FAA Records Track Flight That Ended in Fatal Crash Near Bloomington Airport
Dec. 24—Adam Clark was flying home from Chicago and was just a minute away from landing at Monroe County Airport when his small plane went down in woods near Tower Road and burned the night of Dec. 17.
The 40-year-old Bloomington man was alone in the plane and died from blunt-force trauma in the 8:10 p.m. crash.
Clark had stopped mid-trip at Indianapolis Metropolitan Airport in Fishers, and had been back in the air 45 minutes and traveled 63 miles from there when his plane crashed.
Federal Aviation Administration records indicate Clark's pilot certification is valid until 2024.
According to data from the FAA, Clark had flown the plane to Chicago on Thursday, Dec. 16, leaving the Monroe County Airport at 4 p.m. After a stop at the Fishers airport, he continued to Chicago.
The next day, he departed Chicago at 5:18 p.m. Bloomington time, made a brief stop at the Indy Metro airport,
FAA radar images available online show the plane's flight pattern. It had traveled just past the airport, made a turn to the west and then another to the north, and was approaching the airport to land when the plane gained speed and started to lose altitude.
Forty minutes from Fishers, flight records show, the plane was at 2,700 feet and traveling 167 mph. Two minutes later, it was at 2,000 feet and going 153 mph. Then it went off the radar monitor.
Weather indicators compiled by the FAA show it was dark, overcast and misty, with light rain falling, at the time of the crash. Winds were out of the southeast at 10 mph, and visibility was listed at about four miles.
The cloud ceiling was low, and it was about 40 degrees outside with a dew point in the high 30s.
Longtime commercial pilot and flight instructor Robert Katz tracks plane crashes using FAA website resources and flight records. The Dallas man said that the night of the crash, local conditions were right for fast-developing fog.
Fog often results when the dew point and temperature are close to to the same, as they were that night, Katz said. "That combination makes for unpredictable thick fog," he said, "that can occur in an instant."
He said weather conditions during the Dec. 17 crash closely mirror those present in 2006 when a Cessna plane with five Indiana University music school students aboard crashed as it approached the Monroe County Airport in rainy weather to land.
The IU student piloting the plane, Georgina H. Joshi, was killed in that crash, along with all the passengers: Robert Clayton Samels, Zachary J. Novak, Garth A. Eppley and Chris Bates Carducci.
Weather records show clouds were 100 feet off the ground and visibility was just one mile in the crash 15 years ago. The plane disappeared from radar around midnight, and 911 calls started coming in about a possible crash southwest of Bloomington.
A fire department official said at the time callers reported hearing the sound of a sputtering airplane engine and then "extreme acceleration unusual for a plane coming in for a landing."
Clark bought the seven-seat fixed-wing, single-engine aircraft that crashed this month in January 2018. The 1977 Piper PA-32R-300 is the same kind of plane John F. Kennedy Jr. was piloting when he and his wife died in a 1999 crash.
Contact reporter Laura Lane at [email protected], 812-331-4362 or 812-318-5967.
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