Fatal Flight Was Very Avoidable

By MIKE KELLY

Everything seemed fine except the ending.

Monday’s fiery crash of a single-engine plane onto a driveway in a Wayne neighborhood is one of those accidents that was not supposed to happen.

The pilot was a veteran flight instructor. Friends said his plane had been well-maintained. Despite low cloud cover, his return flight seemed to be routine until three miles from a runway at Essex County Airport in Caldwell.

What went wrong?

Investigators for the National Transportation Safety Board will spend the next few months perhaps most of the year weighing a variety of factors that caused Andrew Coppolo’s Beechcraft BE-36 to plummet from the nighttime sky.

They will scour the bent, fire-scarred wreckage to check whether equipment or instruments broke down. They will review radio calls and radar records.

But here is one question that may be the hardest to answer: Why was Coppolo flying that night anyway?

Coppolo, 55, left Caldwell on Sunday on a business trip, battling fog and rain for nearly four hours before landing in Charleston, S.C. The next morning, he got up and flew another hour from Charleston to Charlotte, N.C.

After a day of business meetings, he jumped back in his cockpit just before 5 p.m. to return to New Jersey. Why didn’t he spend the night in Charlotte?

Maybe he just wanted to get home to his family in Atlantic Highlands.

But Coppolo’s first decision that night simply taking off into the night sky may turn out to be a tragic flaw of this fatal flight.

Brian Alexander, a pilot and lawyer from Franklin Lakes, even has a term for the urge to fly through bad weather to get home: Get- home-itis.

“It’s one of the single biggest causes of crashes,” he said.

North Jersey was still foggy and rainy, with a 500-foot cloud ceiling, the Federal Aviation Administration reported. Coppolo knew he would have to use navigational instruments when he approached the airport. He even filed an instrument flight plan, the FAA said.

But that flight plan is a bit of a ruse. Coppolo was not flying with what pilots call “precision” landing instruments a series of gadgets that help a pilot maintain a plane’s proper horizontal position and altitude.

The best Coppolo had, the FAA said, was a “non-precision” instrument approach that only guided him on a horizontal path to the airport. He had to monitor his altitude himself, with an eye on landing charts that told him how high to fly over hills and power lines. All this in fog and a 500-foot ceiling.

Despite the poor weather conditions, Coppolo was not banned from flying by the FAA that night. Perhaps one of the most flagrant flaws in America’s flying rules is that they give pilots too much leeway to take off in bad weather.

The risk is theirs or so pilots contend. But such an explanation is inherently selfish. When planes fall from the sky, people below them are at risk, too.

The fact that Coppolo’s plane did not kill or injure anyone else on the ground is beside the point. The plane smashed into a driveway of a home in Wayne only a few yards from the front door of a family home too close a call.

Andrew Coppolo’s death is a terrible tragedy for his family. But once again the crash of a small, private plane raises a basic question of public policy:

Why allow these planes to fly in dangerous conditions?

It wasn’t necessary.

(c) 2007 Record, The; Bergen County, N.J.. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.