The pilot, 43, was a Baptist pastor. He had a wife and five children. His private certificate was so fresh that the plastic card had not yet come in the mail.
He had devoted his flying to his life’s mission of “church planting,” that is, establishing new congregations in obedience to the “Great Commission” of Matthew 28: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations…” A director of the Southern Baptist North American Mission Board, he apparently collaborated with the International Mission Board. He had a reservation on a flight from Baltimore to Europe on January 13, 2023.
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On the afternoon of January 12, he was in Canton, Georgia (KCNI), having arrived in his Cherokee PA-28-180 four days earlier. From Canton back to Stafford, Virginia (KRMN), his home field, would be a four-hour flight.
He appeared at the FBO where his airplane was parked at 4 p.m. EST. It was pouring rain. He mentioned to the line supervisor that he was a new pilot. The supervisor suggested that he talk with the office manager, an ASEL private pilot who had been flying for 20 years. He told her that he needed to get to the Washington, D.C., area for an international flight.
“I would not take off in this weather,” she told him. “It’s too dangerous. How experienced are you, and what kind of airplane are you flying?”
“I’m a relatively new pilot, and it’s a Cherokee. But it should be fine after this rain passes, right?”
“How much night experience do you have? Because it’ll be dark soon.”
“I’m OK.”
“I still would not go until daylight and this system has passed. I would get a hotel tonight and go out in the morning.”
“What time do you open?”
“6 a.m.”
“OK.”
At this point, the pilot went to the FBO’s front desk, where the customer service agent made a hotel reservation for him. The reservation was nonrefundable, but he said he didn’t mind. She gave him the airport gate code in case he wanted to leave in the morning before the FBO opened. He thanked her and left in his rented car.
Later in the evening, after the FBO had closed and everyone had gone home, the pilot returned to the airport. It was a moonless night and the rain had abated. The automated weather observation reported instrument conditions, with a 900-foot broken ceiling and 1 mile visibility in mist.
He added 27 gallons of fuel to the Cherokee from the self-serve pump and took off at 8:05 p.m. The Cherokee climbed northeastward for several minutes, weaving left and right. It then made a sudden turn of more than 90 degrees to the right—was this a momentary impulse to return to Canton, or just a maneuver to avoid a cloud?—followed by a slight correction to the left and then a wide turn back to a northeastward heading. It continued steadily on that heading, climbing to 7,500 feet, for several minutes more. It then entered an area of showers.
Up to this point, the pilot must have had some kind of visual references to help him stay upright. But now he evidently lost the external cues. The airplane began the random, erratic descending turns to the left and right that are the telltale mark of a disoriented pilot and the infallible predictor of what will come next. Between the last ADS-B return and the one before it, the Cherokee lost 2,100 feet in 15 seconds. A witness on the ground heard the airplane’s engine and saw its lights spiraling vertically earthward. It had been airborne for 14 minutes.
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At 11 a.m. on the day of the accident, the pilot had obtained a ForeFlight briefing for a proposed departure time of 5 p.m. It showed a mix of VFR, marginal VFR, and IFR conditions along his route. As far as National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigators could determine, he did not get a later briefing. If he had, it would have recommended against VFR flight. But then, so did the office manager, and the pilot paid no heed.
Obviously, he felt himself to be under pressure not to miss his flight to Europe the next day. The office manager was a more experienced pilot than he, and since she was reading him the generally approved gospel of caution he probably did not feel himself in a position to argue.
But did he intend all along to return to the airport after the advocate of caution had left? Or was he torn by inability to decide what to do? Did he accept the nonrefundable hotel reservation because he really intended to stay the night, or because to insist on a refundable reservation would have revealed that he was still half-thinking he might take off? His actions and language, as reported by the people with whom he interacted, were ambiguous. He appeared prepared to stay, but as soon as nobody was looking he returned to leave.
He was a deeply religious man. Did he perhaps pray for guidance, and believe that the Lord would look after him? We can’t know his mind. The NTSB’s finding of probable cause merely cites the pilot’s decision to launch a VFR flight into night instrument conditions that he had neither the skill nor the experience to deal with. It does not explicitly mention self-induced pressure or the lack of timely planning.
In the course of two years prior to getting his PPL, the pilot had logged 171 hours. In seven weeks since passing the check ride, he had flown another 32 hours, 10 of them at night. His log reflected 3.7 hours of simulated instruments and 4.4 hours of night training. He had become comfortable with night flying, but nothing that he had done could prepare him for flying on a dark night between layers of cloud.
During the four days that he spent in Canton, the pilot had ample time to monitor the weather and consider what to do in case it deteriorated. The marginal conditions—showers, multiple broken cloud layers, isolated thunderstorms—cannot have materialized out of nowhere. If he had left earlier, he might have had to cancel a meeting or two, but he might have been able to make the trip in daylight before the weather moved in. Alternatively, he could have flown (or driven) to Atlanta, 30 miles away, and caught a flight to Washington, leaving the Cherokee to be retrieved another day. The one thing he should not have done, as a beginner pilot, was depart at night in marginal weather. But that was what he did.
The most important obligation of the owner of an airplane is to know when not to use it.
This column first appeared in the May Issue 958 of the FLYING print edition.
