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