A 71-year-old pilot’s erratic behavior raised red flags in the hours of southwest Colorado in 2015, killing him and three others, according to federal investigators.
³ stopped for fuel in Flagstaff, Ariz., on his way from California to Texas, he nearly struck another aircraft while taxiing at an airport and knocked a ladder near a fuel pump, a National Transportation Safety Board report says.
He also forced a commercial airplane to abort its landing by being on a runway without permission at the Arizona airport, the agency said in a factual report about the crash released last week, and then “really didn’t register” what had happened when confronted.
Several hours later on Sept. 5, 2015, the Cessna 310 Raggio was flying crashed into rugged alpine terrain, at an elevation of about 11,500 feet, near Silverton. Authorities believe the plane went down at high speed and have indicated it had headed about 200 miles in the wrong direction from its intended airport — in Amarillo, Texas — when it slammed into the ground.
Raggio was only certified to fly a single-engine airplane. And, the NTSB report says, despite purported claims that he flew fighter jets, the agency could find “no record … the pilot had been issued a multi-engine airplane rating or that he had flown military aircraft.”
A pilot-rated passenger on the flight was also only certified to fly single-engine planes, the report says.
“It’s one of the more unusual sequence of events,” said Greg Feith, who spent more than 20 years probing air crashes for the NTSB and became a senior investigator for the agency. “Normally, with the majority of the accidents that I’ve investigated over 30-some years, you’re going to have pilots doing things beyond their skill set or their rating. But here you’ve got a guy that’s older, doesn’t have a lot of flight time or experience over all, and so he doesn’t have really the cognitive skills to be making decisions. And now he puts himself and three other people into an airplane that he’s not rated to fly.”
Feith added: “There are just so many compounding factors that make up the sequence of events.”
and , both of Newberry Springs, Calif., were killed in the crash.
Rosalinda Leslie of Hesperia, Calif., and Michael Lyle Riley of Barstow, Calif., also died when the plane went down. NTSB records indicated Riley was the pilot-rated passenger.
According to the NTSB report, Raggio left from Daggett, Calif., before heading to Flagstaff to refuel. As his actions raised red flags with air traffic controllers and ground operators at the Arizona airport, one witness said his radio transmissions were also “screwy” and “lacked organization and context.”
When he took off for Texas, the NTSB report shows the Cessna remained low over the runway for a long time before pulling up and turning to the east and northeast.
Radar data compiled by the NTSB showed the plane departing Flagstaff and heading east along Interstate 40 until it was near the town of Grants in New Mexico. It then headed directly north into Colorado before it crashed.
When requesting weather information for his destination airport in Amarillo, Texas, the report says Raggio used the wrong airport identifier code — one for an airport in Winifred, Montana.
Silverton is a more-than-500-mile drive from Amarillo.
“It’s obvious that, situationally, he didn’t understand where he was because he was going in the wrong direction,” Feith said. “He believed that he had the requisite skills to operate the complex airplane such as this.”
Federal investigators say there was an antidepressant in Raggio’s system found during his autopsy. Veteran’s Administration records obtained by the NTSB also showed he had a host of medical problems, including paraplegia from a 1996 car crash, depressive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, panic disorder, peptic ulcer disease, Type 2 diabetes and emphysema.
The Cessna 310 was built in 1963 and investigators were told its radios and instruments were out of date. One person also told federal air crash investigators the pilot had recently bought the airplane.
“Examination of both engines revealed no preimpact anomalies that would have precluded normal operation,” the report says.
