Pilot in Aaliyah Crash Was on Probation for Drug Offense

Twelve days before the plane crash in the Bahamas that killed R&B; singer Aaliyah and eight others--six of them from Los Angeles--the man whose judgment is a key issue in the accident stood before a judge in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Luis Antonio Morales, 30, was accused of three felonies: stealing a tool box and a toy airplane, trying to sell $345 worth of stolen aircraft parts, and possession of cocaine. He decided not to contest the charges.

Since they were his first offenses, Broward County Circuit Judge Royce Agner opted for leniency, handing down a sentence of three years’ probation.

At Morales’ request, there was a special provision: As long as he turned in paycheck stubs to verify his continued employment, probation officials would not contact his employers. That meant they probably wouldn’t find out about his drug arrest.

“This is as routine a first-offense plea bargain as we have down here,” said Ron Ishoy, a spokesman for the Broward state attorney’s office. “It wasn’t unusual at all.”

But other things about the case were.

Morales was a pilot, the man at the controls when the twin-engine Cessna 402B chartered for the Aaliyah entourage crashed into brushy swampland Aug. 25 near Marsh Harbour Airport on Abaco Island, killing everyone on board.

Under Federal Aviation Administration rules, his drug possession could have cost him his pilot’s license. But in order to take action in the case, the FAA would have had to find out about it.

The court didn’t inform the FAA because it has no mechanism to do so. Morales’ employers didn’t tell the FAA, apparently because they didn’t know. And Morales didn’t tell the FAA because he didn’t have to. At least, not right away.

Under FAA rules, Morales had 60 days to inform the agency about his sentencing on the drug charge, but less than two weeks had elapsed when the crash occurred.

He also was required to mention the cocaine possession during his next FAA-mandated physical examination, but it wasn’t due until January.

“That drug possession would have sent up a red flag about possible dependency,” said Dr. Warren Silverman, manager of the FAA’s Aerospace Medical Certification Division in Oklahoma City.

The cause of the crash, which is being investigated by Bahamian aviation officials and the National Transportation Safety Board in Washington, will not be determined officially for months.

Overloading is suspected, however, and under FAA regulations the man responsible for determining the plane was loaded properly and capable of flying safely was the pilot, Morales.

As in all air crash investigations, blood samples were taken from the pilot to determine the presence of drugs. The results of those tests have not been made public.

FAA Unable to Verify Pilots’ Information

The FAA relies largely on an honor system when it comes to pilot’s licenses.

Pilots are required to provide truthful information and respond honestly when asked questions by FAA officials, but that truthfulness is seldom challenged. The FAA has no mechanism for verifying the information provided by pilots, other than routine checks of traffic records.

“I think that 99% of the time, the honor system works pretty well,” said William Harry Allen, director of Transport Action, a private aviation safety consulting firm in Anza, Calif. “It’s either that or authorize a whole fleet of FAA inspectors, and I’m not sure the taxpayers would go for that.”

In any event, Morales was the pilot for the flight the Aaliyah entourage had chartered from Marsh Harbour to Opa-Locka Airport in Florida.

That in itself violated FAA rules because the FAA requires a list of certified pilots to be used for each charter aircraft, and Morales was not on the list provided by Blackhawk International Airways, which operated the flight.

Morales apparently had started working for Blackhawk a few days before the flight, increasing the likelihood that the company knew nothing about his drug arrest. Officials at Blackhawk could not be reached for comment.

A check of FAA data shows that Blackhawk had an ordinary record of compliance with federal regulations. Only four enforcement actions were taken since the company was founded in 1991.

Letters of correction were sent in April 1997 for the company’s failure to post the name of the certificate holder on a plane, and in April for failing to meet some FAA maintenance requirements.

The company was fined $1,500 in March 1998 for failing to comply with the flight and maneuvering regulations of a foreign country.

Perhaps most interestingly, a letter of correction was sent in June 1999 for Blackhawk’s failure to test some employees for drug use.

Questions about the safety of charter operations like Blackhawk’s arise because their accident rate is much higher than for large commercial air carriers.

The FAA says that although charters logged only about three flights for every five flown by major airlines in the United States last year, there were 80 accidents involving charter flights, compared with 56 accidents involving the large carriers.

The accident rate for charters from 1996 through 1999--the most recent years for which such statistics are available--was 3.46 per 100,000 passenger miles, about 12 times the rate for large commercial air carriers.

These figures include accidents of all types, most of which did not cause death or serious injury.

Stuart Matthews, president of the Flight Safety Foundation, an independent, aviation industry-supported group in Alexandria, Va., pointed out that because charters fly shorter routes, they make many more takeoffs and landings for each mile flown. Most aviation accidents occur during landings and takeoffs.

“There may be an individual carrier stretching the rules, but as a whole, the air taxi industry does quite well,” Matthews said.

Most safety officials seem to agree that the current regulations governing charter service in this country probably are adequate.

“There may be a few times when they haven’t been, but there have been thousands and thousands of times when they have been,” Allen said.

If Morales didn’t check the weight and balance of the plane before the Aaliyah flight, he should have. And if he did, he never should have taken off.

Plane Overloaded by Estimated 700 Pounds

Figures released 10 days ago by Randy Butler, an official with the Bahamian Department of Civil Aviation, indicate that the plane was dangerously overweight on takeoff, probably by 700 pounds or more.

The Cessna 402B, which weighs about 4,100 pounds empty, can carry a total additional payload of about 2,200 pounds, including fuel. Butler’s figures show the plane was carrying 574 pounds of fuel and 804 pounds of baggage.

That left another 822 pounds for the pilot and his eight passengers--about 90 pounds per person. If published reports are correct, one of those passengers, Aaliyah bodyguard Scott Gallin, weighed 300 pounds, which left only 65 pounds per person for the other eight on board.

That’s considerably less than half the 170-pound-per-person average assumed by large commercial carriers.

Witnesses said baggage handlers argued with some of the passengers boarding the Cessna 402B, warning them that they were taking too much luggage. Two local newspapers, the Tribune and the Freeport News, quoted an unidentified baggage handler as telling the pilot that the plane was too heavy.

“You just don’t know what pressures were put on the pilot to do what he did,” Matthews said.

The initial investigation indicates that there was nothing wrong with either of the plane’s twin engines, according to sources close to the case. But even if both engines were working perfectly, a Cessna 402B attempting a takeoff while overloaded by 700 pounds could be in serious trouble.

“If the pilot understood the situation and flew the plane gingerly, he might just have made it,” said Barry Schiff, a retired airline pilot and aviation safety consultant. “But if the plane wasn’t balanced properly, if there was too much weight too far aft, that would have made the plane unstable and really, really difficult to handle.”

All things considered, Schiff said, there is a good chance that the plane stalled, quickly reaching a point on climb-out at which the wings simply could not provide the lift needed to keep it in the air.

Witnesses said the plane veered to the left and plunged nose-first to the ground, 200 feet from the end of the runway, in what Schiff called “a classic description of a departure stall.”

The mangled wreckage burst into flames that were fueled by the more than 90 gallons of aviation gasoline in the plane’s tanks.

In addition to Aaliyah, Morales and Gallin, those killed in the crash included six of the singer’s support personnel from Los Angeles: Anthony Dodd, Eric Forman, Douglas Kratz, Christopher Maldonado, Gina Smith and Keith Wallace.