ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, August 18, 1996 TAG: 9608190081
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHRISTINA NUCKOLS STAFF WRITER
MEMO: ***CORRECTION***
Published correction ran on August 20, 1996.
Richard Peery is a retired air traffic assistant and flight data
specialist. His title was incorrect in a story about radar at the
Roanoke airport in Sunday's paper.
AT ROANOKE'S AIRPORT, radar goes unmanned from midnight to 6 a.m., even though some freight and passenger planes land and take off during those hours. Could an all-night operation have prevented last week's fatal crash?
When Richard Peery read about Praveen Bhaskaran's death in a plane crash last week, he thought of the countless pilots he helped to guide back to safety when they faltered from their flight path.
"All these saves go unnoticed," said the retired air traffic controller who was based at the Roanoke Regional Airport tower. "It seems like a minute thing at the time. The fellow is doing something wrong, and you tell him and he corrects it."
But when Bhaskaran's single-engine plane approached the airport shortly after midnight Tuesday morning, the tower was closed. Peery, who still serves as an accident-prevention counselor for the Federal Aviation Administration, believes the Vinton pilot might well be alive today if he had attempted his landing just 15 minutes earlier, when the tower was still open and local radar service was available.
"Had the facility been open when the pilot shot the approach, he'd have been followed on radar, and they could have warned him immediately," he said.
Maurice Hammack, a Bassett pilot with 40 years of experience, noted that planes take off and land without local radar service every day in airports across the country. But when a pilot is already in trouble - whether it's because of weather, human error or equipment problems - having assistance near at hand can make the difference between life and death.
"If he comes in and he's knowledgeable and does everything right, there's no problem," Hammack said. "If he does anything wrong, nobody's there to help him."
It will likely take months before the FAA makes a final ruling on the cause of Tuesday's crash. However, in a preliminary report released Saturday, air-safety investigator Randi-Jean Kukla said Bhaskaran's last recorded transmission, made to another unidentified pilot, was "I'll tell what I'm going to do, is, I'm going to do a missed approach, my uh needles are (unintelligible) working (unintelligible)." At that point, the transmission ended abruptly, according to the report.
What Bhaskaran meant by a "missed approach" was that he had to abort his landing and try again. Investigators don't know whether his first attempt was foiled by the foggy, rainy weather or some other factor or combination of factors.
Bhaskaran was using an instrument flight plan and was relying on radar information from the Washington Air Traffic Control Center. Because he regularly landed after hours in Roanoke, his plane should have been equipped with instructions for how to maneuver safely back to the beginning of the runway. Those instructions would have told him to make a 330-degree turn to the left - this would have brought his plane directly over Valley View Mall - climb to an altitude of 5,000 feet and try again. Instead, Bhaskaran's plane crashed into Catawba Mountain, five miles northwest of the airport, at an altitude of 2,400 feet.
"The horrible thing about it is you can't reconstruct it," Hammack said. "What went through his mind, and why did he do the things he did?"
Kukla will be trying to find at least partial answers to those questions. According to her report, she has found no evidence of mechanical malfunction in her examination of the airframe and engine. She said Friday that the plane's navigation radios are being taken to a special FAA facility in Kansas for examination. She said she also will be reviewing radar data from the Washington control center.
Kukla's report did say the plane's marker beacon lights were not found on the instrument panel or elsewhere at the crash site. The report said maintenance records indicated the lights were removed in April, and there was no record of replacement.
Hammack said the lights flash and make a beeping noise when triggered by instruments on the ground at the airport to remind pilots they must begin the procedures necessary to execute a missed approach.
"If those were removed, it would give [Bhaskaran] a little bit of a handicap," Hammack said.
But even with the lights gone, Hammack said, Bhaskaran would have had an ``80 to 90 percent chance" of landing safely with guidance from the Roanoke tower.
Bhaskaran was an experienced pilot as well as a flight instructor. He had logged 2,000 hours of flight time, including 284 hours of night flight.
"Being a local pilot, he knew the terrain," Peery said. "If this had been an itinerant or out-of-town pilot, it would have been more understandable."
But local pilots know there isn't much room for error at the Roanoke airport.
Peery and Hammack agree that the Roanoke airport is dangerous because of the area geography.
"We have an airport set right down in a bowl," Peery said. "A lot of pilots are kind of afraid to land here at night."
Particularly since 1981, when the airport tower's 24-hour radar service was cut in the midst of a national strike by air traffic controllers. Since that time, the tower has closed from midnight to 6 a.m. daily.
But airplanes continue to land during the period when the tower is locked tight.
Jacqueline Shuck, executive director of the airport, said night traffic includes not only freight and bank runs like Bhaskaran's, but also a couple of 30-seat commercial passenger flights.
Shuck said the Roanoke Regional Airport Commission has asked the FAA to perform traffic counts for off-hours flights as a step toward reinstating the 24-hour service. In the past, the FAA has ruled that the traffic was too light to warrant extended radar service, but the commission has recently renewed requests for a new count.
Roanoke isn't the only airport where flights land without help from the local tower.
"There are a lot of part-time towers, like Lynchburg and Newport News," said Tom Jones, a flight standards official with the FAA in Richmond. "I guess it's just budgets."
Lynchburg, in fact, has no radar service at all. Its air traffic controllers provide sight assistance, but planes landing there use the radar service in Washington, D.C., 24 hours a day. The same is true of Danville.
Peery said air-traffic controllers in Washington can actually track planes in Roanoke almost to the ground. However, they also are handling a larger traffic volume and thus are unlikely to pick back up on an aircraft if it suddenly pulls out of its landing pattern.
Air traffic controllers without local radar wouldn't have made much difference in Tuesday morning's fog, Peery said, but the fact is that Roanoke's tower has radar. There was just no one there to operate it.
"I guess it's expensive, but not too much," Peery said. "A skeleton crew could keep the thing open. As few as two could man that tower."
LENGTH: Long : 129 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: CINDY PINKSTON/Staff. Praveen Bhaskaran, who frequentlyby CNBflew to Roanoke after the radar system shut down at midnight, died
Tuesday when his plane crashed into Catawba Mountain. color. KEYWORDS: FATALITY