Tower Told Pilot Bush Jet Was Too Low

The pilot of a private jet was warned the plane was flying low minutes before it crashed en route to a scheduled landing in Houston to pick up former President Bush, a federal investigator said Tuesday.

An investigation is underway to find out what caused the Gulfstream G-1159A jet to go down Monday morning, killing a crew of three.

The plane, which belonged to Jet Place Inc. of Tulsa, Okla., left Dallas an hour earlier and was to have picked up Bush, who lives in Houston, for a trip to Ecuador to give a speech at a business conference.

Mark Rosenker, vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said the control tower at Hobby Airport told crew members about three minutes before landing that winds were calm and the runway was clear.

“The controller talked with the aircraft approximately two minutes before the accident and asked them to check their altitude because they saw them at somewhere approximately 400 feet,” Rosenker said.

It was not immediately known if the crew responded, officials said.

The jet’s wing and the landing gear on the right side clipped a 120-foot-tall light pole on a road about 3 1/4 miles south of the runway. The normal altitude for a jet at that point would have been 1,000 feet.

Rosenker said there were alarms aboard a plane that told a pilot if he was flying too low, but it was not immediately known if they were activated.

Factors including the condition of the aircraft, the weather and the history of the flight crew were being examined. Rosenker said the pilot and crew were “seasoned,” each having 19,000 hours of flying experience.

The investigation could take a year to complete.