Jet to Pick Up Elder Bush Was Warned

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HOUSTON - The pilot of a private jet was warned the plane was flying low minutes before it crashed en route to a scheduled landing in Houston to pick up former President Bush (news - web sites), a federal investigator said Tuesday.

An investigation is under way to find out what caused the Gulfstream G-1159A jet to go down Monday morning, killing a crew of three. The plane, which belonged to Jet Place Inc. of Tulsa, Okla., left Dallas an hour earlier and was to have picked up Bush, who lives in Houston, for a trip to Ecuador to give a speech at a business conference.

Mark Rosenker, vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said the control tower at Hobby Airport told crew members about three minutes before landing that winds were calm and their runway was clear.

"The controller talked with the aircraft approximately two minutes before the accident and asked them to check their altitude because they saw them at somewhere approximately 400 feet," said Rosenker.

It was not immediately known if the crew responded, NTSB officials said.
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041123/ap_on_re_us/jet_crash

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. Altimeter set incorrectly?

Anybody know whether this type of Gulfstream has GPWS?

[purduejake]

12. YES, it did have GPWS

"Whoop Whoop, Pull Up, Pull Up." I've heard that a few times in my jet training on the ANCIENT Boeing 727 simulator. Turbine aircraft must have have the Ground Proximity Warning Systems... even turboprops are required to have them, let alone a luxury business jet. It would be highly unlikely if the system was turned off. If the weather was clear, I cannot imagine what could have gone wrong... it would fly even if one of it's turbines exploded. Maybe it was windshear or microburst if there was a storm in the area? Those can easily take down any aircraft. It will be interesting to see what the investigation finds.

[Algorem]

2. on the 41st November 22nd after JFK killed,41st President almost killed

[LisaL]

3. Bush wasn't "almost killed". He was nowhere near that plane

when it crashed.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

4. It was on its way to pick him up.

I don't see a conspiracy here. It may have been something as simple as a mis-set or inaccurate altimeter, which could have caused them to fly lower than they thought they were.

[Algorem]

5. It missed him by THIS much.

[7th_Sephiroth]

6. bush WAS on that plane

he sabotaged it and parachuted out

[rooboy]

7. Just like he did in WWII. :) n/t

[7th_Sephiroth]

8. only this time

HE sprayed the cockpit with bullets

[kohodog]

9. My Hero

[Pale_Rider]

10. Patricide?

Maybe something went off (the Carnahan/Wellstone treatment) on the plane before it should have?

[imaginary girl]

11. Or maybe it was just a warning ... (n/t)

[bin.dare]

28. so papa bush did not take his trip afterall. why not?

did he heed the warning ?

[Liberal In Texas]

13. Gulfstream II owned by Jet Place of Tulsa

She went down in fog.

Very pervasive in the last week or so here in Texas.

She left Love in Dallas after a refuel and when she approached Houston Hobby she was 400 feet below glide. The tower warned the crew she was low.

The jet's wing and the landing gear on the right side clipped a 120-foot tall light pole on a road about 3 1/4 miles south of the runway. The normal altitude for a jet at that point would have been 1,000 feet.

The Gulfstream then came apart. Apprently she hit low, and skidded into Beltway 8, a tollway.

(Despite all the movies we see, when a plane hits something like this, it pretty much falls apart.)

The wreckage damaged serveral cars, no one was seriously injured. The aircraft never made the runway.

Three crew dead. The pilot was 67 and the co-pilot 62 and both had 19,000 hours of flight experience. A flight attendant also died in the crash.

Why she was so low in obvious IFR conditions probably won't be found out for months.

What a shame.

[daleo]

14. There was a warning involved all right

Someone was warning someone. I don't believe in a coincidence in this case.

[pa28]

15. Bad pilot. That's all. n/t

[Liberal In Texas]

16. Bad Pilot?

Really?

And in how many hours in what kind of aircraft make you a bloody expert?

We will NOT KNOW until the NTSB gets done in a year or so.


If you'd like more instruction on the subject, let me know...P

[DulceDecorum]

17. What is really amazing

is the idea that the NSTB is to be allowed to investigate this crash.

The last few major aviation accidents have been smothered by the FBI.

[Liberal In Texas]

20. Dulce...

Yes, the NTSB does a very nice job.

Don't try to read too many conspiracies into this coincidence that Bush sr. was going to be the passenger.

There are too many other things rotten around the Buushies that we should worry about.

[pa28]

18. Looks that way to me.

But, if you have time in a G2 or any other jet I'll defer.

As a pilot who spends a considerable amount of time reading NTSB reports I have yet to see one under similar circumstances that did not end up fingering the pilot. It's possible a microburst might have caused it but considering the fact it was foggy that seems unlikely.

[Liberal In Texas]

19. So...

...you're a pilot?

I'm not a G2. I'm helicopter.

But to ASSUME it PE is stupid at this point, and I would think that you would agree. ...Being a pilot!

[pa28]

21. Try this site.

http://www.ntsb.gov/aviation/aviation.htm

There are some good synopses where you can research similar accidents (fixed wing) and write a more contextual answer to my previous post.

I'll also take you up on that flight instruction. It might help boost your post count out of the teens. :)

[Liberal In Texas]

22. Pilot error...maybe...but....

Thanks for the link, I've been there many times.

I know that we who are rotor-heads do not seem like we should know about fixed accidents. I've lost many friends in helicopter and airplane accidents. Hence my guard

It always looks like pilot error. Initially.

Yes, it is sometimes...

But please. Don't always assume it's the pilot...

Yes, I've lost friends. Friends who plowed into power lines (Leo G..-can't spell his last name right now-) had just given a lecture on avoiding power lines at a seminar in Oklahoma. He preceded to go back home to Colorado and ran above the mountains and below the clouds flat out in a JetRanger and hit lines overhanging a valley that killed himself and his photog.

I've also had 2 friends killed because of bad maintenance. In West Texas.

Sky4 was picking up food for the crew on the ground (what a great job) and the AC unit in the 206 failed. It compromised the rotor system. Meaning that the main stopped. It dropped the chopper enough to kill, Ervin Patrick (chief pilot) and Buster McGregor (operations manager) just after a live broadcast for our newscast in Dallas.

They blamed Ervin for awhile. "He flew into cross winds in west Texas. The chopper couldn't handle it." etc. etc....ya da ya...

BS....the chopper was DOOMED, after the mechanics got to it. There was a time bomb sitting next to the main rotor system, and nobody knew it.

I saw the chopper before it left on it's trip out west. Lone Star (the company that owned the chopper) wanted a new one. But channel 4 in Dallas wouldn't authorize that. So they repainted and reconditioned the elderly helicopter and sent her on her way.
All new paint. Smelling nice with worn leather seats.

Lone Star was trying to be so accommodating. They threw a party at their hangar for the TV people. I, of course showed up being one of them, and an aviation nut.

Ervin and I took to each other. We wandered over to a dark part of the hangar and looked mostly at a twin engine Medi-vac type chopper.
Ervin was desperate to fly her. She was huge, you could probably put ten people behind her bulkheads.

Anyway, we hit it off and wended back over to the JetRanger that SKY 4 was emblazoned on. She was small. But she was still pretty cool. A jet chopper that one of the major TV stations "owned". My TV station. And he was pretty proud to be the pilot for channel 4. Short skids. He got into her like crawling into a sports car. Of course, he would be flying her tomorrow.

We made a deal that I was to take lessons (as I wanted to learn to fly helicopters pretty badly in '84) when he got back. Lessons in a turbine chopper, and just for the price of the fuel...sweet.

He never came back.


....sorry about the spelling and the lateness....but it brought back a bunch of old memories...)

[saigon68]

23. Sad Story

The rush to fly on the cheap is the cause of the inevitable rush to fall out of the sky and be dead.

[Liberal In Texas]

24. Yes, Sad

Didn't mean to make it a downer.

But sometimes, the pilot is doing everythig he's supposed to do, and something else goes wrong. But they still blame him. Sometimes just automatically.

It's not always PILOT ERROR. That's all I'm saying.

[pa28]

29. You'll find quite a few pilots here at DU.

Always good to have another aboard. :toast:

[Name removed]

25. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[RivetJoint]

26. Why?

[Sideways]

27. Wow RivetJoint Gonna Call The FBI Or Somethin?

This kind of behavior on DU is insulting and rude. Grow up.