The Nation - News from Feb. 2, 1989

Federal investigators for the first time cited a pilot’s use of cocaine as a contributing factor in a commercial airliner crash in which passengers were killed. The National Transportation Safety Board concluded that pilot Stephen Silver, who was killed in a Jan. 19, 1988, commuter crash in Colorado along with eight other people, had used cocaine 10 to 18 hours before the flight left Denver. Although investigators said that Silver, 36, did not have enough cocaine in his system to have been high and the co-pilot was controlling the plane’s descent to Durango, the board concluded that cocaine contributed to the pilot’s “ineffective monitoring of an unstabilized approach.”