Tragedy at a Flight School
You may have read the articles in your local papers or seen it on the national news. A local flight school here in South Florida had suffered three fatal accidents in a span of five months, and the Congressmen from the area have gotten involved in petitioning the FAA to close them down. To the FAA’s credit they would not be pushed into making a determination or taking an action against the part 141 flight school that specializes in foreign students, until they completed their own investigation. Some of the local papers threw the school under the bus after the second fatal accident back in January, and solicited and printed a lot of bad information from disgruntled flight instructors of that school. To further exacerbate a bad situation, they took quotes out of context from the NTSB preliminary report to support their position that poor maintenance was the primary cause of one of the accidents.
The accident in January was a mid air between a solo student and a light twin on an instrument flight plan landing at a nearby airport. A few months before that, two students and an instructor crashed at night just a few miles from the airport. The final NTSB report isn’t out on this accident either, but they found the fuel selector selected to an empty tank. This type of accident is more common than you might think, especially with high wing trained pilots transitioning to a low wing aircraft where fuel tank selection is required. These two events got the local F.S.D.O. to send a team of inspectors up to the school to examine their operation. It is safe to say that they found no glaring issues or an emergency revocation of their 141 certificate would have followed, and the flight school continued to operate. Last week, the Chief pilot for that same school was involved in a fatal accident in a Cessna 172, killing two Florida Atlantic University students and an employee of that institution while out looking at migratory bird nesting patterns. This type of work is common here in Florida. My former business partner used to have a contract with Florida Department of Fish and Game to count alligator nests from a helicopter. But this particular accident was a true tragedy.
The owner of the flight school, who was also the Chief Pilot, was an affable young man with a young family. I had met him a number of times and always found him to be pleasant to deal with. But when you read the NTSB preliminary report it is obvious that the accident aircraft was between 300 and 400 lbs over gross weight, nearly 15% over the maximum certified gross weight. Eyewitnesses put the aircraft at 200 to 250 feet above the ground just before impact. Post crash investigation had the flaps at about 15 degrees down, consistent with a slow flight configuration. The report further stated that the engine had 75 hours on it since overhaul and no mention of mechanical failure appeared in the report. So what compels an otherwise capable pilot to fly an aircraft significantly over gross, very low to the ground? I don’t know. I understand they had done this trip several times before. I suspect that while low and slow, the pilot either slipped the plane to one side or the other or banked the aircraft to afford the observers a better view of something on the ground and the overloaded Cessna entered an accelerated stall, with not enough altitude to recover.
The short term ramification of this accident is that I am sure the school will close. Either voluntarily or by order, but one way or another it will close. The long term ramifications include a large black eye for the flight training industry. You would think that it isn’t necessary to even say that the Chief Pilot of a flight school needs to display exemplary judgment, if for no other reason than to set an example for the instructors and students he is responsible for. In the flight school world we live in, many instructors are young men and women on their way to a career in aviation. How can we expect them to act responsibly when those of us who are supposed to be the role models, the parapets of regulatory compliance, scoff at something as fundamental as a published aircraft limitation? I do not want to pick on this individual since he has already paid the ultimate price. But there are other regulatory issues with this flight as well. What message does this behavior send to his instructors and students? What habits does it create that these aviators will take with them to their next job? We as instructors need to emphasize the need to make every attempt to comply with regulations and limitations. Reinforce the concept that a limitation is an absolute, not subject to individual interpretation. Further we need to reinforce the fact that aviation is not a very forgiving avocation–not forgiving of poor judgment, poor technique or a poor attitude. Whether you fly a Lear Jet or a Cessna 172, an airplane can and will kill you if you allow it to. Instructors have the responsibility to instill respect for the machine, as well as the regulations, in our students. As airmen, we must keep in mind that general aviation has a huge public relations issue and every time a pilot does something as visible as this and the root cause can be determined to be pilot indifference to the regulations, it gives the media more fodder with which to pummel our collective credibility.
By Michael Leighton, email: av8tor0414@aol.com