Big Island Air Flight 58 Crash

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On the 25th of September 1999, Big Island Air Flight 58 Piper Chieftain, crashed on a slope of the Mauna Loa Volcano in Hawaii at approximately 5:30pm. All nine of the passengers on board and the pilot were killed in the crash. The impact sustained by the airplane and the fire that followed the impact completely destroyed the airplane. Big Island Air Flight 58 was operating under CFR Part 135 air taxi operations providing sight seeing tours to tourists and locals. The Piper Chieftain had departed from Keahole – Kona International Airport, Kona Hawaii (KOA) at around 4:22pm. The airport reported that there were visual meteorological conditions that existed prior to the planes departure. The pilot had filed a proper visual flight rules (VFR) flight plane prior to his departure. The investigation that followed performed by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) had determined that instrument conditions existed in the area of the crash site.

On the morning of the 25th of September an employee with Big Island Air who said they had seen the pilot that morning when he arrived at the airport, mentioned that he appeared to look rested and very alert. There were two flights that were scheduled for the pilot on that day. The first of his flights was a sightseeing tour that was scheduled to depart at 7am followed by the second flight also a sightseeing tour that was scheduled to depart at around 4:20pm. The second flight ultimately ended in the deaths of ten people that day.

Pilots with Big Island Air that were scheduled with a departure time of 7am or earlier would always receive a morning weather report to use as a reference and this weather report would always be included on their flight plane and weather fo...

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...onnel from the Flight Standards District. The records also showed that there were no instances of any of Big Island Air’s pilots failing to maintain the required distance from clouds while performing flight operations.

The 25th of September proved to be a tragic day in the legacy of Big Island Air. The final report from the NTSB included that the likely cause of the accident was the pilot’s poor decision to fly into known instrument meteorological conditions of the cloud covered terrain. The final report also concluded that the pilot’s failure to navigate properly and a direct disregard for standard operation procedures were all contributing factors. The pilot’s blatant disregard for flying into instrument meteorological conditions while operating under VFR rules and failing to ever obtain a weather brief all played a major role in this tragic disaster.

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