Aircraft Accident

This story is about an aircraft accident I witnessed in 1981 while working as an FAA Air Traffic Controller at Riverside Airport in Oklahoma. The airport was renamed Richard Lloyd Jones Jr. Airport sometime in the past but that name was too long so the controllers still used its original Riverside Airport name. The story does not have a happy ending so be warned. I am writing this blog for my kids primarily so they will have some idea what their dad experienced in his life.

I spent nine years in the USAF, the last five as an Air Traffic Controller. I decided to get out of the Air Force in 1976 and try to get a job as a controller with the FAA, which I did in 1977. The FAA had an age limit of 31 (I think) so I had to make the jump or stay in the USAF till retirement. My first couple of years as an FAA controller was spent at an airport in western Okla. but I finally got a transfer to Riverside Airport, Jenks, OK, which was closer to my  family.

An understanding of the different functions (controller positions) of a typical Air Traffic Control (ATC) tower is required to grasp the rest of the story. We would normally rotate through the positions every hour so everyone would get to work both easy and hard positions during their shift. Another important fact is that Riverside Airport has parallel runways meaning two runways in the same direction spaced apart enough for air traffic to safely operate on both runways at the same time.

Local Control — This position controls all aircraft taking off, landing, departures, inbound or in other words, everything in the air. This is the busiest position and as traffic increases we would split the Local Control into two positions with each taking one of the parallel runways and all the traffic on that side of the airport.

Ground Control – This position controls all taxiing aircraft to/from the runway and on the ramps. In addition, this position controls all rescue vehicles during emergencies; i.e. Fire Trucks, etc. This is the second busiest position.

Flight Data – This position coordinates with all other ATC facilities via land lines. In addition, Flight Data prepares the Flight Data strips for each Instrument Flight Rule (IFR) aircraft. IFR aircraft are under ATC contact from departure to final destination. Most aircraft use Visual Flight Rules (VFR), which means once they leave the five-mile radius of a controlled airport (like Riverside) they are on their own. They do have to contact ATC again before entering that same five-mile radius when returning. Flight Data position is the easiest of the three positions (most times anyway).

Supervisor – This is an experienced controller who has moved over to management and provides overall crew management. Normally there would only be a supervisor on shift during peak traffic hours; i.e. 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. The rest of the time a senior controller would be in charge and during very low traffic, there may only be a single controller in the tower.

Airport Patterns is another piece of the puzzle you must learn. On a single runway, traffic would use a box shaped right hand traffic pattern (Parallel runway operations use both a right hand and left hand pattern at the same time). Departures would take off on the active runway and depart either straight ahead or turn right onto crosswind leg. They would then turn right again onto downwind leg flying the opposite direction from take-off.  They would then tun left out of the traffic pattern from downwind leg. Arrivals would normally fly to intersect downwind leg mid-field then fly parallel to the runway until turning right on base leg then turn right again on final leg to touch down. Occasionally an aircraft would request a straight in approach, which means they would enter final leg several miles from the airport and fly straight to touchdown. This meant that the Local Controller had to sequence traffic that was on downwind leg with any straight in aircraft. Directions would be given to both aircraft as to their sequence to the runway and who should follow who. This gets even more complicated with two parallel runways and especially if two Local Controllers are being used.

On the day of the accident the weather was good and nothing was unusual about the flow of traffic and a single Local Controller was being used. Riverside had five flight schools, all of which would launch student flights every hour with them all returning an hour later. These flight schools also had many foreign students with barely acceptable English language skills. We had complained about this on several occasions to the flight schools to no avail.

It was not unusual to have more than 200 take-offs and landings in a single hour using both runways. In fact, at the time of this accident, Riverside was the 38^th busiest out of 400+ airports in the nation. Our traffic flow would peak on the hour during departures and again an hour later when they all returned. During the slack between these events, the controllers would rotate positions by Local Controller going to Flight Data, Ground Controller moving over to Local Control and Flight Data moving over to Ground Control. As a controller working Ground Control, you would know what type of traffic to expect when your turn came up next to take over Local Control. Believe me there have been many times when my stomach would be churning because I could see that I would be getting a load of airplanes inbound when my turn came up for Local Control.

The supervisor was usually in the Tower to help when the traffic got heavy, but there is something that you must understand. During low traffic we would have all radios on speaker so everyone could hear all transmissions from the aircraft and the controllers speaking at their positions. As soon as the traffic increased we would all go on headsets. This meant that only those in the tower on the separate positions could hear the aircraft on their frequency but everyone could still hear the controllers as they talked on their headset. Confusing? BTW Local Control and Ground Control of course used different radio frequencies but were only about eight feet apart in the tower cab.

With all that knowledge I can now tell you what happened.

We had three controllers working that day with a supervisor occasionally in the tower cab. George was working Local Control, I was working Ground Control, Bill was working Flight Data and our Supervisor was John. At the time of the accident the Supervisor (John) had gone downstairs for some reason. The student traffic was starting to return with numerous arrivals plus some departures. I had all my ground traffic moving as needed so I was watching out the window at the in-flight traffic that the Local Controller had. He had a Cessna 150 (two-place training airplane) on downwind, call-sign Tad-57, and another one coming straight-in, call-sign Jump-29, plus aircraft asking for departure clearance. He also had other aircraft calling inbound and several more in the pattern. Several examples of a C-150 is provided below:

I heard George give an aircraft take off clearance and the aircraft took the runway and started rolling. Remember I can only hear George and not the aircraft. I also heard him tell his downwind traffic “Tad-57 you are number 2 to follow a Cessna 150 (Jump-29) on three-mile final” (the straight in aircraft). George then looked at the other end of the runway to see where his departure aircraft was. I was still watching the downwind aircraft (Tad-57) when I saw him turn base leg too early which would put him in conflict with the straight-in aircraft (Jump-29). I alerted George by saying “George, your downwind turned in front of your straight in!” He knew immediately what I meant.

George immediately tried to get Tad-57 to make a right 360 degree turn and re-enter base leg behind Jump-29. He said this several times but Tad-57 continued on base-leg towards the final leg. At this time he also advised Jump-29 of traffic on base leg “Jump-29, traffic ahead and to your right”. Both Tad-57 and Jump-29 were foreign students flying solo. As I watched both aircraft and heard George continuing to try to separate the two aircraft, Jump-29 made a right hand turn and collided with Tad-57. It appeared to me that both aircraft immediately went straight down to the ground behind trees about two miles from the airport.

At the instant of impact, the supervisor John just stuck his head up from the stairs and saw two airplanes collide. George ripped off his head set and threw it on the floor and said “You stupid Son Of A Bitch!” and went past the supervisor down the spiral stairs. We three still in the cab where in shock for a micro second then experience kicked in. Flight Data (Bill) activated the crash alarm to get the fire/rescue trucks moving. I immediately stopped all ground traffic and started talking to the fire/rescue trucks giving them directions to the crash site. Supervisor John ran over and plugged into the Local Control radio and started trying to figure out who all the aircraft still flying were and where they were reference the airport. Once I had the fire/rescue trucks heading to the crash site I started helping him sort out the flying traffic. We told all aircraft to exit the traffic pattern and hold until we got the emergency under control. Flight Data (Bill) had to deal with all the phone calls that began and alerting other rescue resources.

Several minutes had passed and we were starting to identify all the traffic still holding when I see a Cessna-150 fly low over the trees, touch down on the runway in front of the tower and crash off to the side of the runway. I think I said “ What The F___!” or something similar. I immediately called the Fire/Rescue trucks and said we just had an aircraft crash on our runway, send some of the resources back to the airport immediately, which they did. They pulled the pilot out of the crash (lucky no fire) and rushed him to the hospital. The other aircraft had crashed in the back yard of one of our controllers getting ready to come to work. He was the first one to the airplane but said the pilot was dead or dying when he got to him.

Aftermath:

Normal procedure during an aircraft accident is that the working controller(s) have to be taken off position and relieved by other controllers. Since there were no other controllers working yet, they had to call in some of those off work but meanwhile we had to stay on position for an hour or more till they arrived. Once we were relieved, we all went downstairs to the break room. At this point the FAA Tower Chief said we needed to write a statement and listen to the tapes of the accident. BTW, all the radios were recorded on 8” reel to reel tapes. George is a basket case at this point. We said we were NOT going to write a statement until we talked to our union lawyers. This sent the Tower Chief into a full blown screaming fit. He was already getting calls from FAA headquarters and National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and he didn’t want to hear what we had just said. In addition, by this time the Tower was surrounded by news trucks and cameras trying to get facts about the accident.

At this point I will explain why we had a Union. The Air Traffic Controller Union was called PATCO for Professional Air traffic Controller Organization. I went from the military to working for the FAA. I knew nothing about unions at the time but quickly realized that in this job, it was very necessary. Only working controllers could be represented by the union. Supervisors, managers and Tower Chiefs could not. An Air Traffic Controller’s job was and still is extremely subjective. We had a manual 3” thick that had all the rules we had to follow to control air traffic. It covers everything to include separation of aircraft by IFR and VFR rules. It covers distance between aircraft in numerous situations. A couple of typical examples of how this works is provided next. The ATC manual says one aircraft can’t cross the runway threshold until a departing aircraft has crossed the runway end. If I have heavy traffic, I am pushing this right up to the minimum in order to get the traffic moving. A supervisor could state that my departure was 50 feet from the end of the runway when my arrival crossed the landing threshold. There is no way to prove this one way or the other but that is all it would take to get a Systems Error given to me. Another rule using radar was the three-mile separation requirement. I could have five aircraft on final lined up on radar and I must maintain three miles separation between all five. If one aircraft flies a little faster than the others this could go down to below three miles per the supervisors opinion. At the time, radar wasn’t recorded so no way to prove it, but the controller gets a Systems Error. Neither of these examples was unsafe or put anyone’s life at stake but the FAA would and did hang controllers on such issues and would especially sacrifice a controller on a high-profile accident. PATCO was our only protection because FAA management could not be relied upon to look out for the controller. PATCO had the lawyers who would stand up for the controllers against the FAA, otherwise we would be at the mercy of the bureaucracy. Please don’t assume PATCO would protect a controller even if they were at fault because they would not. They just ensured the controllers were treated fairly. I appreciate that there are many people opposed to unions, but unless you have been in this situation, your opinion isn’t even a factor.

The PATCO lawyer said to listen to the tapes and write a statement that said “On this date I observed two aircraft collide southeast of the Riverside Airport.” He said then leave the tower and they would be flying in the next morning to meet us for any further action. We advised the Tower Chief of this and he went into another screaming fit, but we just went into the recording room to listen to the tapes and write our statements.

We listened to the tape at least six times. This was the first time I actually got cold chills. George was totally out of it and would not listen to the tapes at all. We wrote our statements and then left the tower with George and went to his apartment. We had to work our way through all the news cameras and reporters then do some fancy driving to lose some of them on the way to the apartment. We finally got George to talk and we explained that he was not the cause of the accident. He did everything correct and everything possible to get those two aircraft safely apart, but the language issues finally caught up with us.

In the last paragraph I stated that only while hearing the tapes did I get cold chills. You have to understand the mind set of an Air Traffic Controller to appreciate this comment. I never met a controller who didn’t love his job. It provides instant gratification for a job well done. Every hour on position you and all your co-workers knew if you did well or screwed up in some way. It was an adrenaline rush after working a 200 traffic hour because you are talking non-stop with a constantly changing environment (picture) and you knew you kicked a__.  On the other side, if for some reason you “lost the picture” and had to get it back, sometimes with the supervisors help, you felt like crap. During those rare events, you still had to keep working and may very well have to go back on Local Control during another peak traffic hour. In order to do this hour after hour, day after day you have to disconnect from the thought that people’s lives relied on the very words you continually spoke all day. That is why we were all able to deal with the unforeseen accident immediately and only thought about the people dying when we had to listen to the tapes later. George on the other hand knew immediately that he had just possibly killed several people and that’s why he went into shock. It’s the truth when they say this is one of the most high-stress jobs in the world.

To continue with the story, the next day the PATCO lawyer met us and listened to our stories. He agreed that this was not controller error and we wrote out more detailed statements that we gave to the Tower Chief later that day.

Accident Conclusion: The FAA and NTSB finally agreed that the language issue was the primary contributing factor and the controller was not at fault.

When Jump-29 made the right turn and collided with Tad-57 he basically cut the tail off Tad-57 which crashed in the back-yard of one of our controllers. Not much hope for Tad-57 once he lost the tail of his aircraft. Jump-29 on the other hand had bent his propeller and bent back his nose gear. He also started straight down but was able to recover and keep flying even though he had severe vibration from the bent prop. He was able to limp back to the airport and is the aircraft that flew low over the trees and crashed on the runway.

As for the three controllers working that day, George, me and Bill, we went back to work a short time later although none of us ever forgot this day.

Finally, I’ve been reluctant to write this story for many, many years. It’s now 2020 so it’s been 39 years since this happened, but I remember it like it happened yesterday. I worked as a controller both USAF and FAA for around nine years. I saw and participated in numerous emergencies and have several letters of commendation for the efforts I provided in saving several pilots from death or injury. I was never the cause of any of those mishaps, but I may have just been lucky. George on the day of the accident was not lucky and I’m sure he still lives with this memory to this day. Shortly  after this accident happened I was involved with the PATCO strike and I will write the story of that life event next.