Washington – Pilot errors caused the deadly crash of a commuter airliner in northeastern Missouri in 2004, and the crew’s nonstop joking and expletive- laden banter in the cockpit didn’t help, federal investigators said Tuesday.
The two-man crew and 11 of 13 passengers were killed when Corporate Airlines Flight 5966 crashed on Oct. 19, 2004. It was the country’s deadliest civilian air crash that year.
The National Transportation Safety Board said the pilot and co-pilot failed to follow established procedures for landing at night without precision instruments and descended too low before they could see the ground clearly.
The pilot, Kim Sasse, 48, focused too much on looking outside the cockpit window instead of monitoring flight instruments as the plane approached Kirksville Regional Airport under limited visibility, the board said.
Investigators also found that Sasse and his co-pilot, Jonathan Palmer, 29, “lacked a professional tone” in the cockpit. Sasse and Palmer distracted themselves with a steady stream of quips, laughter and more than 45 expletives, investigators said.
“The discipline in that cockpit didn’t seem to exist, which really created an environment for mistakes to be made,” said the NTSB’s acting chairman, Mark Rosenker.
The NTSB found no mechanical failure or maintenance problems and no fault with training procedures at Smyrna, Tenn.- based Corporate Airlines, now called RegionsAir.
The crew had little warning of any problems until the final seconds of the flight, which originated in St. Louis. The plane clipped treetops and stalled before crashing in a field a mile short of the runway.
According to the transcript, Sasse claimed to see the ground and continued descending below 400 feet even though Palmer said he couldn’t see anything. The board said Palmer failed to challenge Sasse’s observations, defying established rules.
Pilot fatigue also was a factor, said NTSB investigator Malcolm Brenner. The pilots had been on duty for more than 14 hours.
