Minneapolis Star Tribune: Investigators Sift Through Debris for Clues to Cause of Minnesota Plane Crash
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Investigators sift through debris for clues to cause of Minnesota plane crash (Ladd Sanger comments on weather-related factors)
By Bill McAuliffe, Joy Powell and Rodrigo Zamith
Minneapolis Star Tribune
A slick runway. An unexpected tailwind. A fast-moving jet and two pilots facing split-second decisions.
All may have converged Thursday morning to cause what looked to be a normal landing to turn into the deadliest plane crash in Minnesota in years.
While investigators are taking a hard look at everything to determine why the corporate jet crashed, several experienced pilots and aviation experts said Friday that unstable weather that passed through southern Minnesota early Thursday may have put the plane into a precarious situation.
Extremely high winds that blew through Owatonna just before 9 a.m. Thursday had moved on, and the skies were clearing, but the pilots were still being warned that there were storm cells only 5 miles away. A severe thunderstorm warning also was still in effect over the Rochester, Minn., area, 40 miles to the east.
"The decision to proceed in the bad weather, with a short runway that is wet and landing with a tailwind, that's starting to set up a series of mistakes and poor judgment calls that led to the accident," said Ladd Sanger, an Austin, Texas, pilot and attorney who has handled airplane crash litigation internationally.
The pilots "didn't have much margin for error," Sanger said.
The two pilots and six passengers on board were killed when the charter flight from Atlantic City, N.J., crashed in a cornfield 500 feet from the end of the runway at about 9:40 a.m. The plane was delivering six East Coast executives to a meeting with Viracon Inc., a nationally known glass manufacturer based in Owatonna, Minn.
Investigators for the National Transportation Safety Board said Friday that it was too early to cite a cause of the crash.
Steven Chealander, an NTSB member, said it may take up to a year before investigators determine what happened.
"We're looking at the weather," he said. "We're looking at the airplane. We're looking at the flight crews. We're looking at all aspects to find the cause."
Witnesses who saw the plane touch down said it appeared to be on its way to a safe landing when it suddenly accelerated and went airborne, then twisted and crashed into a nearby cornfield.
The reports suggest the plane either overshot the runway, or was going too fast when it landed, making it likely it would go off the runway before stopping. The attempt to take off again was likely foiled by a lack of speed.
"He was rolling down the runway, just like normal," said Brian Mechura, 31, a welder at the airport who saw the plane try to land.
Mechura said the plane "got down to the end of the runway and I heard him throttle up. And I thought he was hitting the reversers, but he just lifted off, and the right wing just kind of hung down - and the tip must have dragged, or the left engine overpowered, and pushed the nose right into the ground."
Sanger, who examined all the publicly available flight and weather information on Thursday, said the weather conditions appeared risky enough that the pilots should have avoided southern Minnesota altogether.
Typically, a pilot tries to land into the wind. Because of the severe thunderstorms and high winds that had been in the area about 45 minutes earlier, the pilots may have approached the runway with extra speed to deal with surprise gusts, Sanger said. The plane may have tried to land too far down the runway as well, making it "short," he added.
Instead, a tailwind estimated at 3 to 10 miles per hour materialized and likely pushed the plane too far down the runway to land safely. By then, Sanger and other observers said, it may have been too late to stop and too late to take off again.
A 25-year-old FAA guideline warns pilots not to fly within 20 miles of severe thunderstorms. On their approach, however, the pilots were warned by an air traffic controller of storm cells only 5 miles from the airport. An FAA spokeswoman said pilots should be aware of FAA and other guidelines, but that the pilots are the final authority on when and where to fly their planes.
Owatonna's airport is one of at least 24 in Minnesota with runways of 5,000 feet or longer. A 3,000-foot crosswind runway is under construction.
Airport Manager Dave Beaver said Friday that planes the size of the 10-passenger, Raytheon Hawker 800 that crashed fly "routinely" into the airport. He added that the 5,500-foot runway where the pilot tried to land his plane was long enough to accommodate the landing.
"It's a good business line," Beaver said.
Elizabeth Isham Cory, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration, which tracks accidents, incidents and enforcement actions involving licensed pilots, said Friday that the pilots - Clark Keefer, 40, of Bethlehem, Pa., and Dan D'Ambrosio, 27, of Hellertown, Pa. - had no recorded flying violations.
"He was a very good pilot," William Keefer, 63, said of his son. "Very professional - he wouldn't play around."
Keefer confirmed that his son was piloting the plane at the time of the crash. D'Ambrosio was the co-pilot, he said.
George Doughty, director of Lehigh Valley International Airport in Allentown, Pa., where the flight originated, said he did not know the pilots. But he said the company they worked for, East Coast Jets, was a "first-class company and a first-class group of people. It's just really tough."
As team of 14 NTSB investigators, along with officials from the FAA and FBI, interviewed witnesses and combed through the cornfield northwest of the airport searching for clues amid the debris, the airport reopened to all flights Friday.
Meanwhile, community leaders expressed condolences. By midday all six passengers had been publicly identified by their employers.
"Our hearts and prayers go out to the families from our citizens of Owatonna," Mayor Tom Kuntz said. "It's a tragic loss."
(Minneapolis Star Tribune staff writers Richard Meryhew and Jenna Ross contributed to this report.)
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