By Leslie Linthicum
Albuquerque Journal
Copyright 2007 Albuquerque Journal
Fateful Turn For Plane; Investigators Seek Answers To Pilot’s Southerly Path
Albuquerque ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — The four-seater Beechcraft carrying a sick toddler, her mother and three crew members on a medical flight from Ruidoso to Albuquerque on Sunday night was in the air about a minute before it turned off its flight path and, low to the ground, skimmed trees and bushes.
According to a federal accident investigator, the trees snapped off both of the airplane’s wings and the plane skidded down a hillside, coming to rest in flames in the Devil’s Canyon region of the Lincoln National Forest, only about five miles from the airport. All five people aboard were killed.
A team of nearly 20 investigators spent Tuesday from dawn to dusk at the accident scene trying to answer a basic and puzzling question: Why did pilot Ricky Byers turn south toward U.S. 70 and the Hondo Valley instead of north toward Albuquerque immediately after he took off Sunday night?
“He should have been turning to the northwest but he turned in the opposite direction,” National Transportation Safety Board regional manager David Bowling said from Denver on Tuesday.
“That’s one of the questions we have to answer,” said Bowling. “Why did he turn south?”
Answers were hard to come by Tuesday because there were no survivors and Byers made no radio contact after he took off from Sierra Blanca Regional Airport - no call to Albuquerque air traffic controllers to say he was safely on his way and no Mayday call to signal trouble.
Wings lost
The wreckage of the airplane showed one immediate clue to how it came down, NTSB’s Bowling said. “They lost the wings when they hit the trees,” he said. “This airplane pretty much came apart.”
The airport’s elevation is 6,814 feet and the crash scene is at 6,800 feet, Bowling said.
Pieces of the aircraft will be loaded onto trucks and moved out of the forest most likely today, Bowling said. The wreckage will probably be trucked to Phoenix where investigators will comb over it looking for clues of possible mechanical failure. “He could have been turning around (to return to the airport) because of some sort of problem, a mechanical problem,” Bowling said.
Another question to be investigated, Bowling said, is whether anything involving a medical emergency on board might have contributed to the accident.
“Because it is a medical flight, one of the questions that you ask is, were they in a hurry?” Bowling asked.
The plane, operated by Southwest Med Evac was flying 15-month-old Lily Smith from the Lincoln County Medical Center in Ruidoso to Albuquerque, where she was to be transferred to the University of New Mexico hospital. She was accompanied by her mother, Ruidoso resident Tracy Smith, 41. KOAT-TV reported that according to a colleague, the toddler had been experiencing seizures throughout the day.
Byers, the 56-year-old pilot, had been flying for Southwest Med Evac for a year. Also killed were Brian Miller, 44, a flight nurse who had been with the company for 11/2 years, and Deanna Palmer, a 40-year-old paramedic who had just joined the company a month ago. Miller lived in Roswell, Byers lived in Dimmitt, Texas, and Palmer had lived in Prescott Valley, Ariz., company spokesman Rob Campion said.
The bodies were taken to the Office of the Medical Investigator in Albuquerque where they were being autopsied Tuesday, spokesman Tim Stepetic said.
On the ground in the Lincoln National Forest on Tuesday were two NTSB investigators, three Federal Aviation Administration investigators, 11 FBI agents and two representatives of Raytheon, the manufacturer of the turbo-prop, NTSB’s Bowling said.
Immediate crash
Based on the airplane’s takeoff speed and distance of the crash scene from the airport, Bowling said investigators believe the plane was barely airborne before it skimmed the trees. “He probably wasn’t in the air much more than a minute - two at the most,” Bowling said.
Campion said the plane, a King Air E-90, has two seats in the cockpit, two seats for medical crew and room for a patient’s gurney. The aircraft does not require a co-pilot, Campion said.
The plane had flown to Sierra Blanca from Roswell and was on the ground loading its patient for only about 20 minutes, Campion said. The weather was “well above our minimum standards for flight,” he said, and Byers followed normal procedure by checking in with the company’s communications center in Las Cruces by cell phone just before takeoff.
Although the NTSB initially put the plane’s takeoff later in the night, the Sierra Blanca airport logged the Med Evac takeoff at 9:40 p.m. Sunday and the company said its logs also showed the takeoff at that time.
After Med Evac was not able to track the plane on satellite and the plane did not reach Albuquerque by 10:30 p.m., Campion said the company reported the plane missing.
Department of Public Safety spokesman Peter Olson said the New Mexico State Police in Alamogordo was notified the plane was missing or overdue at about 1 a.m. Monday.
The company, one of the largest medical air transportation companies in the country, operates nine helicopters and eight airplanes, and has flown nearly 13,000 patients mostly in New Mexico and Texas since it was founded in Las Cruces in 1994.