Federal air crash investigators have squarely blamed a California pilot’s judgement for causing a twin-engine plane — that he was not certified to fly — to crash into a mountain near Silverton in 2015, killing him and three others aboard.
The National Transportation Safety Board, in a final report on the Cessna 310 crash released last week, said 71-year-old Harrold Joseph Raggio’s bad decision making and lack of situational awareness led to the wreck. Officials also said he was on track to fly to the wrong airport — one possibly in rural Montana instead of his intended destination in Amarillo, Texas — when the plane slammed into the ground during rain showers.
“The wreckage was found in rising mountainous terrain, and the accident wreckage distribution was consistent with a low-angle, high-speed impact,” the NTSB report said. “Given that post-accident examination of the airplane revealed no mechanical anomalies that would have precluded normal operation, it is likely that the non-instrument rated pilot did not see the rising mountainous terrain given the (instrument conditions) and flew directly into it.”
The NTSB identified the crash’s probable cause as “the non-instrument rated pilot’s improper judgment and his failure to maintain situational awareness, which resulted in the flight’s encounter with instrument meteorological conditions and controlled flight into terrain during cruise flight.”
Raggio and Steven Dale Wilkinson, both of Newberry Springs, Calif., were killed in the Sept. 5, 2015, crash. Rosalinda Leslie of Hesperia, Calif., and Michael Lyle Riley of Barstow, Calif., also died when the plane went down.
Raggio had acted erratically in the hours leading up to the crash when he stopped to refuel at an airport in Flagstaff, Ariz. He nearly struck another aircraft while taxiing at the airport and knocked a ladder near a fuel pump, the National Transportation Safety Board found.
He also forced a commercial airplane to abort its landing by being on a runway without permission and then “really didn’t register” what had happened when confronted, according to the NTSB. Raggio had raised other red flags as a pilot, according to the NTSB — generally breaking federal air regulations, flying a multi-engine plane when he was only certified to fly a single-engine aircraft and flying the Cessna even though it lacked a current airworthiness inspection.
The NTSB also says that despite purported claims that he flew fighter jets, the agency could find no record that he had piloted military aircraft.
“He had a history of poor decision making and piloting errors,” the NTSB wrote in its final report on the crash.
Greg Feith, who spent more than 20 years probing air crashes for the NTSB and became a senior investigator for the agency, told The Denver Post last week that the fatal flight stemmed from “one of the more unusual sequence of events” he has seen.
According to the NTSB report, Raggio left from Daggett, Calif., before heading to Flagstaff to refuel the day of the crash. As his actions drew concern with air traffic controllers and ground operators at the Arizona airport, one witness said his radio transmissions were also “screwy” and “lacked organization and context.”
When he took off for Texas, the NTSB report shows the Cessna remained low over the runway for a long time before pulling up and turning to the east and northeast.
Radar data compiled by the NTSB showed the plane departing Flagstaff and heading east along Interstate 40 until it was near the town of Grants in New Mexico. It then headed directly north into Colorado before it crashed.
When requesting weather information for his destination airport in Amarillo, Texas, the report says Raggio used the wrong airport identifier code — one for an airport in Winifred, Montana. Silverton is a more-than-500-mile drive from Amarillo.
“It’s obvious that, situationally, he didn’t understand where he was because he was going in the wrong direction,” Feith said. “He believed that he had the requisite skills to operate the complex airplane such as this.”
