When 36-year-old Matthew Broadus of Redmond, Washington climbed aboard the sleek Schleicher ASK-21 glider three days after receiving an acrobatic plane ride as a Christmas present, he had no idea Dec. 28, 2003 would be his last day on Earth.
Neither did 30-year-old Keith Coulliette – son of Roy Coulliette, manager of the Pleasant Valley Airport outside Phoenix and owner of the Turf Soaring School – who was planning on giving Broadus the ride of his life.
Carl Remmer, an 82-year-old retired Marine Corps pilot and commercial flight instructor, and his 80-year-old friend Bob Shaff, both experienced pilots, were also out enjoying a flight in Remmer’s Piper Cub when tragedy struck.
According to witnesses, the glider was coming out of a cloverleaf maneuver at about 600 feet when Remmer’s left wing slammed into its tail, sending the glider hurtling straight into the desert floor. The impact also ripped off a three-foot-long section of the plane’s wing and sent it into a death spiral.
A subsequent investigation of the fatal accident by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) found the plane’s unexpected entry into the imaginary “aerobatic box” used by the glider partially to blame. However, neither aircraft had a transponder, and NTSB investigators cited both pilots’ failure to see each other as the main cause of the crash that killed all four men.
They weren’t the only ones. Over the past 20 years, nine people died and three were injured in preventable mid-air collisions between gliders and private and commercial aircraft.
Dozens of near-misses endangered many more. But the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) still doesn’t require gliders to carry life-saving transponders, a simple way to eliminate the risk.
* In 2006, a Hawker commercial jet pilot told NTSB that even with a collision avoidance system, he had less than a second to take evasive action after a glider suddenly appeared in his windshield. The two aircraft collided over Smith, Nevada, damaging one of the Hawker’s engines and completely disabling the glider, whose pilot had turned off his transponder to reserve battery power and had to parachute to safety.
* A transponder would have alerted a commercial jet arriving at Chicago’s busy O’Hare International Airport in 1989 that it was on a collision course with a glider at 5,000 feet. O’Hare’s air traffic controllers didn’t know the glider was there because it didn’t show up on their radar screens. Catastrophe was averted only because one of the commercial pilots spotted the glider less than a half-mile away and took immediate evasive action.
This scenario has been repeated at least twice every year for the past two decades, but the FAA still allows gliders to fly without transponders, which one critic likened to “driving at night without your headlights or tail lights on.”
Barbara F. Hollingsworth is The Examiner’s local opinion editor. She can be reached by email at: [email protected].
