Episode 32 – Payne Stewart’s Learjet decompression death and missing maintenance logs
Plane Crash DiariesShow Notes
A listener asked me to take a closer look at the crash of a Lear jet in 1999 that was carrying golfer Payne Stewart so here we are.
Of all the crashes we’ve looked at this has to be one of the more frustrating and needs quite a bit of sleuthing. The main reason is the NTSB still has not published a final report and probably never will.
The basic facts are not in dispute – it was a case of a plane decompression at high altitude. But how it happened is another matter.
So let’s try and dig deep and discover what led to the death of one of the best known sportsmen in the United States.
The basic story goes like this.
On October 25, 1999 a Learjet 35 registration N47BA, operated by Sunjet Aviation based in Sanford, Florida departed Orlando, Florida, for Dallas, Texas, at around 0920 eastern daylight time (EDT). Radio contact with the flight was lost north of Gainesville, after air traffic control (ATC) cleared the airplane to flight level (FL) 390.
The learjet was then intercepted by several U.S. Air Force and Air National Guard aircraft as it headed in a north west direction. The military pilots flew close enough to see that the windshields of the Learjet were frosted or covered with condensation.
Later the airplane engines began spooling down, controlled flight was not possible, and the learjet stalled and spiralled to the ground, impacting an open field between the towns of Mila and Aberdeen in South Dakota just before 12h15 central daylight time on October 25th 1999.
The NTSB scrutinised the maintenance logs and found a snag reported in February 1998 that the cabin occasionally would not hold pressure at low altitudes. Maintenance checked this on the ground but could not replicate the problem, so it wasn’t fixed.
IN May 1999 Sunjet maintenance personnel were checked out as part of the Phase A1-6 inspection, which included pressurization system checks. All seemed fine once more.
But it wasn’t.
A Sunjet Aviation pilot reported to Safety Board investigators that a month later, July 22, 1999 during a flight in the very same Learjet, the pressurization system would not maintain a full pressure differential and that later the cabin altitude “started climbing well past 2,000 feet per minute” he said.
When confronted by the NTSB, the Sunjet Aviation Chief pilot denied this, saying that he hadn’t noticed any differential.
However, a July 23, 1999, Work Order discrepancy sheet 5895 noted the following: “Discrepancy: Pressurization check and operation of system.”
More from Plane Crash Diaries
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Welcome back to Plane Crash Diaries with me, your host and pilot, Des Latham. Episode 44 and we’re exploring more bizarre stories of pilot suicide with the tragedy of A10 Captain Craig Button and the Kamikaze Pink Porn Pilot, Mitsuyatsu Maeno. A listener called Clifford who’s a SouthWest Airlines pilot suggested the topic for this episode and it’s taken me a year to get around to it – the curious case of Captain Craig Button. The incident has been called one of the most puzzling in US Air Force history. We’ll also hear about an off the wall weird example of pilot suicide in the second half, Japanese porn actor and pilot Mitsuyasu Maeno who dressed up in Kamikazi gear than tried to kill a Yakuza crime boss with a loaded Piper Cherokee. I decided to look at these two in particular because of how cosmology, religion, and extremism can hide in plain sight in someone who may be sitting next to you on the flight deck. Neither were examples of commercial aviation-linked suicides, but they are a warning to all of us to keep an eye out for folks who may harbour dark secrets. Let’s start It on April 2nd, 1997. Captain Craig Button was leading a three plane A-10 Thunderbolt Warthog formation conducting a live-weapons training mission from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona. Button inexplicably broke formation. He flew 800 miles off course, and zigzagged across Arizona and Colorado the plane obviously being handled in a controlled fashion, maneuvering through bad weather, and in places, changing altitude. Button was tracked by radar, until he flew into Gold Dust Peak near Vail in Colorado, hitting the mountain just 100 feet below the summit. Apart from the mystery of what caused the accident, there was also a small matter of four 500 pound MK82 bombs which were never found despite extensive searches. It appeared he dropped them over the desert somewhere, like trees falling in a forest, unseen but as you’ll hear in a minute, not unheard. What caused this highly respected and skilled instructor to apparently commit suicide, which is what the Air Force concluded had happened. Unrequited love perhaps? Confusion over his role as a fighter pilot? The missing motive and missing ordnance were equally baffling. A search and rescue began immediately. The wreckage was finally spotted on 20 April 1997 by a Colorado Army National Guard helicopter crew, 18 days after Button went missing,on the northwest face of Gold Dust Peak at about 13,200 feet. Because the crash took place at such a high elevation during spring, most of the bits were buried under deep snow. Like the mysterious flight MH370, the pilot here had picked a spot on earth that was extremely difficult to access. Let’s move onto the second example of the pilot suicide took place On March 23, 1976. This involved love of a very different kind. Japanese porn actor and pilot Mitsuyasu Maeno staged a kamikaze-style attack, crashing a Piper PA-28 Cherokee into the Tokyo home of right-wing figure Yoshio Kodama. Maeno was dressed in a World War II Kamikazi pilot uniform and died on impact. He was the only fatality. The attack was motivated by rage over what was called the Lockheed bribery scandal. Yoshio Kodama was a notorious political fixer, Yakuza-connected gangster, and key figure in corrupt business practices..
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Episode 41 is about substance abuse, technocrats behaving badly, sub-standard crew training and fatal attractions to nicotine and C H 3 C H 2 OH — methylethyl alcohol, otherwise known as hootch, or in South Africa, dop.