Long before I dreamed of becoming a pilot, I was presented with the gift of knowing firsthand what the ramifications of poor aeronautical decision making looks like. One missed opportunity after another led to an accident that claimed two lives. We can all learn from this unavoidable reality. Better yet, we can carry this lesson with us and apply it when a similar series of challenges faces us.
Flight instructors are charged with passing a variety of skills to their students. Skills that are often dependent on a large and ever-changing body of knowledge. The most important of these skills is the most difficult and time-consuming to teach. And that is because it requires judgment—the judgment to make good decisions, even when faced with less-than-favorable conditions.
Students can be forgiven for not seeing themselves reflected in the examples they are given—all designed to teach aeronautical decision-making (ADM) skills, and all failing to some degree. The students’ lack of experience leaves them with a myopic perspective that suggests a certain bulletproof quality to their piloting skills.
With the importance of ADM in mind, I offer the following. You might think of it as a ghost story for flight students, although the lesson is one worth remembering for any pilot. In this case, the only departure from a traditional ghost story is that this story is actually true.
If this were a movie review, I would have to include a spoiler alert at this point. But as a published lesson in ADM, you know how the story turns out. There is no pretense of a happy ending.
The facts, as listed in the NTSB synopsis, are these. N6003R, a Cessna 172G, struck trees while in normal cruise flight. A 32-year-old man with 55 hours total time was at the controls. He was killed in the crash. The sky was obscured at the accident site. Ceiling and visibility were zero. The weather at the crash site was IFR with fog, drizzle, and rain. There was no record that he had obtained a weather briefing, and no flight plan was filed.
As tragic as those facts are, they do not tell the whole story of N6003R’s last flight. The synopsis does not mention that the pilot was not alone on his final flight. And it does not specify that the passenger survived the crash. Ironically, it is the passenger’s survival that makes this story memorable, and monumentally important for each of us to consider when we fly from point A to point B—even under the best of conditions.
John Emmanuel and Richard Grimaldi were good friends. Good enough, in fact, that Grimaldi shared the freedom and adventure of his new private pilot certificate with Emmanuel for a trip to Block Island off the coast of Rhode Island in August 1966. The exact details of their motivation for returning home early on a Sunday morning in the face of bad weather are unknown. The decision to launch may have been because of inexperience, or it may have been caused by a bad case of get-home-itis. It is even possible that the low-time pilot was unaware of the existence of IFR conditions at his destination. The reason makes little difference in the end. What matters is that N6003R departed from Block Island for Hartford, Connecticut, in weather that was beyond the capability of the pilot to navigate successfully.
It was raining in southern New England. Grimaldi apparently departed without the benefit of a weather briefing, and without filing a flight plan that detailed his intended route of flight. It is possible that Grimaldi could not locate a phone that morning. It is also conceivable that he did find a phone, but found it to be inoperative. In the days before satellite communications and cell phones were ubiquitous, it was not at all unusual to find islands to be peaceful, quiet places where telephones were scarce and working telephones were rare. Still, making the decision of whether or not to depart into inclement weather without a standard briefing or a flight plan is an excellent example of where to draw your go/no-go line in the sand.
A direct flight from Block Island to Hartford covers 59 nautical miles. The first few miles across Block Island Sound are obstruction free, followed by the low, rolling hills of rural Connecticut, where the occasional tower pops a few hundred feet into the air. An alternate route crosses the sound to the mouth of the Connecticut River, which runs north to within a few yards of the runways at Hartford-Brainard Airport. This route adds a half-dozen miles to the trip, but provides a clear landmark in the form of the river all the way to the flight’s destination, and is also largely free of obstructions.
It was reported that Grimaldi was familiar with a third route that carried him over Tweed-New Haven Airport, then on to Hartford—a route that allowed him to follow Interstate 91 directly into the state capital. This route is considerably longer, at almost 90 nautical miles, but it is apparently the route Grimaldi took as the Cessna made its way home in the gray overcast of the early morning hours. Unfortunately, without a flight plan on file, nobody other than Grimaldi and Emmanuel, were aware of the route.
For the next five days, in spite of a search by the Civil Air Patrol, N6003R could not be found. Family and friends of the two missing men continued the search, hoping against hope that somehow, the men had survived their ordeal. On a tip from a truck driver who reported seeing a flash in his side mirror in the vicinity of Mount Higby in Middletown, Connecticut, the volunteer search crew finally found the wreckage on August 21, six days after the crash. The crash site was located only 16 miles from their destination, Brainard Field in Hartford.
The airplane came to rest with its nose on the ground. The fuselage was inverted. The Cessna struck Mount Higby while in level flight, approximately 40 feet below the summit, where a nearly solid rock wall was exposed. The airplane had sliced through a short cluster of treetops before flying into the mountain itself, then falling to the ground where it came to a stop, its tail held high against a tree. The aircraft sat at roughly a 50-degree nose-low attitude.
The evidence suggests Grimaldi had been following the interstate and briefly lost sight of the four-lane divided highway below him. He lost his visual reference at a point where the roadway jogs to the left to skirt the mountain. Grimaldi maintained his heading. The mountain did not move.
The wreckage was found approximately 300 yards from the highway, close enough that the search crew could clearly hear the traffic below. Close enough that Emmanuel would have been tortured with the knowledge that his salvation was only a stone’s throw away—but with the instrument panel collapsed on his legs and the aircraft inverted, Emmanuel was unable to free himself or signal for help. Bloody handprints on the overhead attested to his repeated, failed attempts to do for himself what he could not. He survived the crash. He survived six days without food or water, hanging upside down beside the body of his friend.
Emmanuel was alive and conscious when he was found in the wreckage of N6003R near the peak of Mount Higby. It was late on the sixth day following the crash. He was freed by brute force, and as he was airlifted to a hospital his rescuers made their way down the mountain while darkness fell on the scene. Grimaldi’s body was recovered two days later.
On the ninth day following the crash, Emmanuel finally succumbed to the dehydration, exhaustion, and extensive trauma caused by the crash.
The lesson of this flight is in the details. This accident—like so many others—was completely avoidable. If only Grimaldi had made a command decision to wait for the weather to clear, both men would have survived. Had they recognized the degrading conditions in the early portion of their flight and gone back to Block Island, the accident could have been averted. If they had opted to land at Tweed-New Haven and call a friend to pick them up for a ride home by car, the story would have had a very different ending. If they had filed a flight plan, a search crew may have found the wreckage days sooner, sparing at least Emmanuel’s life.
It’s better to be late than not arrive at all. It’s better to be found quickly when disaster strikes, than to save a phone call in order to get airborne 15 minutes sooner.
A peculiar twist to this story occurred 26 years after Grimaldi and Emmanuel died on the face of Mount Higby. I was employed as a flight instructor at Meriden Markham Municipal Airport, just to the west of the accident site. On an almost daily basis I would fly over that mountain beside a student on our way to the practice area. Never once did I make that trip without thinking of those two men and the horror of Emmanuel’s last week on Earth. But the fact that I was flying with students in a similar airplane over the site of their demise isn’t what makes this my own personal ghost story.
My memories of the crash of N6003R go back to August 1966, when as a 7-year-old boy I came upon that wrecked fuselage hanging on the side of Mount Higby. I poked my head inside, through the window broken out by Emmanuel’s rescuers. To this day I retain a clear mental image of what that cockpit looked like in the aftermath.
This is a lesson that has served me well over the years. And it has left me with a ghost story to tell that I hope will prove to be helpful to other pilots who might think of tossing a coin or taking a chance, when the better decision is to head back to the FBO for another cup of coffee—or a nap on the couch.
I have every confidence that Richard Grimaldi and John Emmanuel would have a thing or two to say about their last flight if given the chance. Then again, perhaps they just did.
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