Pilot's Careless Mistakes Kills His Own Brother!

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On a gusty January afternoon in 2014, a Bombardier Challenger 601 crew flew a second approach into Aspen with a tailwind well beyond the airplane's flight manual limit. The runway impact that followed was 6 g.

The Challenger 601 was inbound to Aspen-Pitkin County Airport on January 5, 2014, a Part 91 cross-country flight with two pilots and a CL-600-rated pilot riding in the jumpseat. The captain had asked that experienced pilot along specifically to provide guidance into the high-altitude, terrain-limited airport. Both flight crewmembers had only recently finished simulator training for the type rating, with roughly 12 to 14 hours in the airplane.

The first approach to Runway 15 was abandoned after the tower reported a 33-knot tailwind component, well past the airplane's 10-knot limit. ATC vectored them around for a second LOC/DME-E approach. Winds were still gusting from the northwest, near or in excess of the airplane's published tailwind and crosswind limits for landing.

The initial portion of that second approach looked stable. Then, in the final minute, the engines were advanced and retarded five times as airspeed wandered between 135 and 150 knots. The airplane stayed nose-down through the final descent, struck the runway nose-first, bounced, and came back down at about 6 g, flipping inverted on Runway 15. The copilot was killed. The captain and the jumpseat pilot were seriously injured, and the airplane was destroyed by post-crash fire. Investigators determined the crew did have the performance margin to go around when the approach unraveled, even with terrain considerations — they just didn't take it. The NTSB found the probable cause was the flight crew's failure to maintain airplane control during landing following an unstabilized approach, with the decision to land with a tailwind above the airplane's operating limitations and the failure to go around when the approach became unstabilized cited as contributing factors.

The pattern is one every pilot has seen at some level: a high-workload arrival, a crew newer to the airframe than the situation demanded, a resource in the jumpseat who couldn't actually fly the airplane, and limits that were treated as guidance rather than hard numbers. The go-around was available. It wasn't taken.

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SOURCES

NTSB Accident ID: CEN14FA099
Status: Final
Final Report: https://data.ntsb.gov/carol-repgen/api/Aviation/ReportMain/GenerateNewestReport/88631/pdf
Docket: https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket?ProjectID=88631

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ABOUT PILOT DEBRIEF

Pilot Debrief is hosted by Hoover, a retired F-15E pilot and current pilot for a major U.S. airline. Every video on this channel analyzes publicly released NTSB final reports, factual narratives, CVR/FDR transcripts, and docket evidence to extract practical safety lessons for general aviation pilots. We do not speculate beyond the evidence. We do not blame pilots for being human. We debrief the decisions and the systems, not the people.

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Видео Pilot's Careless Mistakes Kills His Own Brother! канала Pilot Debrief