Oct
15
Daniel Shalloway appears to have done all the right things Tuesday until, in a span of 14 seconds, his small plane sharply veered off course, turned on its side and dropped into Banny Galicia’s mobile home west of Lake Worth, killing both himself and the 21-year-old Palm Beach State College student.
What event — either mechanical or human — led to that critical moment when Shalloway’s single-engine Piper Cherokee 180 made its fatal turn?
Steve Lopez
What really happened to Dan Shalloway’s Piper Cherokee airplane that slammed into a mobile park home in Palm Springs on Tuesday … read more
Steve Lopez
Investigators might never find out. Whatever clues there are likely burned up with the plane.
Animated flight tracking software operated by the Boca Raton Municipal Airport — manufacturers warn it can’t be presumed 100 percent accurate, but airport officials say it’s very reliable — appears to show the plane’s final minutes.
The plane first appears in the animation at 5:28 p.m. and 49 seconds near Congress Avenue, just north of Forest Hill Boulevard. It travels south toward downtown Lake Worth, then turns northwest toward Palm Beach State College. Patterns of other flights doing the same thing suggest it’s preparing to swing around and land at the Lantana airport from the northwest.
But at 5:32:53, it turns sharply to the right; just 14 seconds later the little black airplane icon comes to a stop in the animation, right at the spot where the plane went down into the mobile park.
Surveillance video suggests the plane actually struck the mobile home from the west, suggesting it made some last-second turn that’s not seen in the flight tracking.
“Fourteen seconds to hit the ground; something happened,” said Steven Daiagi, president of the Aero Club, a “fly-in” community in Wellington.
A pilot who’s lined up on the Lantana runway, with the strip likely in sight, as Shalloway appears to have been, could glide to a landing if he ran out of gas, Daiagi said.
“It doesn’t make sense,” he said.
Daiagi said neighbors were friendly with Shalloway and described him as a seasoned pilot.
“Either something went terribly wrong with the plane and it lost power, or he (Shalloway) had a personal incident,” said Dave Freudenberg, a former Boca Raton City Council member and a small plane pilot since 1992.
“It’s possible that there was just what they call a ‘loss of control.’ The plane suddenly did something the pilot wasn’t expecting,” said Donna Wilt, an associate professor in the College of Aeronautics at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne. The college specializes in aviation.
She also said the pilot could have intentionally veered off to avoid another plane or because “he suddenly had an issue and was intentionally trying to turn right and break off the landing.” And she said a bird strike can’t be ruled out.
“Something happened right at that critical time,” Wilt said.
Daniel Boggs, the NTSB investigator, still was at the crash site Thursday, but wouldn’t be made available, agency spokesman Terry Williams said from Washington, D.C.
Asked about the disastrous final 14-second stretch, Williams said, “that’s one of the things we’re going to be looking at.”
He also said the agency was interviewing witnesses and pulling the plane’s maintenance records.
Williams stressed what the NTSB always does in such investigations: they could take months.
Boggs did tell reporters Wednesday at a briefing at the scene that investigators were trying to determine if Shalloway radioed air traffic controllers.
Unlike Palm Beach International Airport and the Boca Raton airport, both of which have staffed control towers, the Lantana Airport — official name: Palm Beach County Park Airport — “is all visual,” Freudenberg said. “You’re on your own. Find that little triangle yourself.”
But Daiagi said he’s certain that neither the Lantana airport, nor the volume of aircraft in Palm Beach County’s air space, had anything to do with Tuesday’s disaster.
“If planes crash into each other,” Daiagi said, “that would have something to do with busy air space. If planes fall out of the sky…”
The NTSB says zero people died in 2014 in commercial flight accidents, while nearly 500 died in small planes, and in those, loss of control was the most frequent cause.
“The general aviation industry has not seen the same improvements” as commercial airline operators, NTSB member Earl Weener said in a statement before a safety forum Wednesday in Washington D.C. about “loss of control” smalll plane crashes.
In the statement, George Perry, head of the Air Safety Institute for the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, which represents owners and pilots of small planes, said standards by which the Federal Aviation Administration tests pilots are “stuck in the 1970s.”
Data analyst Mike Stucka contributed to this story.
Comments
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.