Here is one of the maaaaany articles surrounding a local doctor, Stephen Hatch, who had a plane crash earlier this year in a small aircraft. Dr. Hatch and his second wife were both killed in this crash and their teenage son Austin survived with serious injuries.
Dr. Hatch was involved in a similar crash in 2003 where his first wife was killed. Dr. Hatch and Austin survived the first crash.
This was Big News in our community and I haven’t felt comfortable posting this question before but the question just simply won’t get out of my head. Was he just a sucky pilot? Was this an aircraft with a high failure rate? IIRC it was a Beechcraft that some were calling the “Dr. Killer”.
There are pilots that are sucky. There are people that don’t learn from their mistakes. There are people that think they are better than they are at something. There are doctors that think because they are doctor they are automatically good at other shit. There are high perfomance expensive planes that take GOOOD pilots to be flown safely but that doctors/lawyers can easily afford (hence the name doctor/lawyer killers).
The guy MAY have been just damn unlucky, but given that MOST aviation accidents really arent ACCIDENTS I’d bet money that twice in a row isn’t bad luck but a combination of most/all of the above.
Yes, he was a sucky pilot. He ran his first airplane out of fuel and killed his family in the crash.
It’s possible that this second crash was not his fault, but the first one certainly was. The NTSB report is at Page not found His lawyer can say whatever he wants, but what happened seems pretty clear.
People call the Bonanza “fork-tailed doctor killer” because it is an expensive, high-performance airplane, and wealthy doctors seem prone to purchasing them, becoming overconfident in their abilities, and killing themselves.
Agreed. It takes very unusual circumstances to absolve a pilot of responsibility for having only residual fuel on board at a time when regulations required that he have 45 minutes worth. No circumstances are evident here.
There’s no excuse for running out of fuel. The only time I ever landed with minimum fuel reserves I took extra precautions to avoid an emergency situation.
a crappy GPS will put you plus or minus 10 feet. It’s not easy to pop out of a cloud deck at 200 AGL but the GPS would have given him precise ground reference to the runway. It’s not good form to jack up an approach to compensate for overshooting the runway. He would have had to know ahead of time he had a fuel issue to risk slowing it down unconventionally.
The same thing sort of happened to Ted Stevens (though he wasn’t flying). He survived a crash in the 70’s where his wife was killed and then he himself was killed in a crash more recently. But I suppose he had a lifestyle where he spent a heck of a lot of time in airplanes.
At first I thought he was nuts for flying again after the first accident but after further consideration a person wouldn’t give up driving if they were in a fatal car crash.
Surely in his heart he knew he was personally responsible for the death of his first wife but he still got behind the stick with his second family. I want to think that it was just a sad coincidence but your posts are trending more toward my cynical side which says he was simply a sucky pilot.
Most? I’ve been an insurance adjuster for over 30 years and have investigated many fatalities. That hasn’t been my experience. The automobile has been the main method of travel for Americans since it was invented and we’re hard-pressed to survive without it. Upon further thought, all of my career has been in the midwest where we simply depend on our cars to live. If I lived in a large metropolitan area like NYC, I can see giving up the keys.
IANAP but I have always heard pilots say that the only time you have too much fuel is when you are on fire.
Given that running out of fuel creates a serious problem why would you even consider taking off with less than full tanks?
Yep. Beechcraft Bonanzas are called Doctor Killers because they’re about the only ones who can afford them.
There was a doctor in Lancaster who liked to fly his Bonanza in the Tehachapis. I heard it said that he liked to fly low over a certain part of them, and count on the ever-present updraft to get him over the top. One day he took a couple of photographers from New Zealand up for a photo flight. The updraft he always counted on wasn’t there. The plane hit the plateau flat and everyone survived the impact. Their charred bodies were found in such a position as to suggest that they were trying to get the door open while they burned.
No one was surprised he crashed. But it was too bad he took two people with him.
Two reasons: first, many airplanes cannot carry both a full load of passengers and a full load of fuel. For instance, a Cessna 172 has 4 seats, but will not even carry 3 modern adults (read: fat Americans) with full fuel. If you want to fly with 4 people, you need to fly with partial tanks. There’s nothing wrong or inherently unsafe about this, as long as you plan carefully. This is often the case even for medium-size airplanes costing millions of dollars, like turboprops and business jets.
Second, many airplanes have large fuel tanks. Some single-engine Mooneys have a range of over 1,800 miles. If you are making several short trips, it is a waste of time to fill the tanks every time you stop. Again, as long as you are careful, there’s nothing wrong with this.
On the other hand, some people like to push the limits. These people are called idiots. Pushing the limits in airplanes will inevitably get you killed.