The crumpled Bonanza lay in a field of corn stubble. The eastern Colorado terrain was flat for miles around. It was hard to see how even a complete loss of power should have led to anything worse than a little scraped metal, but evidently the airplane was out of control when it hit the ground. It had cartwheeled before coming to rest, its cabin crushed. Its two occupants died: the owner of the airplane, a nonpilot who had bought it three days before, and an instructor who was taking him to a business meeting that day and intended, in the future, to teach him to fly his newly acquired machine.
The log of the instructor pilot, 35, showed 467 total hours. Pilots who had flown with him, including the seller of the accident airplane, had only praise for his flying. But his experience level in Bonanzas is unclear: The National Transportation Safety Board’s report on the accident states (at different points on the same page) that he had two and a half hours or 131 hours in the make and model of the accident airplane. In another location, however, it refers to his “limited experience” in Bonanzas.
