Reply #10: I still cannot find the report itself but here is [View All]

[truedelphi]

The email I received from the man I knewe who was a highly experienced pilot. Here is what he said when he read my notes on the crash, and the NTSB preliminary report. (My notes were phone alls to people in Eveleth, and news clippings from major newspapers regarding the facts fo the crash)


11 November 2002


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You passed along the info about the plane that went down carrying Paul Wellstone. Sorry to take so long to respond. I needed to do a little research.... I am not a pilot. I’ve been hiring pilots and small craft in my work for 30 years. In the time I’ve been in almost every kind of small craft made, from Piper Cubs and Cessna 172s (a bit scary) to Lears, King Airs and jet helicopters.

I’ll keep this short, but some details of this class of plane (Beechcraft A100) are worth noting. They have the best avionics in the business, as good, though smaller, than commercial airliners. They also usually have black boxes because of the “caliber” of customer they carry, i.e., the very rich. The A100 is not only one of the most reliable in the air, they are complicated enough to require extensive checkout before every flight and the maintenance is rigorous, not just for safety reasons but also because they cost as much as a mansion. This is not a plane that goes down in freezing rain.

Which leads to the next part. Visibility and conditions were not an issue in this accident. A pilot cannot fly this plane without an IFR (instrument) rating and thousands of hours of experience. IFR rating means the plane can be landed completely on instruments with no visibility at all—fog, freezing rain, driving snow, etc. Wellstone’s plane had two such pilots, which is unusual in itself. Not to say that weather not does sometimes present unworkable conditions—it does. But that’s where the pilot’s judgment comes in. Along with the 200 or so small craft I have flown in, I also got to know as many pilots, and they are not chance-takers, with the exception of some hotdog rich guys with their own planes (who account for the majority of real accidents)—that kind doesn’t get hired to fly important people anywhere. In fact they can’t fly for hire anyway because they would have to go through some additional rigorous training and most of them don’t.

On every flight I have chartered I have gone with the pilot(s) through the preflight checkout and asked a mess of technical questions. I tell them upfront I want a technical flight with all the explanation they can muster. My respect for both their skills and their good sense couldn’t be any greater. At rock bottom, they want to get home safely as much as I do and they just don’t take risks, especially when so many alternatives are available with IFR, even in remote places like northern Minnesota. They would have redirected right away if the weather looked like too much to handle, and they would have told their passengers that it was the only safe thing to do.

Two last small pieces—ice and freezing rain do not set planes on fire. The fact that they were clocked turning away from the chosen airstrip says that something else waved them off. The NTSB investigators (actual voices on the radio today) went to great lengths to emphasize that a “severe” fire had begun after impact. In fact, that’s about all they had to say, other than describing a crash perimeter that was preposterously small for serious investigation.

There was mention of witnesses who saw the plane on fire on the way down, but they were neither identified nor repeated later in the day. Plain and simple, based on my every experience with dedicated pilots and precision aircraft, planes like the A100 do not catch fire in spotty, wet weather and two experienced pilots are extremely unlikely to agree to fly under conditions they can’t control. They were not suicide bombers. This plane was destroyed intentionally from afar.

http://www.coastalpost.com/03/05/06.htm
They hang the man and flog the woman
That steal the goose from off the common,
But let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose.


"America is a quarter of a billion people totally misinformed and disinformed by their government. This is tragic but our media is -- I wouldn't even say corrupt -- it's just beyond telling us anything that the government doesn't want us to know." Gore Vidal