Expert Suspects Engine Problem Likely Cause of Butler Plane Crash That Killed 12
The plane that crashed Sunday at Butler Memorial Airport, killing 11 skydivers and a pilot, did not appear to be overloaded or too old to be used for such activities, a former DOT inspector general told The Star.
“As planes that are used for skydiving go, so often what you find is that they’re working with very old planes,” said Mary Schiavo, who served as U.S. Department of Transportation inspector general from 1990 to 1996.
“As planes go, this is not geriatric yet. We wouldn’t call this ‘tired iron.’ My first guess would be there was a problem with the engine.”
Bates County authorities said the crash occurred during takeoff and was reported about 11:27 a.m. The plane, a Pacific Aerospace single-engine turboprop built in 2010, was a locally-based aircraft. The Butler airport is about an hour’s drive south of Kansas City.
Schiavo, who also once served as an assistant U.S. attorney in Kansas City, called the crash “heartbreaking” and “terribly tragic.”
“The first time I heard about it, they said that it appeared that they had lost power, lost thrust, and I thought, ‘Oh boy, engine failure on takeoff with a fully loaded plane — that’s hard,’” she said.
She said though the plane was registered as a 10-person aircraft, that doesn’t ordinarily include the two spots for the pilot and co-pilot.
“With no more people on board than seats, my first guess would not be that it was overloaded,” she said. “If they use this regularly for skydiving, they would know that they had the weight properly distributed and balanced. So if they had done the proper weight and balance, unless for some reason they had a bunch of cargo on there, they should have been OK.”
A ‘pretty typical’ skydiving aircraft
Schiavo said the plane is a “pretty typical” aircraft for skydiving.
“And that engine, Pratt & Whitney, the PT6A-34, that’s not a lawn mower engine, that’s powerful enough for the plane,” she said. “It shouldn’t have been underpowered with an engine like that.”
Schiavo noted that authorities said the plane wasn’t getting enough power on takeoff.
“So it very easily could have had an engine failure,” she said.
An official with the Bates County Emergency Management Agency said the plane was turning left when it stalled near Interstate 49 Business, a local road that runs between Interstate 49 and the airport.
If the plane turned, Schiavo said, “that presents a problem.”
“Literally, from your first week of flight school, you’re trained what to do if you lose the engine,” she said. “And ordinarily, you put the nose down, and if you’re not very high off the ground, look for places to put it down for an emergency landing.”
By turning, she said, “You can unintentionally stall the plane, because it’s hard to do a coordinated turn when you don’t have the right amount of power and thrust.”
“What probably happened is the plane winged over and stalled,” she said, “and that’s usually what happens when you’re getting into a stall — one wing goes up, one wing goes down, and then you nose in.”
During such an emergency, Schiavo said, there’s a loss of situational awareness.
“You get so tied up in trying to address the problem that you don’t pay attention to all the other things that are going on,” she said. “There should have been a stall warning horn going off, and that would have said, ‘Oh, you’re going to stall, get the nose down, if that was going on.’
“So I’m sure that the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) will be looking at what was the response to the emergency, because it does seem like, at this early stage of the process, something was wrong with the plane.”
Investigators also will look into whether there was a problem with the fuel, Schiavo said.
“They look at absolutely everything,” she said. “For example, could the fuel be contaminated? The fire would have burned all the fuel, but they will go back to the last place of fueling and find out.”
No black boxes in smaller planes
Aircraft like the one in Sunday’s crash don’t have black boxes, Schiavo said.
“You can have a rudimentary version,” she said. “It records, but almost no one does on small planes. But you could opt for that equipment, sure.”
Schiavo was not surprised to hear that authorities said there was no air traffic control in use at the time of the crash.
“Unfortunately, that’s not unusual, especially since it looked like from the pictures I saw, a nice, clear day, and you’re allowed to operate without being under air traffic control and instrument flight rules, particularly if you’re taking a crew out to go skydiving,” she said. “Air traffic control is not going to wait around while you’re finding a spot.”
Schiavo also said the weather didn’t appear to be a factor. Sunday morning was clear and relatively cool, with a temperature of 73 degrees and winds out of the north at about 15 mph at the time of the crash.
The Federal Aviation Administration does not keep separate statistics for skydiving operations that would indicate the degree of risk involved, Schiavo said.
“So, a lot of the stories are apocryphal,” she said. “Obviously, the planes have to be inspected, they have to be airworthy, they have to go through their annual inspection. But there’s just a lot more things that can go wrong with skydiving, not to mention the least of which is you have the exit from the plane, and you’re flying around with an open door.
“I’ve done it when I was much, much, much younger,” she said of skydiving. “But it is very sobering because there’s just a lot of moving parts.”
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