#7: Let me tell you about a 2021 crash in Truckee, California
On July 26, 2021, a Challenger 600 crashed in Truckee killing the four passengers and two pilots. The NTSB found errors by the pilots as the cause. I have some questions.
I’ve been thinking about how to write this article for quite awhile; every time I tried to put it together, an effective narrative structure eluded me. I started and stopped repeatedly and then turned, in desperation, to John McPhee’s essay “Structure”. That’s where I finally landed on the realization that I needed to let go of a standard chronological approach and move in a different direction - a research-based structure. It was in trying to understand the intricacies of the events prior to the crash that I was able to make the most sense of what went wrong. There was a lot to this accident however and I will return to some of it in a future newsletter, particularly how the NTSB assumed the motivations of the First Officer.
The Challenger 600 involved in the accident, N605TR, was leased by Aeolus Air Charters, a Part 135 charter company which obtained its operating certificate only two weeks earlier. The company planned for a FAA conformity inspection on the Challenger in August. The single aircraft on the company’s certificate was a Beechcraft Premier, N390SA, which according to Aeolus management was leased from Ryan Thomas and his company Hideaway Aviation. (Thomas was one of the four passengers killed on the Challenger.) Databases list N390SA’s owner in 2021 as TVPX Aircraft Solutions Inc Trustee which, per its website, provides trust services “for aircraft owners, including those individuals and businesses that do not qualify as US citizens for FAA registration purposes”. Thomas either owned that company as well or subleased from them to Aeolus.
In an interview with the NTSB after the accident, Conner Jadwin, the Aeolus CEO, President, and Director of Business Development, explained his relationship with Thomas:
According to documents in the accident docket, the Challenger was owned by Florida-based TARCO Aircraft Funding and leased directly by Aeolus. There is no evidence of involvement, financial or otherwise, with Thomas on that aircraft.
Jadwin told investigators the accident flight was personal business for Thomas with all expenses paid for by Aeolus, including the two pilots. He said there was no compensation or any other benefit to Aeolus by transporting Thomas and his party in the Challenger adding, “I didn't know much about what he was doing in Boise other than he just said I'm going to use the 605…and let the Premier run revenue flights so that we as a company can make money…”
The Director of Operations (DO) Dave Ventrella later told investigators, the flight was “not a 91 under a 135 operation”. When asked about the flight’s staffing, and specifically if the captain was employed by Aeolus, he responded, “No. He was a contractor.” The NTSB classified the flight as Part 91: General Aviation - Personal.
Miscommunication due to lack of crew resource management training
Security camera footage from the FBO in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, showed the flight’s captain, Alberto Montero De Collado De La Rosa, arrived about 10:15AM. The First Officer, (FO), Bret Ebaugh arrived an hour later and the four passengers arrived about 11:25AM. None of them had ever met before, including the two pilots. Only Thomas and his wife Christine were noted on the manifest; it was never explained why passengers John Dunn and Kevin Kvarnlov were overlooked in the paperwork.
The aircraft departed about 11:45AM and the flight to Truckee was uneventful. At 12:58PM, the crew was told by approach to expect runway 20 at Truckee. Capt. De La Rosa, who was the pilot flying, told Ebaugh that was unacceptable as it was too short for their landing weight. Ebaugh concurred and both agreed runway 20 was unacceptable. The captain said they would do a circle approach to runway 20 and then land on runway 11, rather than request the straight in to runway 11. Ebaugh then requested the circle approach and landing on runway 11; ATC approved.
What followed was a series of errors and miscommunications between the two pilots. Ultimately, they lost control of the approach which resulted in the crash. This is a description of the final moments from the accident report:
Once the airplane crossed the extended runway centerline, it approached a stall and the stick shaker engaged; the FO again requested control of the airplane multiple times, likely motivated by a desire to continue the approach. However, the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) did not record a positive transfer of control or any indication that the captain had relinquished control to the FO. The FO had acted as an instructor to the captain throughout the flight; seeing himself in this role might have driven his desire to take the controls in the final moments of the flight. Given the FO’s clear motivation to continue the approach and his multiple requests for control of the airplane, it is likely that he improperly attempted to take control of the aircraft without permission from the captain and increased the bank angle of the left turn, which contributed to the left wing’s stall.
(FYI: I will be writing in the future about the NTSB’s conclusions about the FO’s motivations.)
Here is the probable cause:
The first officer’s (FO’s) improper decision to attempt to salvage an unstabilized approach by executing a steep left turn to realign the airplane with the runway centerline, and the captain’s failure to intervene after recognizing the FO’s erroneous action, while both ignored stall protection system warnings, which resulted in a left-wing stall and an impact with terrain. Contributing to the accident was the FO's improper deployment of the flight spoilers, which decreased the airplane's stall margin; the captain’s improper setup of the circling approach; and the flight crew’s self-induced pressure to perform and poor crew resource management, which degraded their decision-making.
The captain could not legally fly Part 135
The primary focus in the investigation was the crew’s actions, so my first questions when reading the report were about them. Their flight times from the report:
De La Rosa had 5,680 hours of total time with 235 in the aircraft.
Ebaugh had 14,308 hours of total time with 4,410 in the aircraft.
De La Rosa’s Challenger recurrency training at Flight Safety (completed 10 days before the accident), was paid for by Aeolus. While proficient, his instructor noted he “rushed checklists, needed to slow down and read the checklist requirements, and needed to setup approach procedures without PM prompts.” (PM = Pilot Monitoring)
Jadwin told the NTSB he hired De La Rosa, a Mexican national, following a zoom interview. (DO Ventrella also participated in that interview and according to Jadwin was part of the hiring decision.) De La Rosa was covered under the company’s insurance policy and had signed an employment contract.
Jadwin said Aeolus planned to utilize De La Rosa as a Part 135 contractor, and not a regular pilot, due to problems with his visa. According to Ventrella, they “wanted to hire him” and planned to after the Challenger was on the certificate. In an email exchange to the NTSB in the accident docket, the FBI discussed the captain’s unique situation:
For immigration reasons, De La Rosa could not fly Part 135.
The FO, Bret Ebaugh, was a recommended contract pilot Jadwin hired over the phone. Ebaugh had no association with Aeolus prior to the flight, and had paid for his own recurrent training in the Challenger at CAE in June. He was recently given a start date for an inspector position with the FAA and planned to begin working at the Minneapolis FSDO in August.
Uncertainty over PIC and SIC assignments
Jadwin was unaware if a conversation occurred between the two pilots to determine who would serve as PIC and SIC, although he thought that De La Rosa would be the captain. Jadwin was not asked, nor did did he discuss, the disparity in the crew’s Challenger experience and how that would affect PIC/SIC assignment. In retrospect, he expressed the following:
The NTSB also asked Ventrella, whose previous experience was with Southwest Airlines as a captain and chief pilot, about the Challenger crew’s assignments. He was unclear on how it was determined who served as PIC and SIC, telling investigators, “So we ran it through our system. So it showed Alberto as the PIC, I believe on the paperwork that you should have received. And Bret as the SIC.” (The “system” he referred to is unclear.)
This is Ventrella’s response about lack of common training:
In addition to Ventrella, the Aeolus Chief Pilot, Takeshi Yanagi, came from a Part 121 background. Yanagi was hired in April, initially as a line pilot, and submitted as chief pilot on May 3. Documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), revealed that Yanagi was the third individual put forward since January 2021 for the chief pilot position.
Yanagi told investigators he did not know how either Challenger pilot was hired, and further, because the aircraft was not on the operating certificate, he was not expected to know about it. Yanagi was flying a charter on the Premier on July 26; he was not notified of the crash until the next morning.
An unusual certification process
FOIA documents show that initially, the Aeolus Part 135 certificate was pursued by Ryan Frost, based in Honolulu, under the proposed name of Royal Hawaiian Air Service with an FAA designator of RHAA. (The original Royal Hawaiian went out of business in 1986.) Frost operated another Part 135 charter in Hawaii, Mid-Pacific Air Service, and told the FAA he planned to divide aircraft between the two certificates listing two Learjets on the Preliminary Statement of Intent submitted in July 2019. (The FAA office assigned to oversee the Royal Hawaiian process was in Fargo, North Dakota - a geographic situation that came about because several certificates were transferred there from the Honolulu FSDO in 2018.)
Frost was listed as both the DO and chief pilot when he submitted a formal certificate application, on April 2, 2020. He also provided other documents, including an Operator Schedule of Events, anticipating certification by September. Frost dropped the Learjets from the paperwork at this point and submitted a lease for a new company aircraft, N390SA. He told FAA Principal Operations Inspector Sean Mosher that the owner of N390SA, “approached me to extract him and his aircraft from what he considered an unacceptable situation.”
“The current owner,” he continued, “purchased the aircraft from an operator in Rapid City and put it on certificate with an operator out of Van Nuys.” At the time of this exchange, and back to June 2018, the Beechcraft Premier N390SA was owned by TVPX Aircraft Solutions Inc Trustee. As detailed previously, N390SA would later be leased through Ryan Thomas for Aeolus. Due to redactions in FOIA documents, it is impossible to know if Thomas was communicating with Frost in April 2020.
Jadwin told investigators after the Challenger crash that in the summer of 2020 he and Thomas decided to start the business. Thomas would help to “find the funds we needed to grow the fleet” while Jadwin dealt with the certification process. In his interview he did not mention that Ryan Frost was pursuing the RHAA certificate at that time or that a name change to Aeolus Air Charter was not submitted until January 21, 2021.
The confusion between Royal Hawaiian and Aeolus stems from what the FAA later characterized as Frost “seeking a second certificate specifically to transfer to another operator upon completion.” The other operator was Aeolus. At some point in the fall of 2020, the FAA became aware of the situation. On November 8, Fly Compliant, a company specializing in FAA regulatory compliance, notified Mosher that it was now the Agent of Service for Royal Hawaiian as hired by the new owners; Jadwin notified Mosher as well. On November 12, the FAA informed Frost that the Royal Hawaiian certificate process was suspended for multiple reasons including that aspects of the initial proposal were “no longer factual”. A document from Ryan Frost, dated December 15, formally declared that Royal Hawaiian was sold to Jadwin and Ventrella. In a Certification Report memorandum for the FAA written the following July, Mosher recalled that after communication with Aeolus personnel in November the agency had decided to move forward on the process with Aeolus Air Charter. Frost, and all mention of Honolulu, was now out of the discussion. In January 2021 the request for name change from Royal Hawaiian to Aeolus Air Charter was formally submitted by Fly Compliant.
In the months that followed there were several requests to the FAA to approve the training program and speed up the certification process. On May 12, Ventrella sent Mosher an email castigating the FAA for repeated delays noting that the aircraft owner, who he referred to as Ryan Thomas, was “ready to pull out”. Ventrella insisted “The company is doing everything to demonstrate our ability to be a safe operator.”
On July 13 the certificate was issued; the Challenger crashed less than two weeks later. In their later comments to investigators Jadwin and Ventrella both insisted that as the flight was operated under Part 91, De La Rosa was solely responsible for operational control, including the incorrect flight manifest. Yanagi said he did not know the flight was happening nor if it was Part 91 or Part 135. He only knew about flights on the Premier. Less than a year later, Yanagi was replaced as chief pilot.
In his July 2021 retrospective memo, Mosher noted that none of the company’s management had any Part 135 experience. It was Fly Compliant, he wrote, that “kept the certificate moving.”
The Aftermath
The NTSB hosted a case study and panel discussion about the Truckee accident at the National Business Aviation Association conference in 2023. It focused primarily on issues in the cockpit with some discussion of contract pilots and crews with no common training experience. As former NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt stated in an interview last November however, the reason for formal accident investigations is “to find out what happened, so that we can prevent it from happening again”. In this case, focusing too much on the cockpit misses the many safety issues presented by the ever-increasing grey area between Part 135 and Part 91 operations.
Right now, everything that put the Challenger crew together in a cockpit where they knew almost nothing about each others professional background and capabilities, and where a vastly less experienced pilot was placed in the PIC position, is perfectly legal and even commonplace in Part 91. Reliably effective crew resource management is problematic in these situations yet the FAA has not adapted to such realities. Further, the flight’s failure to be investigated as a Part 135 was based on descriptions of the relationship between Ryan Thomas and Aeolus that relied on statements from Aeolus management. In the docket there is no evidence that the NTSB asked for, or referenced, any corporate document or lease agreement to support the veracity of a formal partnership. The nebulous definitions of “compensation” and “benefit” are also doing a lot of work in how the NTSB verifies a Part 91 classification.
Ryan Thomas’s mother, Marlene Thomas, filed a lawsuit against Jadwin, Ventrella and Aeolus in January 2022. Among other things, she alleges that the flight was an illegal charter and that Ryan Thomas was not a business partner or officer of the company.
Dave Ventrella is no longer director of operations and filed a lawsuit against Conner Jadwin in January 2024 alleging breach of contract. Ventrella claims the two men had an oral agreement whereby Jadwin owned 51% of the company and Ventrella 49%. Ventrella asserts he purchased stock shares in the company in March 2020 but later discovered he was not listed as a partner in corporate documents nor did the stock purchase he paid for actually occur.
As of April, both lawsuits were ongoing.
Aeolus Air Charters is now known as Let’s Jett with Conner Jadwin as CEO. In a 2023 article with AIN, he aimed for a high safety standard, telling the publication “You rarely worry about safety when you get on a commercial airliner and that’s what we aspire to for our on-demand charter customers.”
Upcoming newsletters planned on Elizabeth Knowlton, (a cool mountaineer I’m low-key obsessed with), the lingering questions about the 1988 crash of Ryan Air flight 103 in AK, medevac accident statistics in the US, my continued wait on research documents from Princeton, and finally how NTSB investigators analyze human factors which can lead to some assumptions I’m not comfortable with.
The wreckage site photo is courtesy the NTSB. The accident record is #WPR21FA286. You can input that number to access the docket here.