Probe to Examine Risks of Landing at Aspen Airport

Confusion over how to best approach the tricky mountain valley airport here is of growing significance in the probe into the crash of a charter jet from Los Angeles that claimed 18 lives last week, federal investigators said Sunday.

There was no evidence that the Gulfstream III, carrying 15 Southland-area residents and a crew of three, suffered structural or engine failure before it crashed into a hillside directly beside the main highway leading into Aspen, and just a half-mile short of the runway.

“We will ultimately come up with a probable cause,” Carol Carmody, acting chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, pledged at a noon briefing, the last before her 13-member team boarded a jet back to Washington, D.C.

The identification of all the Avjet charter’s passengers and crew was completed Saturday night by the local coroner, and the bodies of three--Mirwais Tukehi, Ori Greenberg and Liz Smith--were returned to Los Angeles on Sunday.

Their fate was one that local authorities had predicted with uncanny precision a decade ago: a flight from Los Angeles rushing to get to Aspen by nightfall, a pilot apparently unable to get his bearings to the runway in bad weather and, finally, the impact at windy Shale Bluffs.

“This outcome was inevitable,” said attorney Dwight Shellman, who oversaw a Pitkin County study in 1991 concluding that only scheduled airliners should be allowed to fly at night into Aspen because of its difficult terrain. The airport’s daytime crash rate of nonscheduled aircraft was more than twice the rate at other mountain airports, the report found.

The late folk singer John Denver had the same concerns. “I asked my pilots after a recent flight if other professional pilots were sometimes scared landing in Aspen,” Denver, who died when his own experimental aircraft plunged into the Pacific Ocean off Monterey Bay in 1997, wrote seven years earlier to Pitkin County commissioners. “They told me you could tell just how scared a pilot was from the amount of coffee visible on his shoes after landing.”

But the Federal Aviation Administration ultimately rejected the findings, Shellman said, and the county was forced to start letting private, charter and other nonscheduled flights land at night.

Avjet, the Burbank company that owned the doomed jet, belongs to two aircraft associations that successfully fought to allow nonscheduled nighttime flights into Aspen. Avjet officials had no comment Sunday about the report.

Paramount to the current investigation, said Al Dickinson, the NTSB investigator in charge, is to find out, possibly through the cockpit’s voice recorder, what happened in the final harrowing moments of the pilot’s approach.

“We don’t really know what’s on his mind, and we have to find that out,” Dickinson said.

Aviators who fly into the county airport have myriad interpretations of how to approach the runway, especially at night, Carmody said. The NTSB is struggling to interpret the FAA’s approach guidelines, and investigators are traveling to Oklahoma City today to talk to the pilot whose recommendations led to a March 27 notice that restricted nighttime approaches.

That FAA ban on nighttime circling approaches--issued just two days before the crash--is one of the central questions in the crash probe. Circling can be a dangerous maneuver because of the difficulty of avoiding unlighted mountainous terrain.

But it is “very hard to define circling,” Dickinson said. “That’s where we are going to focus our investigation: What does circling mean, and what was in [this] pilot’s head.”

In their preflight checkout before heading here, the Avjet pilot was informed of, and acknowledged, the prohibition on circling into Aspen at night. But the ban, ordered by FAA officials in Oklahoma City and passed on to regional centers including Denver, never reached the control tower here, the NTSB said. The so-called Notice to Airmen was to have been faxed here after it was issued, but wasn’t, Carmody said Sunday.

“Our own investigation is focusing on how that happened, and why it happened,” FAA spokesman Mike Fergus said Sunday.

While the flight crew was told that they were not supposed to circle into the airport after dark, they may have anticipated arriving here in daylight or not having to fly the instrument approach.

Dickinson said the plane’s departure was delayed by perhaps up to an hour at Los Angeles International Airport. The plane was approaching the airport here just minutes after the nightly circling ban went into effect. A day after the crash, the FAA issued another notice banning all nighttime instrument-guided approaches--effectively canceling at least two scheduled daily commercial flights here. FAA paperwork indicated the ban was temporary while the NTSB indicated it was permanent.

Such FAA notices, which advise pilots of procedural changes, flood the nation’s airports. In 2000, the FAA issued 15,564 notices--half of which involved instrument approach guidelines.

The FAA’s Fergus acknowledged Sunday “there appears there was confusion” in his agency’s directive on circling Aspen. “All of that is on the table to be studied,” he said. “Was it worded sufficiently for what we meant? Do we need to clarify among our own professionals what we mean?”

NTSB investigators will resume their investigation today in Washington where, among other things, they planned to listen to the cockpit voice recorder with Avjet officials, who will help them determine who is speaking, Carmody said.

Investigators are still trying to determine who was at the controls during the approach--pilot Bob Frisbie or first officer Peter Kowalczyk.

At the crash site, workers began trucking away the wreckage Sunday to a warehouse in Greeley, about 63 miles north of Denver, where they will lay out the pieces for further study, said NTSB spokesman Terry Williams. The cleanup should be completed today, Carmody said.

Investigators determined that the aircraft was equipped with a ground proximity warning device, but did not know if it was activated in the approach because its toggle was sheared off in the crash, Carmody said.

An eyewitness told investigators he saw the plane banking steeply to the left--turning toward the runway--when it overshot its approach alignment and slammed into the hill, Carmody said.

She said the witness said he “had never seen an aircraft coming over in such a steep bank or as far over [past the runway approach] as this one.”

Investigators will also review minute-by-minute recordings of weather conditions at the runway, and compare them to radar data from the doomed airplane, to learn what conditions the pilot faced as he headed in for the landing.

Other pilots reported that heavy snow showers developed at the airport as the plane was approaching it--and after the pilot told the control tower that he had the runway in sight.