Report says pilot made a wrong turn, couldn't escape box canyon in fatal Forest Service crash

Hungry Horse News

A Forest Service investigation into a plane crash that killed two of its employees and the pilot says the plane went off course and tried to escape a box canyon before it went down.

Those were just some of the conclusions released Wednesday by the Forest Service team that looked at the accident. The Forest Service investigation is not the final word in the incident. The National Transportation Safety Board is actually the lead investigative agency. Its report could take months.

The Forest Service's role was to look at the accident and see how it could change procedures to make backcountry flights safer. Even so, the Forest Service's investigation has shed considerable light on why the plane crash.

The crash killed Forest Service employee Ken Good, contract pilot Jim Long of Columbia Falls and Davita Bryant of Whitefish.

Forest Service employees Matthew Ramige and Jodee Hogg survived.

The five were headed to Schafer Meadow in the Great Bear Wilderness. It was initially thought that all five were dead. Hogg and Ramige spent two days in the wilderness before walking out on their own power.

Long was a contract pilot for Edwards Aviation. The five took off from the airport Sept. 20 at about 3 p.m. Because of bad weather and low clouds, the route was to follow U.S. Highway 2 to a point south of Essex and then into Schafer.

Long made a position call to dispatch about 15 minutes into the flight saying he was at Essex and inbound to Schafer. But in reality, he was actually near Pinnacle and he was flying into the Tunnel Creek drainage - well north of Schafer.

In short, he made a wrong turn.

"The accident occurred when he was trying to escape the box canyon," said Randy Moore, the regional forester for region 9 out of Milwaukee, Wis. Moore's team headed up the investigation for the Forest Service.

Investigators don't know why Long turned when he did.

Their investigation also discovered that while Long was an experienced commercial pilot with thousands of hours of flying time, he had only about five hours of backcountry flying experience.

From the accident, the Forest Service made three safety recommendations:

€ Review and modify as needed current backcountry pilot experience and approvals for appropriate requirements, including a standard definition of "typical terrain." The initial Forest Service inspector that OK'd Long to fly apparently thought he had enough experience to fly into the backcountry. While Long had plenty of commercial flight experience, his backcountry flight experience was limited. Typical terrain defines the landscape a pilot will be flying in.

€ Re-evaluate personal protective gear for employees on flights. Ken Good, who survived the initial impact but later died, had on a Nomex shirt when the accident happened. Fire from the crash burned his lower extremities severely, but his Nomex shirt protected his upper body. The Forest Service will likely require some sort of protective clothing on future backcountry flights. A final recommendation is due out in June.

"It's already required for helicopter flights," Moore noted.

€ Place an emphasis on implementing the automated flight following program. This combination of hardware and software tracks a plane's location every two minutes, Moore explained. If it had been used on this flight, emergency personnel could have found the plane faster and maybe could have saved Good's life. As it turned out, rescue personnel initially thought the plane went down south near Schafer. It wasn't until eyewitnesses told the Forest Service and law enforcement that they heard a plane in the Tunnel Creek drainage that they started looking there.

The report did not specify any further weather protocols, Moore said. For one, Long and Good consulted on the weather beforehand it believed it was OK to fly, even though thunderstorms were rolling through the area.

Also, another pilot, who had just made the flight to Schafer earlier that afternoon, said it was OK, as long as they followed the highway route, Moore said.

The normal route is a shorter flight across mountain passes.

"The mountain passes were obscured, which is why he took that path," said Gary Morgan, technical investigator and Forest Service pilot who was on the investigation team.