Talk:AVE Mizar
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Does this craft feature the famous exploding Pinto gas tank?Pedant
"Pinto leaves you with that warm feeling" kostmo
I have some personal knowlege about the Mizar. The flight testing was done at Oxnard airport (then known as Ventura County Airport) and the Ave folks rented their hangar space (and use of a metal workshop) from an avionics shop located at the airport. I know this because the owner of the avionics shop was my father. I was 13 in 1973 and spent most of my summer vacations working with my parents at the small family owned business. Also, I was very interested in the plane/car hybrid that Smolinski and Blake were working on.
It's probably a fortunate thing for me that I was back in school the day of the crash or I would probably have seen the accident - it happened in clear sight - in a line of trees next to a road that paralleled the runway - very close to the airport.
From first or second hand knowlege - I can add some information to the article. First, Hal Blake was not the pilot in the fatal crash - Smolinski piloted the Pinto that day while inexplicably Blake went along as a passenger. He had no business being in the plane when it flew the day it crashed. As for Smolinski - he was not supposed to be the test pilot at this stage. AVE had hired a professional test pilot who had been making the test flights - hops actually.
I enthusiastically watched many of these test flights that summer. The vehicle would accelerate down the ~5000 foot runway - rising to a max heigth of around ten or twenty feet and then settling back onto the runway with plenty of room to stop. On one of these professionally flown tests - which I heard about but did not see - a gust of wind had apparently blown the plane far enough off course that the test pilot had elected to set the plane down in a field off to the side of the runway - probably to avoid having to fly any farther than absolutely required. This had resulted in minor damage to the vehicle - in addition to whatever crops had been mowed down by the emergency landing.
The fatal flight did not go as well. Smolinski - probably very eager to test the vehicle with a new and more powerful aircraft (rear) engine - apparently decided to fly despite higher than prescribed wind speeds (> 10mph if memory serves) at the airport that day. Also - the test pilot was either not there or refused. Apparently either intentionally or because of a wind gust as in the earlier example - Smolinski elected to fly the pattern before landing.
Finally - the wing struts were not held in place by sheet metal screws - had it been so the vehicle would never have passed an FAA inspection. At any rate such a design flaw would be noted in the NTSB report if it were so. I do remember hearing (after the crash - according to a local airframe mechanic that my father knew - and who was also familiar with the "Flying Pinto" - as it was popularly known) that the lower wing struts had been joined with the Pinto body by "spot welding" directly to the pinto's body and that's where the failure supposedly occurred.
One final remark: even to my untrained eye - the struts of the Mizar were very strange in one respect - the angle between the strut and body of the Mizar was unusually acute (that is, the triangle formed between the base of the stut -where the failure apparently occured, and the car body - opposite the side formed by the wing) as compared with the normal configuration - which more generally looks more like an isosceles triangle . Whenever I saw this - it just looked wrong to me. Rjtighe 17:17, 22 January 2006 (UTC)
