On January 4, 2007, at about 8:30 p.m. EST, a Cessna 182P with three aboard left Newport News, Virginia, for Columbia, South Carolina. Rain and fog were forecast for Columbia, and the pilot, a 7,200-hour ATP, had filed an IFR flight plan earlier in the evening. The right-seat passenger, himself an instrument-rated commercial pilot and flight instructor, had called a friend in Columbia shortly before taking off and had expressed concern about the predicted fog.
The forecast proved accurate. When the 182 approached Columbia at 11:15, both of the city's airports were near or below minimums with intermittent rain, low overcasts and mist. Owens Downtown, the flight's destination and home base, had a 100-foot overcast with visibility fluctuating between three-quarters and one-and-a-half miles; Columbia Metro reported 200 feet and half a mile.
The pilot first attempted a localizer approach to Runway 31 at Owens. The MDA for the approach is 660 feet. He crossed Hidee intersection, five miles from the runway, at 1,300 feet, 500 feet below the published minimum crossing altitude, and called a missed approach at 400 feet. The controller's radar displayed a Minimum Safe Altitude Warning (MSAW) alert during much of the approach, but the controller said nothing to the pilot.
The missed approach procedure calls for a climbing left turn to hold at the VOR at 2,000 feet; the pilot, however, turned right. The controller instructed him to climb to 2,100 feet. "We may as well come over and spend the night with you," the pilot joked, meaning that he would try to land at Metropolitan, his flight-planned alternate.
"Hope you're still on a heading of 310 on the localizer there," said the controller. "Don't get too far to the north, I don't know what's out there at that altitude." The pilot, who flew for the local construction company that had recently purchased the 182, probably did know that there were no obstacles higher than 1,000 feet msl in the vicinity.
While vectoring the 182 to the Runway 11 ILS at Metro, the controller issued a transmission to all aircraft: "Tower visibility at the Metro airport is down to half a mile, we should be getting some new weather shortly." Two minutes later he broadcast the new ATIS: "Visibility one half in mist, ceiling 200 overcast, temperature 17, dew point 17, wind 130 at five, altimeter 3010."
At 11:32 the 182 was four miles from the outer marker. "Turn left 140," the controller said, "maintain 2,100 until established on the localizer, cleared ILS Runway 11 approach, maintain forward speed to the outer marker."
"Okay, 140, 2.1 until established, cleared ILS 11 and we'll hustle it along," replied the pilot.
Half a minute later, the controller amended the heading instruction to 150 degrees. At this point, according to recorded radar data, the aircraft was over Murry, the outer marker, and was making 104 knots groundspeed on a heading of 101 degrees. He was at 1,700 feet, several hundred feet below the crossing altitude, and again the MSAW alert illuminated on the controller's scope. It remained on for the duration of the approach, but the controller said nothing to the pilot about it, merely instructing him to switch to the tower frequency.
The 182 disappeared from tower radar about a mile west of the runway threshold as it approached a large, densely wooded area. Ground searchers, hampered by dense fog and vegetation, could not locate the airplane until the next morning, when a state police helicopter spotted the wreckage three-quarters of a mile from the runway. The 182 must have been at an altitude of about 320 feet msl-the runway is at 236 feet and the surrounding terrain is level-when its right wing struck the top of a 90-foot tree.
Both front-seat pilots, as well as the back-seat passenger, lost their lives in the accident.
The airplane had been purchased by the pilot's employer only two days before the accident. Its last annual inspection had taken place 10 weeks earlier, and the airplane had flown 16.5 hours since then. Previously, it had been lightly used. Manufactured in 1979, it had received a zero-time engine at 2,110 hours in 1992. It then apparently sat idle for 13 years before flying 156 hours in the two-year period that ended with the fatal crash.
