Early in the morning of Christmas Eve in 2017, dense ground fog covered some parts of central Florida. The sky above was clear and the forecast called for the fog to burn off by 9 a.m.
Sometime before 7 a.m., the pilot-owner of a Cessna 340 asked the Bartow Municipal Airport FBO where he hangared the airplane to tow it out to the ramp edge, so that he would not have to taxi among parked airplanes in the fog. The pilot and four passengers—his two daughters, the husband of one and a friend—were already seated in the airplane when two linemen towed it out and, at the pilot’s request, wiped condensation from the windshield with a towel. They then watched as he started the engines and taxied very slowly away into the mist.
