Wellstone's pilot balked at flying on morning of crash
Tony Kennedy and Greg Gordon
Star Tribune
Published Feb. 22, 2003
WELL22
The captain of Sen. Paul Wellstone's fatal flight to Eveleth was so concerned about the weather that he briefly canceled the trip before deciding to go ahead with it, according to new information from crash investigators.
Three days earlier, the same pilot accidentally endangered Wellstone by flipping the wrong switch on a takeoff from St. Paul. That mistake by Capt. Richard Conry was corrected by his copilot after the plane pitched downward while trying to gain altitude just 300 feet off the ground.
"Oh, that could have been pretty bad," Conry reportedly told the copilot.
When the plane landed safely in Rochester, Wellstone jokingly told Conry to "get some sleep," the report said. Conry's copilot on that flight later suggested to Conry that he should consider retiring.
Those findings were among many facts released without comment Friday by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which won't rule on the cause of the crash for months.
But Friday's report sheds new light on the backgrounds of the two pilots and on Conry's anxiety about weather conditions before the fatal Oct. 25 flight, which included light to moderate icing, low cloud ceilings and low visibilities in northeastern Minnesota.
The NTSB report, which is several hundred pages long and still not complete, includes information gathered from air traffic controllers, meteorologists, Wellstone staffers, and employees of Aviation Charter Inc., the firm Wellstone hired to operate the flight.
On the fatal flight, Conry, 55, was paired with 30-year-old Michael Guess, an Aviation Charter copilot who was thought by some of his colleagues to need improvement.
NTSB investigators were told that Guess was friendly and eager to fly. However, "several pilots who had flown with Guess at Aviation Charter expressed concerns about Guess' flying skills, especially his ability to land the airplane without assistance," the report said.
Similarly, pilots who had flown with Conry expressed concerns about his flying skills. For example, a King Air pilot told investigators that during an instrument approach to the airport in Fort Dodge, Iowa, he had to take the controls away from Conry because Conry was unable to hold altitude.
Another King Air copilot said that he also took the airplane controls from Conry while they were cruising in poor weather. The copilot told investigators that he turned around to answer a question from passengers and when he swung back around to face the controls, he realized the plane was in a 45-degree bank and descending at 1,000 feet a minute.
Rep. Jim Oberstar, D-Minn., the ranking Democrat on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said Friday the report contains "stunning revelations about Conry."
"It's going to take some time to read and digest this report," he said, "but it may well turn out to be . . . a mixture of pilot error and weather conditions" that caused the crash.
No go, go
On the morning of the fatal flight, icing was on Conry's mind when he canceled Wellstone's flight. The captain's first weather briefing came at 7:15 a.m. The general forecast at that time for northern Minnesota was for mist, light snow, mixed icing conditions, calm winds and visibility of 1 to 4 miles.
"After getting information from the [weather] briefer, Conry stated, 'You know what, I don't think I'm going to take this flight.' "
The fiancée of copilot Guess told investigators that Conry called Guess about 8 a.m. to tell him the flight was canceled. She said he called back about 20 minutes later to say it was back on.
In the meantime, Conry had received an updated weather forecast that showed the weather had improved a bit. Conry told the weather briefer, "OK, that's what I need, at least it's above my minimums."
Steve Thornton, the air traffic controller who handled the first weather briefing and listened to a recording of the second briefing after the crash, told investigators he was concerned that someone was putting pressure on the pilot of Wellstone's plane to make the flight. Thornton told investigators he believed the pilot was "more stressed and apprehensive about the flight" during the second briefing, which was given by another controller.
Throughout the morning, even before Conry arrived at Aviation Charter's airport terminal in St. Paul, he discussed weather reports with Wellstone's scheduler.
The senator and his entourage were already at the St. Paul terminal when Conry arrived. In preparation for the 9:30 a.m. takeoff, Conry spoke to a corporate pilot who had just flown in from Duluth.
"How was it up there?" Conry reportedly asked.
The corporate pilot told investigators he thought it was unusual that Conry began asking about the weather before the pilot had even finished getting off his airplane.
Conry had the corporate pilot talk directly to the senator to reassure him. The pilot told Wellstone he was sure Conry and Guess could handle the flight.
According to the report, Conry also had tried to reach a colleague by telephone before the takeoff. The colleague told investigators that she and Conry had a practice of calling each other if they had preflight concerns, to talk things over.
Conry also called Aviation Charter headquarters in Eden Prairie several times before the flight. On one occasion, he told the company that Wellstone's flight would be delayed, but investigators weren't able to determine the nature of all the calls.
Mike Lindberg, an attorney for Aviation Charter, said Friday that the company is "unable to comment at this time" about the nature of Conry's calls or anything else raised in the report.
In one call to Aviation Charter, Conry told the company's marketing director he had done a weather check with the senator's campaign staff "and the campaign staff wanted to depart on the trip as scheduled. However, one of the Senate offices was telling him something different."
"Conry told the director he did not want to make a decision, because whichever decision he made would be the wrong one," the NTSB report said.
The copilot
Friday's report indicated Guess was handling radio communications on the final approach to Eveleth, suggesting Conry likely was at the flight controls. But the report doesn't conclude who was doing the flying.
The lead ground instructor at Aviation Charter said that Guess had trouble with memory items, weight and balance. A company pilot said Guess tended to be "fixated" during his approaches and that "airspeed and torque would . . . get too low," the report said.
In NTSB interviews, Guess was described as a nonassertive individual. Guess had 701 hours of flying time, the report said.
One Aviation Charter pilot told NTSB investigators that Guess had a habit of keeping both hands on the flight controls during a landing approach and had to be reminded to keep one hand on the throttles, to control airspeed.
He took his first piloting job with Skydive Hutchinson in 1998 and 1999, but he was released when he failed to meet the company's qualifications for flying a C-182 transport plane that carried skydivers.
He was then hired by Northwest Airlines in 1999 to teach airplane crews about systems and cockpit procedures for flying an Airbus 320 passenger jet. But Guess failed to complete the training program and resigned in October 1999, the report said.
It quoted a Northwest program manager as saying Guess had trouble grasping airplane system knowledge.
After leaving Northwest, Guess took a job at the Pan Am International Flight Academy's school as a customer support representative in October 1999, only to lose that job during a round of company layoffs.
Final moments
NTSB investigators reported that the King Air was traveling at about 200 knots and flying level as it headed toward the airport. As it descended for landing, the plane turned too far to the right and then too far to the left before the crash.
Before the plane disappeared, its speed slowed to 160 knots on the last radar reading gathered in Duluth. Moments later, a radar station closer to the Eveleth-Virginia Municipal Airport indicated the King Air A100 had slowed to 85 knots, according to an earlier NTSB report. At 85 knots, some pilots have said, the plane would be at risk of losing its aerodynamic lift and falling to the ground.
The NTSB has said Wellstone's plane had flown through possible icing conditions. Friday's report included an extensive discussion of icing but no obvious conclusions about its severity. Icing on the leading edge of a plane's wing can disrupt air flow and ruin a plane's aerodynamics.
The NTSB's meteorological group found generally light to moderate icing conditions in northern Minnesota at the time of the crash, with temperatures just above freezing .
But the inquiry into weather conditions was hampered by technical problems at the closest weather station, in International Falls, at the time of the crash. The report said the International Falls station was unable to float a weather balloon until 2 1/2 hours after the accident.
Light snow was falling in Eveleth, but Hibbing, 16 miles to the west, reported misting. The report said some data suggested moisture was freezing at ground level, while other data suggested icing at up to 3,000 feet.
Without drawing a conclusion about icing, the investigators said there was "a hint . . . of supercooled large drops" of water in the air -- drops that are below freezing, but not yet solidified. Some of these droplets, currently a subject of a study by NASA, are believed to freeze instantly when they come in contact with an aircraft.
Marcia Politovich, a meteorologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., said there were "icing conditions" in the area of the Wellstone crash, but the icing appeared to be "fairly light, fairly benign."
Politovich gave her assessment of the weather conditions to the NTSB, and she said the agency will make the final conclusions on the accident's cause.
On the day of the crash, "There were a lot of reports of icing, but they were all reports of light icing or trace icing in that area," she said. She noted the King Air is "very well equipped" to deal with icing in flight.
"So, maybe [icing] was a contributing factor along with other things that were going on. Accidents are usually not just one thing happening," she said.
Politovich started doing research on icing while flying in a King Air at the University of Wyoming. "Each icing case is different, so you can't totally generalize," she said.
Another expert who examined data for crash investigators noted in Friday's report that the icing conditions were "typical, (i.e. this was not an extreme event)."
Two pilots who landed in Eveleth before the crash told investigators that they encountered light to moderate icing but lost the ice after descending to lower altitudes.
Interviews with Aviation Charter pilots, "indicated that there were no clear standardized procedures as to how much ice should accumulate prior to operation of the de-ice boots," the report said.
Pilot backgrounds
In reporting on the backgrounds of pilots Conry and Guess, investigators talked to their colleagues. Conry had a habit of letting copilots do a lot of the flying, according to the report.
"Some copilots said Conry rarely, if ever, flew when they were paired with him, and this made them uncertain of his skill level," the report said.
When flying an Aviation Charter jet as a copilot, Conry often turned down offers to fly when it was his turn, one jet captain told investigators.
On Conry's Oct. 22 flight with Wellstone, he mistakenly engaged the autopilot instead of switching on the plane's yaw damper, according to the report. The copilot said he disconnected the autopilot, continued the climb "and later had to explain to Mr. Conry what had happened."
On yet another occasion just two months before the crash, a King Air copilot said, Conry had tuned his "course deviation indicator" to the global positioning system rather than to a navigational aid on the ground. The copilot was flying the plane and made a safe landing, but "later had to explain to Mr. Conry the reason his CDI was not indicating properly during the approach."
The investigators found curious gaps in Conry's background and a checkered performance record. He kept two different logbooks that his wife handed over to investigators. "These two logbooks contained conflicting accounts of Conry's flying activity from mid-1986 to mid-1990," the report said.
In 1994, it said, he informed the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that he had lost his logbooks and sought permission to reconstruct his more than 5,000 flight hours. The FAA later accepted a notarized statement in which he summarized his hours, but the NTSB investigators said a number of the entries could not be verified.
While his logbooks from May 1986 to May 1990 included a flight instructor's authorization for him to apply for an air transport rating, the instructor's signatures in the two logbooks were different, the investigators found. The instructor told investigators that only one of the signatures was his.
The report said Conry had vision problems during his career and his FAA medical records "showed a history of significant changes in his visual acuity." An aviation medical examiner expressed concern to the FAA in 1989 that Conry had "demonstrated a dramatic, unexplained improvement in his visual acuity and had falsified his medical form by denying having a waiver for defective distant vision."
Conry started flying for Aviation Charter in May 2001. By then, he had obtained a valid, first-class medical certificate, the report said.
The report said Conry received a "notice of disapproval" from the FAA in 1989 after his flight check for a certificate to fly commercial passenger planes, due to unsatisfactory performance in multiple areas.
Still, several people described Conry as meticulous and "by the book," and one pilot called him the most careful pilot with whom he had ever flown.
The report found a number of instances when Aviation Charter, which advertised itself as the largest on-demand charter company in Minnesota, had appropriate safety measures in its manuals and guidebooks. But it said that the firm's 25 pilots, eight copilots and three check airmen largely ignored a number of these safeguards.
Oberstar said that given the training lapses the report found at Aviation Charter, he would not be surprised if the FAA "does some inquiry with this company . . . and their procedures."
Toxicology
Final forensic toxicology reports showed no drug or alcohol issues with either pilot.
A different section of the report said three of the eight victims showed evidence of post-impact smoke or soot inhalation, suggesting that they survived the impact but not suggesting they were conscious. The three were Wellstone aides Will McLaughlin, 23; Mary McEvoy, 49; and Tom Lapic, 49.
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