Plane Crash
Jonathan Leber
Audio: 911 call for help from Lake MichiganPosted on 04/26/2005 7:11:36 PM PDT by Jean S
A 20-year-old ministry student's rented single-engine plane ran out of gas and went down in Lake Michigan about five miles offshore, prompting him to make a frantic 911 call from his cell phone pleading for help.
| Plane Crash |
|
Jonathan Leber |
| 911 call |
| Audio: 911 call for help from Lake Michigan |
Rescue crews in boats, helicopters and planes spent much of Tuesday searching the choppy waters for Jonathan Leber before calling off the search late in the afternoon.
Leber told a dispatcher he had no flotation device and was planning to swim to shore.
"I need any help real fast," Leber of Springfield, Va., said in the call shortly before midnight Monday.
"My plane's going down real fast," he added as the dispatcher asked him questions.
He said, "I'm in the water" before the water could be heard in the background and the call cut off.
The Coast Guard estimated Leber could survive in the 44-degree water for about four hours, Lt.j.g. Boris Montasky said. Investigators don't believe the plane floated for long.
Leber, who was preparing for the ministry at Maranatha Baptist Bible College in Watertown, was flying west across the lake when he radioed he was low on fuel, Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Elizabeth Isham Cory said.
He ditched his plane in the lake a short time later.
Leber was flying under visual flight rules and was not required to file a flight plan, Cory said.
"He had gone for the weekend to New York. He had stopped in Michigan Sunday and was coming back from Michigan," said Darryl Sturgill, assistant to the college's president.
Leber had rented the plane from Wisconsin Aviation Four Lakes Inc. of Madison.
"It's tragic," said Jeff Baum, the company's president. "He was a young man with a promising life."
The National Transportation Safety Board would investigate the crash. The search included Coast Guard boats and helicopters, a C-130 plane from the Canadian Coast Guard and boats from the Milwaukee Police and Fire Departments.
Coast Guard Lt. Rolando Hernandez said the search would not resume unless investigators had new information that would lead them to think Leber could be alive.
Complete coverage of this story will appear online later tonight and in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in the morning.
I remember emergency survival guys saying that... Don't know how well it really works. But I have tried to swim in pants and shoes, and it is good advice to take both off, regardless of how well they may work as a floatation device.
It works pretty well, especially if the pants are not worn through or have no holes. I can't speak for slacks one way or the other.
It is a pain to knot off the legs of wet blue jeans while treading water, but it can be done.
A 'drown-proof' float will also work if you can't master that, (tying the knots under water) but be careful and don't drop your pants! Shoes go first. Let them sink. You'll need to add air every so often, mine held up pretty well, and I only had to add air every 5 minutes or so.
If this guy was dealing with wind, the water may have been rough, too, and that will wear you out fast, especially if you don't know how to swim in it.
This fellow was VFR and may or may not have filed a flight plan. He clearly made serious errors, the most egregious being his lack of fuel. His knowledge of the winds aloft may well have been inadequate, and his decision to cross the lake at night, rather than go around the lake could be questioned, although that's hindsight. Even if he hadn't runout of fuel, he could have had an engine faiure. They are not common, but the stakes are high.
In any event, the poor kid paid for it, RIP.
It was cold, and that will get you really fast.
Why dont you two get out of the sandbox if you cant work and play well with others
That analysis of the JFK Jr. crash is largely correct, but let me clear up a couple misunderstandings. First, he was not an instrument-rated pilot. He was taking instrument training but hadn't taken the test for the rating yet when he died. He was flying a Piper Saratoga, which is a very nice, very high-performance airplane, but it is a single-engine.
His crash resulted from a classic mistake that all pilots are warned against from their earliest training called "VFR into IMC". Essentially this means that he was trying to fly the airplane by reference to the horizon outside, but flew into a situation where there wasn't a visible horizon. This wasn't illegal, since he wasn't in clouds where a pilot is required (by the FAA and by reality) to fly by reference to his flight instruments, but at night over fog and over water the horizon may not be visible.
For aerodynamic reasons I won't get into here, virtually all airplanes are unstable about the roll axis. This means that if you have an airplane flying straight and level, and take your hands off the controls, the wings will bank in one direction or the other. Also for aerodynamic reasons, once that bank has started it will become steeper, and because the wings are turning as well as lifting the airplane will begin to descend. The turn and descent will both increase, entering what's known as a spiral dive, unless the pilot takes corrective action.
With VFR into IMC, the pilot loses reference to the outside horizon. If he doesn't immediately start using his flight instruments to control the airplane, he won't be able to keep the wings level. The abovementioned spiral dive will begin, and that dive is a situation that rapidly worsens, quickly accelerating the aircraft to beyond its maximum speed. If the pilot doesn't immediately recognize the problem and use his flight instruments to correct it, one of two things will happen, depending on how high the airplane was when it entered the spiral dive: either the airplane will hit the ground out of control at a high speed and steep angle, or the airplane will accelerate beyond its maximum design speed, at which point the pilot (who is now probably quite panicked) will make an abrupt control movement that will tear the airplane apart in midair. Either way the result is an unsurvivable crash.
It's likely that JFK Jr. could have told you all of the above the day before he died (as should have any qualified pilot). There are a number of reasons why he may have lost control the way he did. He had relatively little flight time (about 350 hours), and over half of that was with an instructor on board. That's well over the amount of instruction time he would have needed to reach his level of proficiency, and while more instruction is always a good thing, it may have indicated that he wasn't entirely comfortable flying without the instructor. Also, the Piper Saratoga is a high-performance, complex airplane. I don't know how much time he had in it, but he may have been somewhat overwhelmed by how much more advanced it is than a typical training airplane. This theory may be supported by the fact that the airplane had an autopilot. When he lost the horizon, he could have turned on the autopilot to keep the wings level, but he never did, indicating he may have been unfamiliar with the system.
Finally, he was apparently under pressure from his wife and sister-in-law to get where they were going, even after their flight had been delayed until night. "Get-there-itis", or pressing on with a flight that it's not wise to make, is a common killer of pilots; it's almost certain that had he waited until the next morning he would have made an uneventful flight. As it was, he became distracted or didn't notice that he could no longer fly by reference to the outside horion and didn't recognize or try to correct the problem until too late. Even non-instrument-rated pilots are trained to fly straight and level on instruments, and to make a 180-degree turn to get out of bad conditions, but night, complaining passengers, unfamiliarity with the aircraft, nervousness about not having an instructor, and/or all of the above contributed to his not recognizing the problem or not being able to correct it before it was too late.
It was of course a tragedy that three people died, but sadly pilots die every week by making the "VFR-into-IMC" mistake. The JFK Jr. crash was almost a stereotype of bad decision-making that despite all efforts to the contrary pilots still make far too often.
The loss of the young man who ditched into Lake Michigan wasn't exactly the same situation, as he apparently exhibited excellent piloting skills. His mistake was made hours earlier, when he chose to fly beyond gliding distance of land without flotation and survival equipment, and apparently miscalculated (or didn't calculate) his fuel requirements. It's a sad fact that the vast majority of general aviation accidents could have been prevented by proper planning or decision-making (including the decision not to go) before the plane leaves the ground.
If the FAA comes back with a "pilot error" cause of this crash, will you similarly criticize them?
Sorry, I believe I meant the NTSB, instead of the FAA. Same query.
I thought JFK jr was in a twin, I am mistaken.
I live in Michigan, obviously surrounded by water. I am VFR single engine rated and have always been told not to fly over water like a Great Lake. I do aerobat practice over my lake, but it's very shallow and if there was a livable crash landing the plane wouldn't be covered with water unless I was in the shipping channel.
I also don't fly at night over water or in clouds due to my rating. I have instrument training but not certified.
My biggest hang up is Pre-Flight. It makes me crazy when pilots don't even attempt a preflight check. As you know, most crashes are due to pilot error for something stupid.
Pure heartbreaking tragedy. God Bless him and his family and loved ones.
I was thinking the same thing. When one gets lost in an airplane (as does happen with newer pilots from time to time), one gets easily scared and confused. He may have flown around for some time, trying to figure his way out of the situation.
There are those who are pushing to make an instrument license mandatory for night flight.
Prayers for the family.
Thanks for your point of view.
appreciate it.
You did nothing wrong. You just made an observation.
This is so sad, how many kids did he have?
One of our friends crashed and died when they were flying over the home of other friends. They dipped a wing sor of as 'hello' and that was it. Been a long time ago, think it caught a tree top. Sad.
The Piper Saratoga will fly itself as well as any airline equipment.
Kennedy had state of the art Avionics and an autopilot.
Sad, but an illustration why "there are bold pilots, there are old pilots, but there are no old and bold pilots". Flying that low is usually illegal.
Prayers send!
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