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This vintage Model Sperry F-3 Attitude Gyro is a civilian modelused in many late 1940\'s - early 1950\'s aircraft.Perry Part Number 661961. It has a very low serial number - 1605.
This is the samemodel gyro that was in the 1947 Beechcraft Bonanza that crashedOn February 3, 1959, killing rock and roll musiciansBuddy Holly,Ritchie ValensandJ. P. \"The Big Bopper\" RichardsonnearClear Lake, Iowa, together with the pilot,Roger Peterson. The event later became known as \"The day the music died\", after singer-songwriterDon McLeanso referred to it in his song \"American Pie\".
I attempted to test it with a vacuum cleaner but could not get it to spin-up. Sold as-is as a collectors item as it may need overhaul to utilize in an wreckage of N3794N as found by the authorities on the morning of the accident
The investigation was carried out by theCivil Aeronautics Board(CAB, precursor to theNTSB). It emerged that pilotRoger Peterson, who was working on hisinstrument ratingat the time, had passed his written examination but was not yet qualified to operate into weather that required flying solely byreference to instruments. He, and Dwyer Flying Service itself, was certified to operate only undervisual flight rules, which essentially require that the pilot must be able to see where he is going. However, on the night of the accident, the low cloud obscuring the stars, the lack of a visible horizon and the absence of ground lights over the sparsely populated area, would have made visual flight virtually impossible.[15]
Furthermore, Peterson, who had failed an instrumentcheckridenine months before the accident, had received his instrument training on airplanes equipped with a conventionalartificial horizon, as source of aircraft attitude information, while N3794N was equipped with an older-type Sperry F3 attitudegyro. Crucially, the two types of instrument display the sameaircraft pitch attitudeinformation graphically in opposite ways.
The CAB concluded that the accident was due to \"the pilot\'s unwise decision to embark on a flight\" that required instrument flying skills he had not demonstrated to have. A contributing factor was the pilot\'s unfamiliarity with the old-style attitude gyro fitted on board the aircraft, which may have caused him to believe he was climbing when he was, in fact, descending (an example ofspatial disorientation). Another contributing factor was the \"seriously inadequate\" weather briefing provided to the pilot, which \"failed to even mention adverse flying condition which should have been highlighted\".[15][20]
