Slack & Davis attorney Ladd Sanger's comments included below.

September 6, 2008

Crash report offers few clues

By Samantha Arnold
St. George Daily Spectrum (St. George, UT)

CEDAR CITY - The National Transportation Safety Board has released a preliminary report regarding the Aug. 22 plane crash near Moab that killed 10 Cedar City residents.

Although no definitive results were reported, no evidence of an in-flight structural failure was found.

Bridget Serchak, NTSB public information officer, said it will be another year before investigators release the final report on the accident.

A probable cause report will be released soon thereafter, she said.

"This is just one of those 'here are the facts" types of reports," she said.

According to the report, the right wing of the Twin Engine King Air 100 aircraft impacted on the upslope side of hilly terrain about 1.2 miles southeast of the Canyonlands Airport in Moab.

A propeller blade from the right engine propeller was found in some debris near where the plane initially hit the ground, according to the report.

The engine and propeller assemblies have not yet been investigated, but will be examined at a later date, according to the report.

Ladd Sanger, aviation attorney for the law firm Slack & Davis in Dallas, said he has worked on about 10 cases involving King Air 100 plane accidents, and is also a licensed commercial airplane pilot.

Sanger said there could be several possibilities as to what happened to make the plane crash, but said based on his knowledge of the incident, it could have been contributing factors of too much weight and altitude and temperature conditions at the airport.

"The number of people on board raises an eye," he said. "It could have been overweight when it took off."

The King Air 100 seats 10 passengers and nine were on board at the time of takeoff, he said. The passengers' weight in addition to reserve fuel, baggage and equipment, could have caused the aircraft to become slightly overweight.

"It cuts down the safety margin," he said.

The NTSB does not speculate on any of the accidents investigated, Serchak said.

The factual and probable cause reports will take such a long time to be released because there are thousands of these types of accidents per year with only so many NTSB investigators, she said.

Serchak said this particular accident had the most fatalities for the size of the plane so far this year.

"This is one of the worst I have seen this year," she said.