Aftermath: Delayed Reaction

Peter Garrison

Wednesday, March 30, 2011 at 01:01 AM ET

Verified

Key Takeaways:

A flight instructor and student pilot died when their Cessna 172 stalled and crashed during an attempted go-around after approaching a grass runway.
The NTSB determined the probable cause was the instructor's excessive climb and failure to maintain airspeed, leading to an inadvertent stall, with improper decision-making as a contributing factor.
The instructor had a complex medical history, including psychological issues stemming from a prior F-16 ejection and being on multiple psychoactive medications, which he had misrepresented on his FAA medical certificate application.
The article discusses the difficulty in definitively linking the instructor's medical conditions or medications to the specific pilot error, acknowledging that such connections remain speculative.

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(March 2010) — The girlfriend of a student pilot, eager to see how his flying skills were coming along — he had recently soloed — arranged to accompany him and his instructor on a flight. They took off in a 172 on a beautiful June evening. She was sitting behind her boyfriend, who was in the left front seat; in the right front seat was the instructor, a former Air Force F-16 pilot.

She had thought they were just going up to fly around a bit, but it turned out that the instructor had other ideas. After he had put the student through several stalls, the back-seat passenger asked them to stop because the activity was making her nervous.