By Laurie Au
Honolulu Star-Bulletin
Copyright 2007 Honolulu Star-Bulletin
MAUI, Hawaii — On the day he died, Peter Miller had a late breakfast and went surfing before work.
He had family visiting him in Honolulu, a recent report by the National Transportation Safety Board said, and he was an above-average pilot by the company standards of Hawaii Air Ambulance.
“He was a good pilot,” Hawaii Air Ambulance’s former chief executive officer, Andrew Kugler, said yesterday. “He was trained. He was a pilot instructor and very capable.”
The NTSB blames Miller, 32, for the deadly crash that culminated that otherwise uneventful day, March 8, 2006.
The report, released Thursday, found that inadequate pilot training contributed to the crash of the air ambulance into a car dealership on Maui, killing all three aboard the plane. Just after 7 p.m., one of the plane’s two engines failed for undetermined reasons, and Miller was unable to maintain the minimum controllable speed, the NTSB said.
While Miller was trained in other scenarios, there were no procedures in the operator’s manual to train pilots in the event of one-engine failure, the report said.
Miller was comfortable with the plane and had logged 174 hours of flight time in the three months prior to the crash. The plane was last inspected five days before the crash.
Just before the crash, there was a radio transmission from the plane that said, “Maui, I was in a right turn. We lost an engine. Ah, we need assistance.”
Instead of landing at Kahului Airport, the plane crashed less than a mile away into a BMW car dealership on Koloa Street. As horrified witnesses looked on, the plane erupted into flames, destroying 10 cars but injuring no one on the ground.
The crash also killed 37-year-old nurse Brien Eisaman and 39-year-old paramedic Marlena Yomes, who were on their way to pick up a patient.
Since the crash, Hawaii Air Ambulance, which provides service to local hospitals, has restructured itself. It no longer operates the same type of plane involved in the crash — the Cessna 414A — and leases more modern planes, the Beech C90 King Air, from a Utah-based company, Scenic Aviation Inc.
Kugler also hired new staff to operate the business, including Joseph Hunt as president and chief executive officer. The company added more training time, including the use of new simulators, to increase safety measures, Kugler said.
In July 2005, Miller was involved in a plane crash that caused substantial damage to the aircraft at Honolulu Airport after not following procedures that called for manually lowering the landing gear.
On Jan. 31, 2004, a Hawaii Air Ambulance Cessna 414A crashed in a forested area on the slopes of Mauna Kea, killing two paramedics and a pilot. Coast Guard helicopters found the bodies of Mandy Shiraki, 47, fellow paramedic Joseph Daniel Villiaros, 39, and pilot Ron Laubacher, 38, with the wreckage at the 3,600-foot elevation, about 22 miles northwest of Hilo.
The NTSB blamed in part the pilot’s disregard for an in-flight advisory about bad weather and low visibility.