Inexperience blamed for plane crash
BILLINGS – The pilot of an airplane that crashed while ferrying four Forest Service workers into a Montana wilderness last year lacked experience in backcountry flying and flew up the wrong drainage, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded in a report released Wednesday.
The NTSB’s findings of the Sept. 20 crash are similar to those of a separate, preliminary investigation by the U.S. Forest Service that was released earlier this year. That report also concluded that pilot Jim Long apparently had become confused about his location, possibly because of poor weather.
Long, along with two of the four Forest Service workers, died in the crash near Glacier National Park, in northwest Montana. Two other employees, initially thought to have also been killed, survived and emerged from the wilderness two days later.
The NTSB’s probable cause report, much like the Forest Service report, said Long didn’t meet the Forest Service standards for backcountry flying.
Long reported having 100 hours of flight time in “typical terrain (over mountains).” The Forest Service requires 200 flight hours in typical terrain, though the agency never specifically defined that term, the NTSB said.
Earlier this year, an accident investigator for the Forest Service said Long was approved by an agency flight inspector after an interview and test flight.
The Forest Service, in releasing its preliminary report, said it planned to review backcountry flying protocol.
Joe Walsh, a Forest Service spokesman, said Wednesday the agency agrees with the NTSB’s findings. He said the Forest Service now is looking at whether any of its policies or procedures needs to be changed, including those related to pilot experience in the backcountry and a standard definition for “typical terrain.”
Recommendations are expected by November, he said.
Long was to have taken the four workers – Davita Bryant, Ken Good, Jodee Hogg and Matthew Ramige – in a Cessna 206 chartered by the Forest Service to a backcountry air strip near the park. The employees had planned to conduct a vegetation survey and work on telecommunications equipment.
The flight was delayed two hours by heavy rains and a thunderstorm before leaving Kalispell, according to the NTSB report. The plan was to follow a highway through a river valley marked by steep terrain – with peaks towering over 8,000 feet – and then follow a river to the wilderness landing strip, it said.
But an analysis of weather information indicates that ridge tops on both sides became obscured as the plane moved through the valley, and area pilots said drainages bleeding in to the valley can look alike in such conditions, the report said.
In Long’s last radio transmission, he said he was over a small town near the point where the flight would divert from the highway. But witnesses and radar data actually put the plane short of his reported location and flying up a steep drainage, the NTSB said.
The plane was in a left-climbing turn when it crashed and burst into flames.
Three of the workers, Good, Hogg and Ramige, got out of the wreckage, but Good soon died of his injuries. Hogg and Ramige, who suffered serious injuries, left the site and eventually made their way to a highway, where they flagged down help.
An examination of the plane found nothing that would have prevented normal operation, the NTSB said.
“Contributing factors were the low visibility due to mist, obscuration of the mountainous terrain and the pilot’s lack of experience in backcountry flying,” it concluded.
Long’s logbook didn’t specifically record experience flying in the backcountry or mountains, and a review of two years of entries found 15 entries – totaling 14 hours flight time – that included takeoffs or landings at a backcountry airport, the report said.