Non-Rated Fliers Who Bucked Weather Fill Agency’s Files

The pilot called to check the weather before taking off in a private plane from Atlantic City to Woodbridge, Va., and was told to expect “severe weather.”

The man, who had flown a total of 230 hours and was not trained to navigate with his instruments, decided to make the flight anyway and checked the weather again by radio after takeoff. He was advised of heavy updrafts and downdrafts and “numerous active thunderstorms throughout the area.” A Federal Aviation Administration briefer told him that, with visibility at less than two miles, visual flight was not recommended.

Still, the pilot continued on for another 12 minutes before he requested controllers’ guidance to the nearest airport. He never made it. The plane “descended into a marsh area in an extreme nose down attitude,” according to the National Transportation Safety Board’s report on the July 21, 1983, accident.

The NTSB’s files are full of similar reports on private pilots who without the special certification needed for flying in adverse weather do so anyway--as Newport Beach developer Walter Scott Biddle apparently did last week when his plane crashed during a fog-bound approach to Orange County’s John Wayne Airport.

Since 1983, the board said, there have been 237 accidents involving non-instrument-rated pilots venturing into poor visibility conditions, accidents that killed 344 people.

The FAA says it is virtually helpless to prevent them. While the agency conducts seminars on the hazards of instrument flight and imposes strict qualification standards for pilots certified to fly through cloud covers, there is still little to prevent a pilot who is overconfident in his own abilities from venturing into conditions beyond his skill level, agency officials say.

“Being of sound mind and body, would you deliberately endanger yourself and your family by venturing into instrument meteorological conditions when you did not possess the qualifications to fly in that weather? A normal, sensible, intelligent human being would obviously answer no,” said Jim McCann, an investigator for the FAA’s regional Flight Standards District Office in Hawthorne.

“But there are those people that go beyond the limits of reason,” McCann said. FAA officials concede some people with little flight training at all may occasionally pilot planes, but McCann estimated that “less than one-tenth of 1%” of the Los Angeles area’s 20,000-odd licensed pilots fly without proper qualifications.

Usually, “there’s no way we’ll ever know until something like this (an accident) happens,” said Audrey Schutte, the NTSB investigator who is probing the crash of Biddle’s plane.

The problem was illustrated in Orange County only a year ago when the bodies of a man and woman in their mid-20s were pulled from the wreckage of a Cessna 152 off the coast of Newport Beach.

Later, it was learned that the two had agreed to go flying with a 30-year-old student pilot--who by law was not permitted to carry passengers and who should have known that the two-seater he took out that night was not built to haul three. His body was found later.

Schutte said it is not uncommon for businessmen and other professionals like Biddle to take flight training, then neglect to go through “the technicalities” of an actual flight test for certification.

“It’s particularly a problem with doctors and lawyers,” who tend to have a great deal of confidence in their own abilities, she said. Consequently, the aviation accident rate among members of those professions is higher.

Though flight training emphasizes the difficulty of maintaining control of a plane in the clouds, when there are no outside visual references to help a pilot distinguish which way is up or down, many pilots become confident that the minimal instrument training they receive for their pilots’ licenses will be sufficient to carry them through, FAA officials say.

Partly in response to that, the agency recently lowered the requirements for private pilots to begin their instrument training to just 125 hours of flight experience. While some pilots may need more flight time to be good instrument pilots, the accident rate involving non-instrument-rated pilots flying into low visibility conditions merited the change anyway, officials said.

Ralph Odenwald, air traffic manager at the John Wayne Airport control tower, said there have been “several occasions” when he has found himself dealing with pilots who did not appear to be qualified, though most often, pilots confess that they are in over their head and ask for help, he said.

“It’s kind of difficult to tell otherwise,” he said. “It just depends on how they sound and whether or not their reactions may make you suspicious that they may not understand, or they may not be properly trained for what they’re doing.”

In that case, he said, a controller will ask a pilot if he is properly rated. In some cases, controllers may file a report on a pilot with FAA investigators.

“Most pilots,” Odenwald said, “recognize the inherent danger in trying to fly in instrument conditions without the proper training. There’s an old adage, and you’ve probably heard it: The first person at the scene of an accident is the pilot.”