Why we need to talk about the Yute Air crash near Tuntutuliak

On Feb. 6, 2020, Yute Air Flight 1002 crashed about 12 miles from Tuntutuliak, killing the pilot and all four passengers. It was Alaska’s first fatal plane crash of the year, but media attention was brief. This absence of a broader discussion about Flight 1002 represents a missed opportunity, however, a lost chance to consider the complexity of pilot experience and a company’s role in acknowledging pilot personal limitations. Most importantly, Flight 1002 shows how tempting it is to view crashes like it through the old tired lenses of “bush pilot syndrome.”

In August 2017, the National Transportation Safety Board held an investigative hearing in Anchorage for the crash of Hageland Aviation flight 3153, a triple fatality accident near Togiak the previous October. Among the many hearing participants was Deke Abbott, then manager of the Federal Aviation Administration’s Polaris Certificate Management Office in Anchorage. (Hageland fell under Polaris office oversight.) Abbott was asked about his assessment of the state’s “bush pilot culture” and its impact on accidents like Togiak. He responded “I think it’s frankly the bulk of the cause,” and continued:

“... as I watch more and more it is an attitude of ... we push the airplane to get where we’re going. I think that’s a leftover from decades and decades and decades, and we haven’t truly gotten it to the point where folks understand the rules are there for a reason and if we stick to them we can drive this problem down. But it’s got to be a desire. The procedures are there. These airplanes are beautiful, they’re very well-maintained, but at the end of the day if a pilot makes a choice, that’s a conscious choice.”

Unfortunately, the pilot of Yute Flight 1002 had a very limited number of choices he could make. He could have refused to depart Bethel, or he could have turned back minutes into the flight. Those choices are less straightforward when you consider that he had about 700 hours of total flight time and had been with the company less than one month. He likely trusted Yute to make the right choice for him when he was dispatched in his single-engine Piper PA-32R into instrument meteorological conditions, or IMC, and had to obtain a Special Visual Flight Rules clearance out of Bethel. This clearance was later described to the Anchorage Daily News by Yute General Manager Nathan McCabe as “... pilots are using extra caution because weather conditions may change during the flight.” That is incorrect. The Special VFR clearance was required to depart Bethel because IMC prevailed in the zone. Indeed, one hour after the accident conditions had degraded so much that Bethel and Kipnuk, the destination airport, reported ceilings as low as 400 feet and visibility as low as one-half mile with “light snow, mist and freezing fog.”

For anyone familiar with small Alaska air taxis and commuters, or companies that operate under Part 135 of the Federal Aviation Regulations (FARs), the circumstances surrounding Flight 1002 echo those of previous accidents, when a pilot was instructed by management to “go take a look” and see if he or she could find a way to stay under the weather. There have historically been hundreds, possibly thousands, of these types of accidents in Alaska. Certainly, as Abbott asserted in the Togiak hearing, pilots have choices. The questions that are rarely reviewed by the public, however, involve the choices made by companies long before a flight departs.

Although operating a far larger aircraft, and thus regulated by the stricter Part 121 of the FARs, the accident involving PenAir Flight 3296 in October 2019 raises similar issues to Flight 1002 about pilot experience. While flying a twin-engine turbine Saab 2000 with a two-pilot crew, Flight 3296 overran the Dutch Harbor runway. One passenger was killed and four injured. PenAir’s own General Operations Manual did not permit the captain of Flight 3296 to operate as Pilot-In-Command, or PIC, in Dutch Harbor, as he did not meet the 300-hour PIC requirement in the aircraft. The captain had 14,761 hours of total time, but only 131 hours in the Saab. (The co-pilot had 1,447 hours of total time and 138 hours in the aircraft.) A waiver for the 300-hour requirement is possible, but according to the accident investigation, such a waiver was rarely issued. Regardless, PenAir, which was owned by Ravn Air Group, did not formally issue one for the captain of Flight 3296.

Company interviews with the NTSB show that there was a subtle yet ongoing effort by Ravn management to remove the 300-hour requirement, but the pilot group was resistant. Management’s perspective was revealed during an interview with Deke Abbott, who had been hired as Ravn’s Senior Vice President of Flight Operations a few months after the Togiak hearing. According to Abbott, his duties included oversight of Ravn’s other airlines, Hageland Aviation and Corvus, with a primary responsibility for the ongoing merger of the PenAir and Corvus operating certificates. He had no direct oversight with PenAir but was in frequent contact with Chief Pilot Crystal Branchaud, including daily interaction concerning the pilot group. “I would characterize that (relationship),” he explained, “as mentoring a very, very new chief pilot who was by herself.”

In his interview, Abbott acknowledged never flying the Saab 2000 and traveling only once, as a passenger, to Dutch Harbor. But he told investigators that he believed the longstanding 300-hour PIC flight time requirement was excessive. “I’m not convinced that it’s necessary because it’s not done elsewhere,” he said. “There are mountains around the country, around the world. Air is air. Physics are physics. Why is this different?”

The lack of PIC experience in Dutch might have played a part in what went wrong with Flight 3296, however. The PenAir crew could have diverted to Dillingham after their initial go-around, or they could have aborted the second landing attempt of Runway 13 entirely after obtaining critical wind information. When the co-pilot asked Dutch Harbor weather for a wind check ninety seconds before landing, they were told “midfield winds at three zero zero at 24.” According to the cockpit voice recorder, the co-pilot then said “Oh God,” and asked the captain, “do you wanna ... back ou t... do it again?” The captain paused and said “keep talking to weather” and the co-pilot replied, “aright ... we’ll try it again.” The captain responded “aright ... last try.” They did not call for further weather updates. The on-site weather observer would report in her notes “they were landing with at [sic] 30 kt tailwind.” The aircraft went off the runway.

Personal limitations for pilots are a tricky thing to evaluate and can present conflicts with regulatory minimums and company standards. PenAir’s Dutch Harbor PIC minimums, which predated the company’s purchase by Ravn, were a recognition of not only the airport’s specific demands but also pilot wariness in that unique environment. But acknowledgement of such limitations is not always welcome with management. “Personal standards,” Abbott told investigators, “are not professional standards. This is a professional commercial operation.” He later returned to the topic with more emphasis stating, “Personal limits is a — in my opinion, a private pilot concept.”

After the Tuntutuliak crash, Yute’s McCabe told KYUK that there were “new self-imposed restrictions on both new pilot experience and weather conditions to take off.” He also made a questionable assertion to the Anchorage Daily News that “planes can take off once cloud ceilings are at 500 feet and there is 2.5 miles of visibility,” before deflecting blame from the company, by insisting, “We’re in Alaska — it could be beautiful in one minute and terrible, awful weather in the next.”

For his part, Abbott directed his ire at the aircraft in the Dutch Harbor crash, telling the NTSB he thought there was a “potential certification issue” with the Saab 2000 and it was too “sensitive to environmental factors.” Investigators have determined that the aircraft’s anti-skid was mis-wired, but this was not a catastrophic system failure. (According to the docket, the last overhaul of the main landing gear was, as required, in January 2017.) Further, the exact same plane involved in the crash landed without incident in Dutch Harbor just hours prior to Flight 3296′s accident. That captain had more than three decades experience flying the schedule for PenAir into Dutch Harbor.

Studying Yute Flight 1002 and PenAir Flight 3296 together gives us two planes, three pilots and multiple tragedies. One aircraft was a single-engine Piper PA-32, the other a twin-turbine Saab 2000. One captain had about 700 hours of total flight time, the other over 14,000. The only thing they had in common was that both of the companies they flew for made disastrous choices in sending them out the door. Schedules could have been designed with pilot limitations in mind, flights canceled, other destinations assigned. Their companies could have made other choices before either of these pilots were placed in the cockpit. Why they did not do so is a question with repercussions that continue to be felt today.

With six people dead and four injured in these two accidents alone, the price for ignoring the direct daily impact on flight safety by company management becomes only higher with each passing year. Pilots are not the only ones making decisions, but they have been forced to shoulder a far greater responsibility. In the Togiak hearing, when he was still with the FAA, Abbott said, “... if a pilot makes a choice, it’s a conscious choice.” As is clear from what happened to Yute and PenAir, operators make conscious choices as well. They just don’t ever risk, or lose, nearly as much for those choices as pilots and their passengers do.

Colleen Mondor is the author of “The Map of My Dead Pilots: The Dangerous Game of Flying in Alaska.” Find her at chasingray.com or on Twitter @chasingray.

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