Pilot, Plane In Crash Had Clean Records

The twin-engine airplane and the pilot at the controls before Monday’s fatal crash in southern Idaho both had spotless records, according to Federal Aviation Administration records.

Pilot Richard Karl Shipman, 47, of Sandy, and a co-pilot were ferrying six Salt Lake business executives to Pocatello before dawn when the airplane suddenly plunged to the ground. All eight died.

On Tuesday, a team of investigators led by the National Transportation Safety Board and including the plane’s manufacturer, scoured the grassy hillside where the plane went down near Malad City.

Mike Stockhill, the senior air safety investigator in charge of the probe, told the Idaho State Journal it will take two days to sift through the wreckage for clues to why the eight-passenger plane suddenly nosedived.

Among the few discernible remains of the plane was a portion of a propeller, an engine and a large section of the fuselage. There was no flight recorder box, since those are not required on small airplanes.

Pilot Shipman had radioed to the FAA control tower at Salt Lake International Airport that there was an emergency, but was not specific, said FAA spokesman Mitch Barker.

The plane went off radar with no other transmissions, and a pilot in the area soon reported a fire.

Stockhill said he could not speculate Tuesday about what caused the crash. The NTSB typically issues a preliminary report several days after a crash, and a draft of the final report six months later.

One of the first inspectors on the scene Monday, FAA’s Timothy Mason said the debris was in a small, compact area, near where the impact carved a 3-foot-deep crater from a near-vertical impact.

A forensics pathologist and several volunteers arrived at the crash site at midday Tuesday and began the grisly task of identifying and bagging body parts, many of them charred.

Linda Whitfield, a spokeswoman for the FAA records division in Oklahoma city, said both Shipman and the Mitsubishi MU-2B-36A he was flying had “clean” records.

Shipman, the owner of Pro Air Services of Salt Lake, had never been disciplined by the FAA and his pilot’s certificate to fly single and multi-engine aircraft was current.

The Mitsubishi airplane, which Shipman acquired last March, had never been in an accident or had safety and maintenance problems, according to the records.

Planes in the MU-2 series of aircraft, however, have been at fault in a number of fatal airplane crashes.

NTSB records in Washington indicate 65 people died in 25 crashes of MU-2 planes in this country between 1986 and 1993. However, investigators placed blame on the plane and its parts in only 14 of those deaths. Pilot error was cited in others, and the causes of some crashes were never determined.

Killed Monday in southern Idaho were four executives from Swire Coca-Cola, USA of Salt Lake City: chief executive officer Craig Taylor, 39; vice president of marketing Gary Barber, 42; chief financial officer Brad Moore, 36; and marketing analyst Merlin Mikkelson, 36.

Two employees of Scopes Garcia Carlisle Advertising Inc. of Salt Lake City - company co-founder and director William J. Garcia, 44, and account supervisor Bruce W. Keyes, 31, both of Salt Lake City - were also killed.

The co-pilot was Scott Bogan, 27, a Pro Air co-pilot from Salt Lake.