Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Plane crash blamed on pilot error

Preliminary report states aircraft drifted to left

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By KATHERINE WUTZ
Express Staff Writer

The crash of a small private airplane on a ridge east of Hailey last week was caused not by a malfunctioning autopilot device, as local officials believed at the time, but by pilot error, according to a preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board.

The accident sent crews on a hike up Patterson Mountain near Water Gulch and resulted in a Life Flight transport of the plane's two occupants.

The small private plane departed Friedman Memorial Airport at about 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 29. At about 7:13 p.m., Blaine County Emergency Communications received a call from Christina Rathbun, a Boise native and the plane's passenger, reporting the accident.

After a search for the craft complicated by misleading coordinates and the pilot's disorientation, Wood River Fire & Rescue dispatched technical rescue crews to assess the patients. Helicopters from Air St. Luke's reached the site before ground crews, and airlifted the plane's occupants to St. Luke's Wood River Medical Center before undergoing further transport.

Contrary to reports from the Hailey Fire Department, Federal Aviation Administration records show the plane was not a Cessna 182 but a 1978 Piper Turbo Lance II, a single-engine fixed-wing plane with a capacity of a pilot and five passengers. The plane was registered to pilot Paul Tower of Boise.

According to the National Transportation Safety Board's report, the plane hit the ridge when Tower was attempting to set up the autopilot to direct it to Nampa.

"The airplane began turning to the left without him being aware of it," the report states. "As the airplane continued to turn, it approached the steeply rising terrain to the east of the airport."

The report says that the passenger, Rathbun, was looking out the window at the time and told Tower that the plane was rapidly approaching the ridge. Tower immediately maneuvered the craft into what the report calls a "controlled crash."

Though Wood River Fire & Rescue reported that the occupants required extrication, scanner traffic—and Rathbun—indicated that they were outside the plane when Air St. Luke's personnel arrived on scene.

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Rathbun said that despite a fractured vertebra and multiple serious injuries, she was about 30 feet from the plane when the helicopter landed.

"I crawled out of that plane with a broken back and laid in a snow bank for an hour waiting on that helicopter," she said. "You see in movies that planes explode. Even though I was bleeding from the head, I crawled away."

The board report states that Tower sustained minor injuries—a compound fracture of the hand, according to the Blaine County Sheriff's Office—while Rathbun suffered more serious injuries.

Rathbun said she suffered a broken T-12 vertebra, located just below the rib cage at the waist. She also has a lacerated kidney, a mild concussion, an injured right wrist, a severely bruised shoulder and a bone-deep cut from her right eyebrow to her hairline.

The cut was from the plane's Plexiglas visor, she said, and resulted in intense blood loss at the scene of the crash. Though that injury is the most immediately noticeable, Rathbun said, the broken vertebra came close to doing far more damage.

"It didn't affect my spinal cord," she said. "If it had come any closer, I would have been paralyzed from the waist down."

Rathbun said she is currently in a clamshell brace to treat the fractured vertebra and may be able to avoid surgery.

According to Rathbun, she and Tower are casual acquaintances who flew up to the valley for the day so Tower could ski and she could shop. Rathbun said she works with Tower's wife.

The crash is still under investigation.

Katherine Wutz: kwutz@mtexpress.com

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