Some may have heard of Saturday's crash of a C172 on Coney Island, NYC... This hits me hard as I've made a few pleasant runs there  under the JFK Class B tier in the same type.
The vultures have descended... I'd post a link to a news item, but perusing a few made me a little sick. Some eyewitnesses say he was "circling" when the engine quit; one said "looping". Right. A loop in a 172, near gross with four adults aboard, at 500 AGL tops! And I sure wouldn't  even circle in a C172 at 500 AGL, at least not with  a full load.  And of course there's the usual folderol in the news about "stalling" engines and "plummeting" airplanes.
Anyway, it seems the pilot was maneuvering or did maneuver when the relatively new powerplant went south, and he attempted to land on the sand with black smoke trailing from the aircraft.
Naturally I've considered having to do the same, every time I've flown there. There are some photos of the wreck out there- whatever happened, it seems to have hit hard, nose-first and pitched down somewhat. With the smoke, or a fire in the cabin, with hardly a minute to make an approach, I doubt I'd make it either. It's a calculated risk, and when I have passengers, they get to veto that low passage if they don't accept that risk.
But that really doesn't matter... four people lost their lives in a 4-year-old airplane on a beautiful day. A very sad day.

Pilots sit around the hangar and talk about this stuff. We all think about it every time we're up there. We've all got departure end, emergency landing spots picked out for every runway at our home field, or fields we frequent. We all get that same, subtle relief when we're high enough above and far enough away from congested areas to at least, in theory, have time to pick a spot to set it down, cabin fire/smoke withstanding. A theory taught to me early by an instructor who's had to do it twice. "If you have to make a low pass, start it with a shallow dive at full throttle.. wave at your friends at 130kias.. you can launch yourself to a safer altitude while trimming for best-glide".

In the safety of hangar-talk.. it's easy to convince yourself that;  Not worring about saving the air-frame, a 172 can be hard, stall landed and brought to a "walk-away" stop (gear still in place or not) in a couple hundred feet. Fully-loaded with of people who trust you.. time moves fast when the engine quits.

No judgments being passed here. Just thinking out loud and I'm sure the pilot himself would encourage that.

It looks like there was abject engine failure. If there was indeed "smoke" it wasn't just the engine quitting.. something like a rod broke and let oil loose on the exhaust system.  The nose-dive was probably an accelerated stall brought on by a last-ditch effort turning too sharply to get pointed toward or down the beach.

That's my take. I feel a little better. Not much, though.

Thats incredibly nasty.
No pilot could have gotten out of that....

A.

What really angers me is that out of this, critics of aviation will try to use this to "prove" that aeroplanes and flying are dangerous..when all that happened was a poor chap was unlucky to have his aircraft breakdown in the air...

A.