On the morning of his final flight, as his Piper PA-34 readied to depart Colorado on a cross-country journey, cargo pilot Perry C. Grant begged for someone to fly with him.
Grant, 27, had taken on as many hours as possible, but he was burning out, friends and family said – so much so that he had fallen asleep at the controls more than once while ferrying bank records and medical supplies for American Aviation Inc. of Salt Lake City.
“He wanted to fly commercial, and I think this was kind of the carrot dangling in front of him,” said his wife, Jennifer. “We have three kids, and it was always just, ‘He needs to fly and get his hours.’ I don’t understand why he wouldn’t tell them no.”
On that June 2005 morning, unable to find a co-pilot, he entered the cockpit solo.
Thirty minutes later, he crashed into a mountain near Telluride. Witnesses heard the explosion and then saw a rockslide, dust and a giant plume of smoke as the plane’s wreckage trailed for hundreds of feet.
The company thinks the pilot had fallen asleep at the controls.
The Federal Aviation Administration had fined Grant’s employer seven times in five years for safety violations, and last December said American Aviation did not give pilots the required uninterrupted rest. The company continued to fly, even though it failed to pay most fines, and some pilots said they “had never been trained in several areas,” records show.
After Grant’s death, the FAA revoked American’s license.
Perry Grant’s final flight provides a brutal glimpse into the life of air-cargo pilots, who often pocket poor wages and fly at all hours to earn their stripes, and who work for companies that sometimes blatantly skirt safety rules – and get away with it.
Nearly every month, another cargo pilot falls from the sky, making theirs the deadliest form of commercial aviation in the United States.
Behind those casualties is a booming industry that easily attracts young pilots hungry for hours and the chance to rise to better-paying jobs.
Some cargo pilots themselves have adopted a nickname: freight dogs.
Pilots say pay can be as low as $15,000 a year, a stark contrast to the six-figure salaries for pilots employed by larger carriers. Most earn $30,000 to $60,000 a year, depending on their employer, experience and hours, interviews show.
Experts say the very profile of the industry – older planes, less-experienced pilots, longer hours, overnight flying, dangerous weather – adds safety hurdles.
“Those are all little risk factors … that require additional oversight and training on the part of the company, and that is usually missing in most of the cargo operators,” said John J. Goglia, who served on the National Transportation Safety Board for nine years as an outspoken safety advocate.
“Alone, any one of those means nothing. All of a sudden we have a string of them coming together, and all of a sudden we’ve got an accident,” Goglia said.
Cargo pilots fly more hours than their peers navigating passenger planes. They often do so against the clock, while much of the nation sleeps.
Shane Storz, director of operations for Multi-Aero Inc., a cargo company that lost a pilot in an Iowa crash in 2001, said the culture of the industry affects safety.
“A lot of these companies, they don’t have good training programs. They take an individual out of flight instruction and put him in a (cargo) seat, and that’s where you get a lot of accidents,” Storz said. “These guys are so hungry to go to the airlines, they will do anything. You’ve got pilots flying for nothing.”
