#25: Notes on several recent aviation accidents

The NTSB has released some Preliminary Reports on several crashes over the past six weeks. I’ve put together a rundown on what we know.

The Reagan National Midair

There have been regular official updates on the midair collision between American Airlines flight 1542 and a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter on January 29 and the Preliminary Report was released last week. The paywall is down on the article I wrote about this accident for Leeham News, and it provides a lot of information on the airspace and why it is so crowded. (Spoiler alert - Congress is involved in Reagan National decision-making.)

NTSB attention shifted on this one very quickly from the actions of flight 1542 (which was operating a CRJ700 aircraft) to the Black Hawk¹. We know it was flying above the mandated ceiling for the low level helicopter route, although investigators believe the crew was possible unaware of this². We also know it did not apparently have ADS-B operating due to a 2019 rule which permitted certain agencies to operate without it. There already some finger-pointing about why the Black Hawk ADS-B was turned off, but what I found was regardless of the mission, once an agency was approved to operate in civilian airspace without it, that’s what they can do.

Last week, the NTSB issued an urgent safety recommendation to shut down the low level helicopter routes going through Reagan airspace when certain runways are in use. (I think they should just abolish them entirely.) As I noted at the time on bluesky, this is not surprising and it was, quite frankly, the least the board could do. The FAA had already restricted the routes, everyone has been complaining about them and documenting near-misses and the investigation focus is almost entirely on the helicopter. As to what this all means for permanent changes at Reagan, and the potential for Congress to leave Reagan operations alone, only time will tell.

The Pennsylvania Medevac

The Preliminary Report on the Lear 55 medevac crash near Philadelphia on January 31 hints at a lot of potential frustration to come. This accident was already odd and the report is making it clear that the investigation is going to be quite tricky. First, and most significant, the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) was installed but not recording and had not been recording for several years. That’s a huge problem.

Next, it’s that they were in the air for only about a minute and all their communications with ATC were perfectly normal. Whatever came at them was incredibly fast.

I don’t have easy access to any Lear 55 pilots but one thing I wonder about is when the autopilot would have been engaged. This is about that time frame and if there was some sort of immediate failure/issue, the crew would have no time to recover. There is a reason why takeoff and landing are deemed “critical phases of flight” - you do not have the airspace to analyze the problem and come up with a fix. They were at 1,650 feet, then seven seconds later were at 1,275 feet and then in the ground. I think this will be a catastrophic mechanical failure of some kind. (Whether or not the crew did something to cause it remains to be seen.) This is traditionally the sort of thing the NTSB is very good at uncovering although the massive destruction of this aircraft does raise concerns.

Bering Air flight 445 near Nome, Alaska

Bering Air flight 445 was a Cessna Caravan which crashed on the sea ice off the coast of Nome on February 6. The Preliminary Report pretty much tells the whole story and it is about weight and icing. The aircraft was flying IFR from Unalakleet to Nome, about 150 miles away. It’s a regular route, regular flight and there were no issues with ATC communications. About twenty minutes from Nome, at 3:14PM, the pilot was informed that the airport was closed for runway deicing that would take about 10-15 minutes. He had flown initially at 8,000 feet, then was assigned to 6,000 feet and was flying 110-120 knots. Shortly thereafter, at 3:16 he was told to descend and maintain 4,000 feet. He did so without issue but then the airspeed slowed dramatically to 112 knots then 99 knots then 70 knots and then it was gone.

Nome weather at the time was 2,500 broken and 3,200 overcast. Light snow, mist, precipitation and moderate icing were in the area forecast.

Here is the information from the report that matters the most:

Flight 445 was heavy. Unalakleet is a company base for Bering, it has a hangar and ground crew there. The aircraft’s true load should have been known to the pilot; he even could have been out on the ramp during the loading. And, in case he wasn’t, the manifest shows he was overweight, although it does not reflect the true weight.

I’ve been writing about Alaska aviation accidents for a long time. This one reminds of the Rediske Air crash in 2013 in Soldotna. It just doesn’t make any sense how it could happen.

Two accidents in Airzona

On the February 10 mid-air of two aircraft (Lancair 360 and Cessna 172) being used for flight instruction in Marana, Arizona, the Preliminary Report has determined that the Cessna radioed³ more than once that it was performing a “stop and go” to perform a short field landing and takeoff. The Lancair asked if it was a “touch and go”, the Cessna responded “stop and go”. Both aircraft were using runway 12. While the Cessna was taking off, the Lancair announced it was going around. The Cessna instructor looked at ADS-B info and saw the Lancair was converging on their location as they gained altitude. As she called out to them, they collided. The two pilots on the Lancair were killed, the Cessna landed without injury.

This was tight traffic at an uncontrolled field. A young man I went to school with in Florida was killed this way - he was hit from behind on short final. Anyone who has flown in the proximity of busy flight schools has seen similar situations that were narrowly avoided or, like this one, ended in tragedy.

The other Arizona fatality accident last month involved a Lear 35 in Scottsdale which had a landing gear collapse shortly after touchdown. This was a corporate flight (Motley Crue singer Vince Neal’s personal jet) and the pilot was his regular pilot with a familiar co-pilot as well. The aircraft was involved in a “hard landing” (where it bounced mulitple times) last summer. The owner had the landing gear inspected at that time to see if it was damaged.

As you can see from these photos, the gear was not in proper position prior to the Scottsdale accident.

The crew made no radio calls suggesting concern about the landing gear. This is an obvious mechanical issue and the investigation will go into the last gear inspection. The co-pilot, who survived, will also certainly be asked if they had any indication that the gear was not locked.

How many accidents have there been since the Reagan midair?

There have been ninety-seven aviation accidents in the U.S. since January 29, fourteen of them included fatalities. The fatal accidents you may not have noticed including a skydiving company in Florida, an aerial deer survey in Texas, a medevac in Mississippi, a Cessna Citation crash on takeoff in Texas, and a helicopter pilot who collided with power lines in Ohio.

I wrote about the FAA

Leeham News has taken down the paywall on my article about how the FAA is considered a “Tombstone Agency”. I went all the way back to 1956 on this one, reading a lot of historical news coverage of the FAA and aviation accidents in the 70s, 80s and 90s. If you are interested in just how understaffed the FAA has been almost from the beginning, and how much Congress has been involved in its funding and staffing, then this is the article for you.

I plan to continue to research and write about the FAA. While I certainly feel the furious urgency of the moment, I also think part of the agency’s ongoing problems is that the weight of the past has never been properly examined.

Thanks, as always for reading. And especially thank you to my paying subscribers because yes, the lawsuit against me is in the appeals process and still costing me a ton of money. (For new readers, you can read some backstory on the lawsuit here. Since I won, the Plaintiff has appealed.)

1. One thing about the Black Hawk crew: the instructor had 968 hours total time, the pilot had 450. The military has said repeatedly that they were “experienced” but combined they did not have enough time to fly co-pilot on the CRJ. The gulf between what the military terms experienced and what the civilian world does is huge.

2. There are questions in the Prelim about the accuracy of the altimeter. I don’t know what the military inspection requirements are for checking the pitot static system in the Black Hawks and look forward to learning more in the final report.

3. There is no tower at this field; the aircraft were using a common frequency and talking to each other. This is not unusual.