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Report says fatal T-34 crash was avoidable
By Joshua Stewart - Staff writer
Posted : Sunday Aug 14, 2011 11:16:19 EDT
A crash during a training flight that took the life of an instructor pilot was peppered with mistakes that, if avoided, could have prevented the instructor’s death, a Navy investigation determined.
Missteps in both planning the flight and piloting the T-34 Turbomentor should have been avoided, preventing the Jan. 23, 2010, crash into Lake Pontchartrain outside of New Orleans, more than a mile short of the runway at Lakefront Airport. Better planning could have helped prevent the crash altogether, or at least hastened the rescue of the flight student, identified in documents only as “Ensign Matthews,” and saved the life of Lt. Clinton Wermers, who died in the lake.
Wermers and Matthews, both from Training Squadron 6 at Naval Air Station Whiting Field, Fla., were in their second of a three-day series of flights. Starting at Whiting Field, they made three stops in their first day before landing in Millington, Tenn. The pilot and instructor went out for dinner and beers in Memphis before turning in for the night.
They left Millington and landed in Jackson, Miss. From there they set out for Naval Air Station-Joint Reserve Base New Orleans, La. However, weather forced them to Lakefront Airport instead.
The conditions during their approach were bad, with thick fog that limited visibility.
Both Wermers and Matthews looked for their runway but didn’t see it. Somehow they lost track of their altitude and suddenly landed in the lake, according to the report.
“You just see black and just the water vapor all around you. Didn’t even realize we were descending till I looked back into the cockpit right before the altimeter hit zero and it must have been a split second before we impacted,” Matthews told investigators.
“When we hit the water, we bounced back up in the air. I didn’t even realize we hit the water at this point. I thought we had smacked the ground because we hit so hard, it was like hitting hard land, it smacked so hard and then it hit the water again. And that’s when I heard the splashing and whooshing of water and realize (sic) that we were in the lake,”
Neither the pilot nor the student was hurt during the landing about 7 p.m. They got out of the cockpit and into the water.
They were not wearing the proper survival equipment for a flight over water. The distress signal in the plane did not activate.
The two met in the water near the sinking plane. Wermers told Matthews to activate his personal survival radio, but his hands were cold from the 52-degree water and he couldn’t turn it on.
The radio would have been unlikely to help, the report says, because it broadcast at a frequency that isn’t monitored.
After five or 10 minutes in the water and fumbling with the radio, Matthews said he looked around and couldn’t see Wermers. He shouted his name but didn’t hear anything. He told investigators that he thought that maybe he had just floated too far away or decided to make a swim toward land.
Matthews, a former competitive swimmer, focused on floating on his back, popping up every now and then to scan for a shoreline. He lost track of time. Eventually he saw a helicopter’s searchlight.
He reached into his pocket of survival equipment, where he found a strobe that he couldn’t figure out how to turn on. He found a flashlight and, eventually, his pencil flares. He let loose a few shots before being picked up by a Coast Guard vessel after spending about two hours in the water.
On Jan. 25, the search for Wermers was abandoned and he was presumed dead. His body was found shortly after 1 a.m. Jan. 27.
Wermers, a South Dakota native, was 33. He left two daughters and a pregnant wife who has since given birth to a third daughter.
Investigators found several problems with the flight. According to the report, Wermers’ and Matthews’ drinking in Memphis the night before may have left them tired during the flight.
Also, during the descent, the plane flew too low without the runway in sight, against operational policy and one of the primary causes of the mishap, the report said.
Additionally, they didn’t have the proper survival equipment for a water landing — original flight plans didn’t include flying over water — contributing to Wermers’ death. “Had he been wearing a [life preserver], he most likely would have survived,” but his death was not due to his own misconduct, the report says.
Weather conditions were bad, but Wermers didn’t properly research weather for the route, contributing to the crash.
“This mishap was completely preventable; both the Controlled Flight Into Terrain (CFIT) and the subsequent drowning of the instructor pilot,” the investigation states.