An F-16 like those that intercepted the Citation jet that flew to its doom over Washington D.C. this weekend. (Getty Images.)
This post is about two news-making sad outcomes, with a set-up for discussion of a longer-term ongoing challenge.
As a kid, I thought that sonic booms were part of the daily soundscape. My K-12 schools were underneath the flight path for the gigantic Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino, California. In those days of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the buildup to the Vietnam War, we’d hear sonic booms day and night—more and more frequently, the tenser Cold War relations became.
In modern urban life, ambient noise is rising but sonic booms are rare. Thus much of the DC area noticed yesterday afternoon when F-16 fighter planes broke the sound barrier over the Capital, on their way to intercept a Cessna Citation jet that crashed shortly afterwards in rural Virginia.
Deb and I had just arrived in DC a few hours earlier, after two weeks in California, and somehow we didn’t hear the booms. But since then we’ve learned more about the incident. Here are the main points:
The Citation business-jet airplane, with four people aboard, flew from Tennessee to its intended destination on Long Island. The four people were: the pilot, the daughter and the 2-year-old granddaughter of the plane’s owner, and a nanny. The takeoff site was Elizabethton, a small airport in eastern Tennessee, and the destination was Islip, near a family vacation house in the Hamptons on Long Island.
The plane made its northward course without apparent problem, and then seemed to turn to line up for a landing at Islip. But it never descended below 34,000 feet—a jet’s cruising altitude, and very far above the approach altitude for a landing. It overflew Islip and headed straight back over hundreds of miles toward the DC area. Planes flying at this altitude are required to be in constant touch with air traffic controllers. Reportedly this plane was “NORDO”—no radio, and no contact with anyone else.
The Citation finally crashed in a wooded area some 150 miles southwest of DC, on the hilly border between Virginia and West Virginia. This is where it apparently ran out of gas. On the map below, the blue arrow indicates the outbound course; the yellow arrow is the turning point, as if the plane were setting up for landing at Islip; the green is the straight-line path over Washington; and the red is where the plane apparently ran out of fuel and spiraled to the ground
Via FlightRadar24, the track of the plane toward its destination, and then to its demise.
Here is a closer look of the plane’s final descent. At the very end it was heading toward the ground at nearly 500 miles per hour, and losing altitude at over 20,000 feet per minute. This is a far more sudden descent than an airline passenger would normally ever experience. We can hope that all aboard were unconscious at this point.
Track of the final minute of the plane’s spiral, via ADSB Exchange.
As with everything in the aviation world, no one knows for sure, barely a day after a crash.
But several aspects fit the pattern of past aviation tragedies.
One is pilot incapacitation. Some news reports say that when the F-16s neared the plane they saw a pilot slumped over and unresponsive at the controls.
Why just one pilot in the cockpit? A plane like this would normally have two, but operators can apply for a “Single Pilot Waiver.” And what happened to this one pilot? A long-shot possibility is a heart attack or other sudden disabling event. That’s possible—though presumably the two other adults aboard the plane would have tried in the following hours to get on the radios or otherwise appeal for help.
The more likely explanation is that something went wrong with the pressurization system and oxygen supply aboard the plane, in a way that disabled everyone aboard.
The plane spent several hours above 30,000 feet in altitude. That high up, there’s simply not enough oxygen for people to function. Survive, maybe. Operate an airplane, no.
Decades ago, in preparation for a demo flight in the rear seat of an Air Force F-15, I was required to go through altitude-chamber training. You sat in a little enclosed cell, and minute by minute the oxygen was cut off—as if you were ascending into the “flight levels” and breathing only as much oxygen as the surrounding air would supply.
Every minute, you were supposed to write a few words on a note pad. By the time we got to the equivalent of 20,000 feet, my notations were a scrawl. By 30,000 feet, I could barely hold the pen. The shock was that I didn’t realize it at the time. The power of hypoxia is to reduce your performance and your self-awareness more or less in parallel. When I later saw a video of my few minutes in the chamber, it was hard to believe how semi-unconscious I had become. It was a physiological version of the Dunning-Kruger effect. I was being lobotomized, all unaware.
It left a permanent impression. Thanks largely to that experience, in my time as a small-plane pilot I have done my best to avoid extreme altitudes. Going coast to coast? Plan a path either north or south of Colorado’s dreaded Rocky Mountains. Need to go briefly to 10,000 or 11,000 feet to get through p
