Ken Welter wrote:
Hi Paul
The following letter is one that I wrote to the coot news group as I forwarded the the letter that you sent out.
Ken Welter
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I am forwarding a letter that I received from a rotary news group that I belong to. It contains the NTSB report on Jim West, also at the end there is a comment from Paul Lamar that narrates that group and it pretty much sums up my opinion about the the people from FAA and the NTSB that investigated this are compleat incompetent idiots. The FAA and NTSB contacted me as they had some how received the letters that I had sent to the Coot group and the Rotary group.
I told them that the oil metering pump could not cause a engine to seize and that most people remove that pump but they insisted that if Mazda put that pump on there that it they thought that it would be unsafe to fly without it. My comment was then I have been flying a unsafe airplane for the last 1000 hrs and am still flying a an unsafe airplane. If they wanted to get a second opinion they should contact Paul Lamar which they did not and stuck with the incompetent Mazda dealer mechanics opinion and did not take my opinion. It was the cheap piece of crap oil cooler that I told Jim would not handle the pressure and volume of the Mazda engine and that it would cause the engine to seize when it blew. I also told them about the weight and balance problem that I thought it had. They said they needed documentation on paper with numbers and that my eyeball engineering point of view was not worth anything even though in taxi testing the nose popped up and with full stick forward the plane jumped about 15 ft in the air and stalled. They still wanted paperwork but that is the FAA for you they live in a paperwork world.
Still if the engine quit Jim should have been able to fly the airplane and land it as there were fields all around the airport
Ken Welter
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We should not let this stand. Once this report becomes final it is cast in concrete.
Lets all write letters or call to the NTSB complaining about how they handled this crash investigation.
That should get their attention. Here are the addresses. Paul Lamar
Mention:
-NTSB Identification: SEA02LA072
Accident occurred Sunday, April 21, 2002 at Creswell, OR
Aircraft:Gallagher Taylor "Coot", registration: N41RG
Injuries: 1 Fatal.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NTSB Headquarters
490 L'Enfant Plaza, SW
Washington, DC 20594
(202) 314-6000
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Northwest Regional Office
8 a.m.-4:30 p.m. 19518 Pacific Highway South Phone: 206-870-2200
(Pacific) Room 201 FAX: 206-870-2219
Seattle, Washington 98188-5493
The AirCraft Rotary Engine NewsLetter. Powered by Linux.
ACRE NL web site. Copyright 1998-2002 All world wide rights reserved.
http://home.earthlink.net/~rotaryeng/ http://www.linux.org