Doomed Jet Got OK for Procedure Banned by FAA

The chartered jet that slammed into a hillside here Thursday night was cleared for an instrument approach by air traffic controllers even though such an approach required a circling procedure that the Federal Aviation Administration had banned earlier in the week, crash investigators said Saturday.

The pilot was authorized to execute an instrument approach which, according to the National Transportation Safety Board, can be accomplished in Aspen only by circling to descend, versus heading straight in.

Yet, the FAA had issued a ban on circling at night just two days prior to the crash that killed 18 people, most of them from the Los Angeles area.

The pilot, Bob Frisbie, had been informed of the nighttime ban before departing Burbank, but FAA controllers said they knew nothing of the ban, said acting National Transportation Safety Board chairwoman Carol Carmody.

“I find it troubling, no question,” that the controllers didn’t know that the agency that supervises them had issued the ban, Carmody said at an afternoon briefing. But she stopped short of saying the pilot should not have attempted to land.

There is no evidence that the doomed Avjet-owned plane tried to circle before landing, she said. But if the pilot tried to land without circling, that would have been unsafe under the conditions that night, according to at least one aviation safety expert.

The so-called “Notice to Airmen,” known to aviators as NOTAM, was ambiguous, Carmody said, because it did not ban an instrument approach at the airport, but simply the circling approach.

“The language is confusing, quite frankly,” Carmody said.

Carmody said weather was also “something we are looking at very closely.”

Weather conditions here change abruptly, and investigators are still trying to determine the visibility at the time of the crash. Pilots reported the visibility eight minutes beforehand to be 10 miles, compared to only 1.75 miles 10 minutes afterward.

On Friday, the FAA ordered a temporary ban on nighttime instrument approaches at the airport after talking with NTSB investigators.

Local pilots here said such temporary bans are typically ordered by the FAA as it investigates crashes.

The NTSB investigator in charge of the Aspen probe said pilots using instruments to land must circle before actually touching down to avoid having to descend too quickly.

Local pilots said they seldom circle at night--because it is safer to approach the runway straight-in.

But aviation safety expert Barry Schiff said that based on the information available under the first FAA notice, the pilot “should not have executed the approach.”

“You cannot make the approach,” he said. “It is in fact a circling approach. It was clear from the NOTAM he should have received [that] you cannot make the approach at night.”

FAA spokesman Mike Fergus said Saturday that his agency was pursuing its own parallel investigation into the crash. “Since the NTSB has come up with this question [about the ban not being enforced], we’ll put greater focus on it,” he said.

The FAA ban on nighttime circling was issued as a result of a routine FAA flight check of the airport on March 19.

Two planes that reached Aspen shortly before the Gulfstream III ended up flying to another airport, one of them after trying twice, Carmody said.

The Avjet plane was on its first approach when it crashed. The Times erroneously reported in a story Saturday that it was on its second approach.

The plane’s left wing struck the ground first, and both engines were on at the time of impact, Carmody said. There was no evidence of engine failure or fire, she said.

She also described Frisbie, of Fallbrook, as “well qualified.”

A friend agreed.

“In my opinion, I think you had one of the best guys for that situation at that time,” said Tony Blum, a pilot. “He had a lot of experience in that airplane, and as a charter pilot for so long, those guys see a lot of different and varied things.”

The NTSB team will return to Washington by Monday and wreckage cleanup, which begins today, will likely be finished by Tuesday, she said.

NTSB investigators also will go to Burbank today to review Avjet manuals and the plane’s maintenance records.

Carmody met for an hour Saturday with the relatives of the crash victims, who flew to Aspen to claim their loved ones’ remains and see the place where they died.

About 30 grieving relatives were taken to the crash site off Colorado 82 at noon in a chartered bus escorted by the Colorado State Patrol. A crackling police radio announced that the road had been closed to all traffic for 15 minutes to heighten the visitors’ privacy.

The resulting eerie silence was pierced by the sound of several family members wailing as they got off the bus.

Within two minutes, the sounds of crying subsided, and the group, largely hidden from public view by vehicles, stood quietly under a blue sky broken by large white clouds.

The only other noise was a harsh reminder of the tragedy: four jet aircraft--two of them charters and two of them commercial airliners--flew just a few hundred feet above them as they barreled toward the runway about half a mile away.

Some of the relatives handed nine bouquets and two single roses to two crash investigators. They carefully trod around the aircraft fragments and anchored the flowers through the top wires of an 8-foot-high fence designed to keep elk off the highway.

The flowers were the first tributes left in the vicinity of the site since the crash.

The jet had been chartered by Robert New, 36, a multimillionaire financier who had built the firm UniCapital into a national empire in the equipment rental industry before it went bankrupt.

New had organized a lavish birthday bash for his Los Angeles business partner, Mario Aguilar. The evening began with the chartered flight and was to have ended with a catered dinner. New owns a $1.85-million Victorian home in Pitkin County, Colo., where his wife Monica and 8-year-old son Mathew live full time.

It was typical of New to pamper friends and business associates, his brother Jonathan New of Miami said Saturday. New, the flamboyant former chief executive of UniCapital, had raised $532 million in its initial public offering in May 1998, and bought up 12 businesses that were rolled into the firm.

The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in December 2000, lasting just 2 1/2 years. New and Mario Aguilar were business partners in Prestige Automobiles Inc., a luxury car rental firm in Beverly Hills. Aguilar was traveling with some of his family members, including his mother, aunt and two brothers at the time of the crash.

Mario and his older brother Joe, who was also killed in the crash, had moved to a Silver Lake home last year, according to Isaac Mena, who has known Joe for eight years.

Mario, who had modeled in Mexico, had also just purchased a Ferrari and a Bentley, Mena said. He enjoyed dressing in designer clothing and traveled all over the world. Mario and New spent a lot of time traveling together to Miami, Aspen and Europe.

“They were just people who knew how to live,” Mena said.

*

Times staff writers Richard Fausset, Richard Winton and Stephanie Chavez contributed to this story.