Traffic Controllers, Other Pilots Recount Harrowing Exchange with Doomed Pilots

In the minutes before a fatal plane crash on a dreary November afternoon in Akron, air traffic controllers -- one moving in and out of the room during the accident -- shuffled seats to relieve one another from the stressful job.


Akron-Canton Airport tower supervisors were tied up elsewhere in meetings.

Weather reports, which called for less than 2 miles of visibility and low cloud cover, were sent to the pilots, who may have never reviewed them.

Investigation reports and interviews released this week by the National Transportation Safety Board detail how air traffic controllers and other pilots -- the last to speak with the two pilots of the doomed plane -- guided the flight before the Nov. 10 crash. The NTSB expects to release a final report in November listing the probable cause and making recommendations to avoid similar crashes.

On the ground at Akron Fulton International Airport shortly before the crash, a slower-moving plane piloted by flight instructor Jason Edwards had just landed. Edwards heard of the incoming corporate jet, just 10 miles out. Watching the twin-engine private charter pierce through the clouds and safely land would be a good learning experience for his students.

So he taxied out of the way and relayed the weather and his own tight landing to the Hawker jet, whose pilots gave thanks then screamed in terror.

"Hawker, repeat your last transmission," Edwards said.

No response came.

Not wanting to incite panic over the airwaves, Edwards phoned in what he had heard.

Inside a tower that watches the skies above Akron and Canton, air traffic controller Douglas McKenzie -- the last in the room to radio the corporate jet -- awaited confirmation that the pilots had landed. Instead, he listened intently to a colleague on the other end of the phone with Edwards.

Speaking later with an investigator, McKenzie "said he had a feeling whoever it was calling on the phone was saying that EFT1526 [the doomed flight] had never made it to the airport."

He hailed the pilots. Again, no response.

Incoming

The plane, carrying seven passengers, took off from Dayton-Wright Brothers Airport at 2:13 p.m. headed for Akron on an expected 34-minute flight. The pilots made contact with a Cleveland air traffic control tower 15 minutes later. The pilots were advised to switch frequencies so Akron-Canton Airport could guide them to Akron Fulton International Airport.

Five minutes passed before Capt. Oscar Andres Chavez, 40, and first officer Renato Marchese, 50, who was flying the airplane, made contact with Terry Lee Parris, a 30-year Federal Aviation Administration employee in the hot seat.

Parris came to work on his day off after swapping shifts with another controller. With a scheduled break coming up, he told McKenzie, another 30-year employee, that he had made contact with the pilots.

They said they were getting the weather report. Parris thought that odd. Pilots, he later explained to investigators, typically say they either have it or they don't.

Parris told the pilots to descend from 9,000 to 5,000 feet and set them on a heading for the airport.

After two minutes of observing the two aircraft, McKenzie sat down and Parris headed off to the break room.

'A bit tight'

McKenzie asked the pilots to descend another 1,000 feet and slow their speed as the plane ahead of them, a single-engine Cherokee piloted by Edwards, was traveling slower. Time would be needed between the landings. McKenzie "thought to himself that it might be a 'bit tight,'" the investigators' report noted.

Edwards, staging a "missed approach" to teach his students a lesson, broke through the clouds 350 feet above the ground, leveled off and landed.

"We broke out at minimums," Edwards told the jet pilots, noting the narrow visibility between the clouds and the runway.

Four miles away about 2:52 p.m., the Hawker jet crashed into an apartment complex on Mogadore Road in the Ellet neighborhood. All nine on board perished.

While on the phone with the air traffic controller tower, Edwards explained that his last communication with the jet "sounded eerie and the pilot sounded scared," he said. In that moment, Milan Milosevic, one of Edwards' students and a member of the Ohio State Highway Patrol's aviation unit, received a page about an airplane that had crashed in the area.

Mark Gordon, another seasoned FAA worker concerned about the unorthodox lingo one of the pilots had used, put the phone down and pressed the intercom button. His supervisors entered the tower shortly afterward and relieved everyone of their duties as post-crash protocol kicked in.

McKenzie, Gordon and Parris were later asked by investigators about the aircraft's speed, the instructions they gave, whether they thought the pilots had accessed the weather report, why a more current weather report from a pilot at a different airport wasn't used (they said it was not reliable, instead using reports that are up to an hour old) and a battery of other questions.

Everything was handled as usual, they concluded after being asked to relive their actions. At least McKenzie, who took control in the last 19 minutes of the flight, may never be satisfied with his own answer.

"He said that if nothing had happened with the flight, he would have said that there was nothing he would do differently," an investigators' report ended. "However, since something did happen, he will always think about what he could have done differently."

(culled from www.aviationpros.com)