Family of Fort Worth Pilot Who Died in Plane Crash Claims Air Controller Sent Him Wrong Way
Veteran pilot Steve Fehr declared an emergency when he lost power to his single-engine Beechcraft V35B Bonanza.
He and his wife were returning to Fort Worth from a visit with friends in Michigan. Fehr asked a Federal Aviation Administration controller in Fort Worth for help, according to court records and government investigative reports.
“We’ve lost engine power and need to get to an airport right away,” Fehr said.
The controller, a trainee, directed him to the North Texas Regional Airport 15 miles straight ahead, court records said. He was about 6,000 feet in the air.
A National Transportation Safety Board crash investigation details what happened next:
Losing altitude, Fehr asked her three minutes later for “something closer.” The controller told him to turn right and head 7.5 miles to an Oklahoma airport. He made the turn in what essentially was a glider at that point. The plane was down to about 3,800 feet. In those precious moments, the controller then told Fehr that a private strip was about a mile behind him.
It wasn’t true.
Fehr turned the plane again, a risky 180-degree maneuver with a dead engine, the investigative report said. Such a turn causes increased drag and additional altitude loss.
His plane hit a tree and crashed in a wooded area in southern Oklahoma while he tried to find the landing strip, which was actually 10 miles away, the NTSB said. Fehr, 64, the founder and former CEO of a large Texas baked goods company, died in the wreckage on that afternoon in July 2015. His wife, Vicki Fehr, 64, died in the hospital five days later.
The crash is the subject of a wrongful death lawsuit against the government filed by Fehr’s two sons that is scheduled to go to trial before a federal judge in April in Dallas. They are seeking $40 million in damages.
Records from the federal crash investigation attached to filings in the lawsuit reveal confusion and mistakes in the Fort Worth control center that day as the inexperienced trainee struggled to help Fehr while also directing other aircraft during a peak time. Investigators concluded that the controller was managing air traffic in a congested area that was too large; that she failed to direct the crippled plane to the closest airport; and that she gave the pilot incorrect information.
The lawsuit relies heavily on the government’s own investigation of the crash. But while the factual findings are fair game, federal law does not allow “analytical reports” containing the NTSB’s final determinations to be used in litigation. Congress intended to protect the NTSB’s “internal decision-making from controversy,” a government filing said.
There have been at least seven similar incidents in the U.S. of controllers misdirecting stricken planes since 2013, resulting in crashes, according to a court filing in the lawsuit. At least two of them were also the subject of lawsuits against the government.
The Fehr lawsuit mentioned a similar incident in Georgia in October 2014, for example, and said it was evidence of a “system-wide” FAA training problem.
The controllers in that case directed a small plane that had lost power to an airport 10 miles away when an available runway was less than 2 miles away, court records say. The single-engine plane crashed in Fayette County, south of Atlanta, injuring two occupants. The case was the subject of a federal lawsuit, which was settled about two months after it was filed, court records show. Details of the settlement were not disclosed in court filings.
And in 2016, six people were killed in an Alabama crash when the controllers directed an incapacitated plane to an airport 29 miles away when two closer airports were available, according to the Fehr lawsuit and media reports.
Wrong direction
Jon Kettles, a Dallas attorney who brought the lawsuit on behalf of the Fehr family, said no Fort Worth staff or managers who tried to help Fehr during his emergency were disciplined. Kettles, who is also a pilot and aviation expert, said an aircraft that declares an emergency is required to be given priority over all other air traffic.
“She was overloaded in the first place,” he said about the controller trainee.
Among the aircraft she was responsible for that late Sunday afternoon were numerous flights heading into DFW International Airport during the busy “arrival push,” court records show.
The FAA and the Justice Department, which is defending the lawsuit, did not respond to a request for comment. A representative of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association in Washington, D.C., also did not respond to requests for comment.
The FAA trains pilots to call if they need help, Kettles said.
Fehr “did and they didn’t help him,” said Kettles. “And worse, they sent him in the wrong direction.”
Fehr’s plane crashed 7.9 miles from where he declared an emergency — or about the same distance from the closest airport when the engine died, the lawsuit says.
“If the controllers… had not misdirected Mr. Fehr twice, the aircraft would have been able to reach a nearby airport,” the lawsuit says.
The NTSB also found during its investigation that the Fort Worth control center had not provided mandatory refresher training for its supervisors since 2010.
Kettles says he hopes the Fehr lawsuit gets the attention of the FAA, which he said is more interested in defending its controllers than in fixing the problem. The lawsuit, filed in April 2018, blames the FAA for inadequate training, supervision and staffing.
Not close enough
If the case goes to trial, it will likely come down to dueling expert opinions from aviation consultants hired by each side.
The government’s experts say Fehr was to blame for the crash due to mistakes he made. They say the evidence shows that Fehr lacked “situational awareness”; did not properly select a fuel tank, resulting in engine failure; did not perform an emergency checklist; and did not properly configure the aircraft for “maximum glide distance.”
One of the government’s experts also said Fehr “was in a better position to determine which airports were nearby than the air traffic controllers 100 miles away in Fort Worth.” Fehr had instrument displays and an iPad flight planning app in the cockpit to help him, the expert said.
“Mr. Fehr bears responsibility for this accident,” said Michael W. Kerns, a Justice Department trial attorney in a December court filing.
Incidents of controllers sending aircraft the wrong way during emergencies, although serious, are extremely rare given the volume of flights in the U.S.
On any given day, as many as 5,000 aircraft are in the sky during peak times, according to the FAA. And controllers handle an average of 44,000 daily flights. The vast majority of them encounter no problems.
A 2015 FAA air traffic safety report, the most recent available online, said that “air traffic management-related” fatal accidents have declined steadily over the years and now account for less than 2 percent of all deadly crashes.
Members of the Fehr family could not be reached for comment.
Steve Fehr was raised in Dallas and founded Fehr Foods in 1992 in Abilene. He sold it in 2011 but remained on the board of directors until shortly before his death. He and his wife lived in Westover Hills, about 6 miles west of downtown Fort Worth.
The Fehrs took off from Jackson, Mich., around 10 a.m. on July 26, 2015, and stopped to refuel in Missouri, the lawsuit said. They left for the final leg of their journey at 1:17 p.m., headed for the city-owned Spinks Airport in Fort Worth.
At around 3 p.m., Fehr began trying to reach the Fort Worth Air Route Traffic Control Center. But the trainee on duty missed his first two calls because she was also receiving calls from aircraft she was directing in three of the busiest sectors, which were “overloaded” at the time, the lawsuit says.
She didn’t ask him any questions “to better handle the emergency,” the lawsuit said. And her instructor did not take over, to better help Fehr, according to the suit.
When Fehr turned for the final time, he was down to around 1,500 feet. Vicki Fehr texted her sons to tell them how much she loved them, the suit said. Steve Fehr asked the controller four times where the private airfield was. The first three calls went unanswered, according to an FAA report included in the legal filings.
She then responded, “It’s not close enough for you to get to.” There was no response.
“The aircraft was making a descending right hand turn when she lost radar contact,” the NTSB report said.
The right wing of his plane hit an oak tree rising above evergreen trees in Oklahoma and crashed, about 7 minutes after he declared an emergency. Fehr survived the impact but was pinned inside the wreckage, the lawsuit said. He called out for help to a person who ran to the site. But he died by the time help arrived, the lawsuit said.
Vicki Fehr was flown to a Plano hospital and taken off life support four days later. She died the following day. The couple had been married 42 years.
Avoidable?
The lawsuit says the controllers and managers in Fort Worth had access to the location of nearby airports and landing strips in their ERIDS electronic display.
The trainee had less than 10 hours of training on one of the designated areas of airspace — called sectors — that she was responsible for the day of the crash, according to an FAA report in the court filings. Two of the sectors she was handling should have been split and staffed separately at that time of the day due to heavy traffic, the FAA report said.
Richard P. Burgess, an aviation consultant with more than 36 years of air traffic control experience, was hired by the Fehrs to examine the fatal crash. He concluded that it was avoidable and that “multiple mistakes in operations, supervision and management” contributed to the outcome.
“The pilot of the emergency aircraft continued making turns to find this airport and died trying to find it,” Burgess wrote in his report. “There were numerous opportunities during this six-minute period to provide accurate information and maximum assistance to this emergency aircraft.”
The FAA issued a “corrective action plan” in January 2016 as a result of the Fehr crash. It required that a briefing be given to all Fort Worth control center employees “regarding expectations when aircraft in distress request the location of the nearest airport.”
Josh A. Verde, a Houston lawyer who is an aviation expert and former flight instructor, said he used to tell his students to be prepared by knowing where all available airports are along their route.
Current technology now gives pilots the ability to see digital readouts of all airports along their route, he said. Some aircraft are even outfitted with a customized GPS feature that allows pilots to push a button that immediately gives them the nearest suitable airport. Controllers are there to help, he said, but they’re “just looking at a screen.”
Verde said it’s ultimately the responsibility of pilots to know where they are, and that some pilots rely too much on air traffic control. But bad information, he said, is a different story.
“While it is the pilot’s responsibility to know what’s around them, there is an expectation that what air traffic control tells you is going to be correct,” he said.
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