The NTSB’s final report on the accident has a déjà vu flavor to it. A Piper PA-28RT-201T — a 200-hp turbo Arrow IV — has an April encounter with IMC while flying night VFR. Yet again.
And yet again, as is common in these kinds of encounters, the plane crashes and both people on board — the pilot and a non-aviator passenger — perish.
But what you don’t see at first glance is that, adding to the tragedy, the victims are mother and son.
And that the son is a student pilot, allegedly on a day-time solo cross-country.
Ah. I see I have your full attention now. Oh, there’s so much to talk about here. But first, the facts as we know them.
The Student Pilot
The student at the controls of the turbo-charged, retractable gear T-tail was a 55-year-old male and the owner of the airplane. He obtained his student pilot certificate the month after buying the airplane, which was not quite two years before the crash. In that time, although he had never attempted to take his written, he’d racked up 135 hours total time, with 108 in the accident make and model, including 51.2 hours of PIC.
The student had a current solo endorsement, a valid night endorsement, and a cross-country endorsement for the flight.
He did not, however, have a valid medical certificate, which had expired nearly three months before the crash.
The Flight
Apparently, late in the morning, the student pilot talked to his flight instructor about making a “solo” cross-country trip from Pearland Regional Airport (KLVJ), in Houston, Texas, to Kyle-Oakley Field Airport (KCEY), in Murray, Kentucky, so the student could visit his father, who had been hospitalized.
According to an FAA Air Safety Investigator’s report of a phone conversation with the student’s flight instructor, the CFI met the student “at the airport near the pilot’s pickup truck” and provided him with the required endorsement.
This sounds fine at first blush, until you learn it had been more than a month since the CFI had flown with the student. And the previous training flight with the student had been three months before that. We’ll talk more about the CFI’s role and responsibility in this tragedy later.
The weather was fine that morning, but was predicted to drop to IFR by sunset. The CFI — and probably the student himself — expected the flight to depart in plenty of time to beat the weather, landing in the daylight ahead of the storm.
But the student departed much later than planned, apparently delayed by an issue with his iPad, which was his backup in the glass-panel Arrow.
His daughter later told NTSB authorities in an email, “the reason for the delayed departure was that his back-up GPS (iPad) service was not connecting to the internet, therefore leaving him without a connection. He does not fly without all required or necessary tools or equipment!”
While the instructor was under the impression his student would depart between 1 and 2 in the afternoon, ADS-B data shows the student lifted off at 5:20, as evening closed in.
Still, the bulk of the flight, as far as the data shows, was uneventful.
The Arrow flew, well, straight as an arrow, showing little deviation until the final two minutes. The student pilot was using flight following, and two-and-a-half minutes before the crash, he called up Memphis Center to let the controller know that he was preparing to descend from his cruise altitude to land at his destination airport.
The controller gave him the altimeter setting, but advised the student of moderate precipitation ahead, and that all the airports in the area were “on the verge of being IFR.”
The Final Moments
The student responds, “OK, affirmative. I’m gonna still descend down to 2,000 or 3,000 feet to have plenty of clearance for anything that’s not updated on my screen.”
The controller instructs the student to maintain VFR, provides him with several alternate airports that still have legal VFR conditions, and suggests an easterly heading might get the student away from the weather.
The student roger-wilco’s but, based on flight track and weather information, punches into the clouds practically before his finger leaves the mike button.
About 35 seconds later, the controller hears a single one-word broadcast, with no callsign.
The word is “Mayday.”
The Accident
I don’t need to tell you what happens next, because I’m sure you’ve read it a dozen times in a dozen different VFR to IMC encounter reports. Yeah. The airplane enters a descending, tightening, rapidly-accelerating spiral that continues until impact — the fingerprint of spatial disorientation.
The NTSB report states that the airplane reaches an airspeed “significantly greater” than its never exceed speed of 186 KCAS, reaching 270 KCAS 15 seconds after exceeding the Vne.
Local authorities discover the wreckage about 7:30 the next morning, partially submerged in a creek along a muddy ravine in a forest. All the major components of the Arrow are found within a 100-foot-long debris path.
Wreckage is heavily fragmented, making it difficult for investigators to even establish the “four corners.” The stabilator push/pull tube was crushed and pulled out from both ends. Control cables display overload separation. All four seats separated from the airplane’s floor, their frames mangled and broken. One of the front seat belts is found still latched, but torn from its attachment point; the other is nowhere to be found. The instrument panel was completely destroyed. Only one yoke is located…well, pieces of it, anyway. The engine was buried under three feet of mud.
The Unauthorized Passenger
The student pilot’s 74-year-old mother was his passenger that night, and of course I don’t need to tell you that student pilots carrying passengers is strictly verboten. Hell, the prohibition is even printed right there on the student pilot certificate.
According to family members, mom wasn’t along to go see the pilot’s hospitalized father, but rather to meet her sister for a previously planned vacation. A sister, who according to family, INSISTED that they MUST arrive that night.
During the course of the investigation, the NTSB contacted the student pilot’s mechanic, who had sold the student a couple of quarts of oil that morning. The mechanic observed the student fuel and hangar the plane, then return much later in the day. He recalled seeing him taxi out at about 5 p.m. and “observed that one passenger was onboard.”
The next day, the mechanic received a call from the student’s instructor, telling him the airplane had crashed and that the wreckage had been located. The mechanic asked if the student and his passenger were OK. According to the NTSB investigator, the mechanic reported that “the flight instructor responded in surprise that a passenger was onboard, and seemed to get upset.”
The Flight Instructor
While the FAA and NTSB records don’t tell us much about the instructor, a matching name in the Airman Registry shows a multi-engine ATP with commercial seaplane and glider ratings who holds CFI, II, MEI, and glider instructor certificates, along with all three ground instructor ratings, and even a drone certificate for good measure. So he’s not one of those brand new instructors in a holding pattern for the airlines.
The instructor spent a lot of time in his discussion with the FAA covering his own six, saying he had no knowledge that the pilot planned to depart with a passenger. That the student told him he’d renewed his medical. And that he asked the student three times, “Do you need me to go with you?” And that the student declined each time.
But interestingly, buried in all of this, the CFI reveals that the student told him he’d been let go from his job the previous week. So I’m trying to put myself in the CFI’s shoes, standing next to the student’s pickup truck at the airport. Here’s a student who only comes to me once every 90 days to keep his solo endorsement current. His dad is in the hospital. He just lost his job. And the weather is scheduled to go to pot by day’s end.
I don’t think I’d sign him off. But that’s just me.
Analysis & Discussion
Where to even start? I guess with the student. What sort of man was he?
On one hand, it seems like he wasn’t taking his flight instruction very seriously. He has a lot of hours, but he hasn’t done his written. He doesn’t renew his medical. His last two instructional flights seem to have no purpose other than to renew his solo endorsements. It makes one wonder if he ever intended to finish or if he was just planning to fly his plane as a student forever.
And yet he’s not completely off the reservation…he actually does take the time to get those endorsements, and to get a cross-country endorsement for the accident flight. He also keeps his plane properly maintained — it had its annual several weeks before the crash.
But then there’s the issue of taking mom along. Was that a one-time breaking of the rules under extreme circumstances — still not acceptable — or was it business as usual for the student?
The student’s daughter, in that email response to NTSB investigators, sheds some light on the question when she reported, “I was there with him and my grandmother when they were taking off, (I also was training to be a pilot as well). I watched him do all his pre-flight checklist, watched him listen to the weather. He did everything he was supposed to do!”
So, she, too, is a student pilot, but seemed to think nothing strange of her student-pilot father taking her grandmother along as a passenger.
The NTSB
NTSB toxicology found evidence of multiple potentially impairing substances — most prescription meds — but no blood levels were available, so the effect “could not be determined.”
Additionally, as the cause of the crash appeared so cut and dry, the feds figured his multiple potential impairing substances probably didn’t play a role. Instead, they focused on external pressures, saying “the accident flight had self-induced and external pressures that likely affected the pilot’s desire to complete the flight.”
What is of particular note to me is that the pilot was subjected to not just self-induced pressures, but external pressures as well.
One or the other has proven toxic in other accidents — perhaps the combination verges on insurmountable? Wanting to see his father. Wanting to please his mother. Pressure from his aunt. Validation from his fellow-student pilot daughter. Not in the best mental space in the first place, having just lost a job, and possibly having medical issues, based on the cocktail of meds in the tox screen, along with his apparent hesitation in seeing an aviation medical examiner (AME).
Perhaps this cauldron of pressure is a takeaway that both law-abiding and rogue pilots can use: A personal minimum based on sources of pressure. When you’re feeling pressure both from within and without, take the damn car.
Final Thoughts
So was he the victim of more than one person can be expected to handle or was this the final chapter in a pattern of behavior?
Tellingly, his obituary says that he “loved living in the fast lane. From hot rods, Harleys, dirt bikes, boats, planes, he wanted to experience everything he could as fast as he could before he got too old.”
Was he in too big a hurry to invest the time required to complete flight training and become a safe pilot?
Going waaaaaaay off the official grid, I found an interesting comment left on the accident-reporting website Kathryn’s Report, where some locals were discussing the accident.
One commenter claimed that the student pilot had gone through a number of flight instructors, and had been refused membership in more than one local flying club “due to attitude issues.” Reportedly, the fly-in community where he lived also barred him from keeping his plane on the field “due to his reckless behaviors.”
The commenter said, “everyone with direct knowledge of his machismo attitude and arrogance warned him of the consequences of that type of behavior. Myself included.”
The commenter said he was sorry for the family’s loss, however, he felt the accident had been “100% preventable.”
The commenter then threw down the gauntlet to other flight instructors, urging them not to endorse students who show risky behavior: “It is up to you to identify problems early,” he wrote to fellow instructors, “and make the right decision. It might not be popular or convenient, however, at the end of the day, everyone involved will be alive.”
As always, I welcome your comments, thoughts, opinions, and ideas.
The Numbers
Want to read more? Download the NTSB’s final report here or view the items on docket here.
There is a why behind every pilot. That why alone determines how the pilot flies. Look for cues. Ask them if they ride motorcycles, ask them if they skydive, ask them if they ski off-piste. All those activities can be done safely, but if a person likes many of them at once – there is a good chance they are after the adrenaline. You can’t teach an adrenaline-driven pilot to be safe. Lack of safety is what produces the adrenaline they are after. Lack of safety is the entire reason they fly.
It’s seems to be a standard practice at most airports where there’s new students trying to learn to fly, some will just get there solo and just like the story keep renewing the student ticket and not take the written exam, they will fly with friends knowing they’re not allowed to take passengers but they feel since the own the aircraft they can do what they want. Sometimes they work on there aircraft’s without an A&P looking at there work and using none FAA parts. There been a few incidents with there aircraft’s emergency landing on roads and on highways. I don’t think this will ever stop as long as we have people who feel they don’t have to fallow rules.
Bad decision making, bottom line, an idiot trying to be a pilot !!! killed two people. End of story..
Thank you for a very informative article based on this very avoidable tragedy. There are very good reasons for the tedious and often illogical ground school and qualifying for the written exam. All the facts that were so well presented in this review are addressed in ground school i.e. flight planning, weather, self assessment I’m safe external pressures.
Also the flight instructor should have discussed the “ go no go” scenario and put his foot down on any further endorsements. I had a similar situation where in I worked on an Indian Reservation and my instructors would come and go to airline jobs. Years of intermittent instruction several ground schools and solo endorsements and patiently I got my license. The FAA does things for very good reasons, love them or NOT they are there for our SAFETY.
You say the following,
“The student at the controls of the turbo-charged, retractable gear T-tail was a 55-year-old male and the owner of the airplane. He obtained his student pilot certificate the month after buying the airplane, which was not quite two years before the crash. In that time, although he had never attempted to take his written, he’d racked up 135 hours total time, with 108 in the accident make and model, including 51.2 hours of PIC.”
I take offense to your statement. I was 50 when I ticketed, took nearly 80 hours, in three years, because of change of instructors, work schedule and life events. I didn’t take my written test till right before I was to take the practical. I now own my plane, have just over 500 hours and build airliners for a living. I am an aircraft nut! Not everyone has the money or time like you, some of us struggle just to keep our planes let alone fly them regularly. Please feel free to contact me directly.
Another cautionary tale. The sadness of loss of human life, totally avoidable. I’m a senior adult having seen plenty of life across the country. I’m also a novelist and screenwriter, and deal with the broad range of human personalities — all the way from people scared to leave their houses to cowboys riding that bomb down to the ground in complete disregard and disrespect for their own lives. Calls to mind the police report I read about James Dean stating “Failure to negotiate curve” in his sports car, as I recall. And the pilot who took Buddy Holly and friend’s lives. The FAA report ended with the sentence “That pilot had no business in that airplane.” What we sow, we reap.
I grew up in an upper-middle class suburb of Philly. Mostly white collar, many driving recent family second cars to school (not me; I fixed my own junkers. We were poor). I’ve checked into the lives of my public-school peers now decades ago. Funny how my ‘take’ on them in school foretold their futures: some saints, some sinners; some hugely successful financially, some serving long prison sentences. About 50 percent RIP. The guys who were fast-and-loose with virtually everything in their lives brought about their early and in some cases tragic demises. I can still see them sitting in the back of the classroom, cutting up, aggravating the teachers, virtually living in detention, and giving the finger to society at large. They hit the cemetery pretty fast, from car accidents, drug overdoses, angry husbands whose wives they were cheating with, and a hundred other tales of woe, probably including GA fatalities.
It’s been said you can’t save some people from themselves. You can preach, set a good example, invite to church and go to sports games together, but it seems that the predilection to self-destruction in some people is perhaps genetically in-bred. The parents of some of those bad guys weren’t bad guys themselves. They were hard-working blue- and white-collar men and women raising kids and working a job, day-in and day-out. Some even turned their kids into the police for vandalism. But apparently, strong-willed people will do as they will do, and nothing will deter them from irresponsible behavior.
My close friend and boss is a senior man, experienced commercial pilot and currently CFI in Texas dealing with multi-$million private jets and Texas rich guys. He tells me he won’t deal with any irresponsible idiots, but has only seen very few lately. The ones that are tend to be so damned rich they don’t take safety precautions and put undue faith in their equipment and systems rather than getting intimate with their expensive toys to develop man-machine understanding and bonding. Their days are numbered, doomed to perish in a smoking crater a few miles of some runway after dark flying VFR. As night follows day.
Stay safe, don’t have get-there-itis. Live to see another day. Please.
Regards/J
BUT let’s say he didn’t “sign off” on him. From what I am reading he would have flown regardless……
But the CFI did sign him off, the CFI should have a visit from the local FSDO.
45 years as a CFI (24 at an airline, retired USAF ATC) and I’ve had a few with attitudes, as I’m sure every CFI has. As everyone has commented you have to be honest with them if they’re not progressing, as I’ve had with Private and instrument students.
The cowboys I’ve had I immediately terminated their training, even in one instance contacting the FSDO as this individual was doing some hazardous flying. A lot of young and inexperienced CFIs teaching now so I try to share my knowledge and experience with them. Excellent article that I’m sharing with students as well as other CFIs at the flight school.
As a long time CFI I have had several encounters with students that have attitudes like the subject Pilot in this article. I sat them down and laid about the plan to get them to their license. I got several to follow the plan and their attitudes changed in the process. The others never came back.
I thought that you had to pass your knowledge test prior to solo.
The CFI is also a participant in this death.
If a pilot has not completed the training and received the PPL in 12 months and less than 80 hours, the CFI should recognize that that person is not serious about completing the required training and should not continue the training.
As a CFI, how long would you continue training a student that has not soloed? Let’s say 25 hours of training and not ready to solo. Time to be honest with the student.
Same for the student that is training in their own plane. This student should excel in training, not be a student after 70 hours or so.
It’s all about attitude and commitment.
12 months & 80 hrs and no PPL then consider the student isn’t serious? I call baloney. I certainly didn’t fit into that category. Work, family emergencies, CFIs leaving, flight school closing, etc. I now have over 1000 hrs and own a cherokee. Please don’t assume there’s fixed deadline for learning. But I do agree the “student” was an accident looking for a time & location to happen. We had a similar attitude recently…172, 4 adults, and a straight line GPS route from KAPA to 1v6. Cumulo granite aka Pikes Peak.
“If a pilot has not completed the training and received the PPL in 12 months and less than 80 hours, the CFI should recognize that that person is not serious about completing the required training and should not continue the training”
I learned at a 1900 foot strip. Because of the challenges it took 13 months and 85 hours. I got a 98 on my written and flew without incident for 19 years following. So it can take some people longer be it certainly doesn’t make them unsafe.
That’s a little extreme. Going over 80 hours and a year isn’t all that unusual. Ideally there’s the norm of mid 60 hours and 6-7 months, but many flight students can’t afford the cost or the time to do it that quickly.
I thought that you had to pass your knowledge test prior to solo.
The CFI is also a participant in this death.
If a pilot has not completed the training and received the PPL in 12 months and less than 80 hours, the CFI should recognize that that person is not serious about completing the required training and should not continue the training.
As a CFI, how long would you continue training a student that has not soloed? Let’s say 25 hours of training and not ready to solo. Time to be honest with the student.
Same for the student that is training in their own plane. This student should excel in training, not be a student after 70 hours or so.
It’s all about attitude and commitment.
Well written article with helpful information. We’ve heard this before but it’s important to keep refreshing the idea and hopefully it will save at least one life.
Might be summed up in one word — entitlement. I had a student fatality also — flying in IMC, thankfully solo — after forging my solo endorsement. A year previous I refused giving him instruction, but then I guess these individuals somehow find a way to die.
Entitled, I’m not sure that’s the right phrase to apply to this situation. I would more lean towards arrogant, ” license, I don’t need no stinking license!”, who is checking anyhow. Or maybe he considers himself or did consider himself a sovereign citizen and the requirement to have a license to do this and the required training “infringes on his rights as an a’ MERICAN!”. I have no empathy for this cowboy, however I do feel grief for his unsuspecting mother.