I attended a really neat flyin in East Texas this weekend. The place has a grass landing strip and is sandy soil. It has been dry there lately so it was kinda soft I guess you could say, at least after 400 airplanes had landed on it. I was standing watching planes come and go. A unbelieveably beautifull RV6A landed, he seemed to have landed a little fast but what happened was sad. I noticed that the plane was bouncing as normal because of the not perfectly smooth terrain/runway. It looked to me like the guy was not holding enough aft stick just by looking at the elevator, plus he may have been on the brakes. As the plane was sorta bouncing up and down because of terrain it just seemed like he was letting too much weight be on the nose wheel ( remember soft field landing technique? hold the elevator all the way back once down, keep weight off of nose wheel on a nose wheel airplane). The bouncing, plus maybe braking, plus the leverage of the horizontal piece of metal on the side of a RV nose wheel bracketcoming from the pivot point to the axle caused the leading edge of the bracket to go downward and start digging into the ground. I don't know if the nose landing gear had already bent at this point but it started digging in more and more, and I believe this was worsened by the guy probably applying brakes. The planes nose gear finally dug in, the prop hit the ground then in seemingly slow motion the tail came up the nose bowl contacted the ground and the plane flipped upside down and slapped the ground with the verticle tail. Pieces of plexiglass broke and you could hear weird crashing metal noises as the plane slapped the ground upside down. There was enough of us there to run immediately lift the plane high enough to get the two occupants out, then we flipped the plane back to it's mains and rolled it off to the side. Fortunately the two inside had minor injuries as far as we could tell. The builder pilot had some cuts and bruises, I think from the plexiglass. It was sharp as a razorblade at some of the broken edges. He had to go to the hospital for some stitches and I never heard if anything else was wrong with him. This plane had the sliding rearward canopy that you see on RVs. The front roll bar was bent, it looked like the metal on the side of the fuselage was bent some at the top from the load imposed by the plane flipping on the rollbar. We had a hard time moving the canopy rearward because of bending to get the occupants out. Several things came to my mind. 1. What would those guys have done if we had not been there to get them out? What if they landed at a strip out somewhere where there was no one? There was fuel leaking in the area, what if it had started on fire? Lots of what ifs came to mind after seeing this take place. What if he had held full aft stick? What if he had not applied brakes and just let it roll out? What if there was no roll bar? what if we had not been there? what if it had started immediately started on fire? Any plane as you know can flip upside down, tail dragger as well as nose dragger. Plan ahead, what are you going to do if it were to happen to you? How are you going to get out if no one is around to help you? How are you going to get out fast before it starts on fire? Just because a plane does not start on fire immediately does not mean that it is not, so do not mess around. get out as fast as you can or get people out if you see an accident. We had the plane up and the people out in less than one minute or it seemed that fast. We ran lifted and got them out immediately, no questions were asked we just got them out. Think about it people, do you have enough structure to protect you if you slammed the ground upside down. If not maybe you should start thinking about it. After I saw the metal tubing bend on the RV that was not going fast at all by the time it decided to flip upside down I have a totally different way of thinking now. Larry Howell
The front roll bar was bent a little
