NASA

I believe I became complacent, trusting nothing will go wrong. I need to be proactive and preventative rather than reactive.

Spoke with Ground/Tower. Great Controller but clearly working solo on a very busy day. He was clearly overworked. He missed my clearance request, which I restated. It was clear he was working alone and handling Clearance/Ground /Tower solo.

As we were rolling down the runway I looked behind us to discover the other aircraft on the runway at the same time as us (within 500 feet) and moving faster than we were.

Approximately halfway through the takeoff roll the student suddenly put in hard left rudder. Instructor commanded student to stop, but the student continued hard left rudder while saying “what’s happening?”

The Controller told us to follow the regional jet passing off to our left. I had concerns about wake turbulence so I advised my student to climb to get above the regional jet’s path before turning a right base for Runway 6.

This resulted in both aircraft facing head-on on the departure end of 30. We had to take an evasive maneuver action to avoid the aircraft on final.

Our left main tire dropped into a ditch on the left side of the (narrow) runway, which dropped the left wingtip low enough that it caught on a fence post, pulling the plane around into the fence. The propeller struck the fence, coming to a stop after becoming entangled in the barbed wire fence.

Knowing that the propeller governor had been overhauled during the annual inspection the previous month, I suspected a failure of the governor.

As we were seconds away from turning final, we turned to clear extended final approach when a Cessna 172 came across our flight path, narrowly missing us.