Quick Take
Pilot error was likely the cause of a midair collision that killed three people at Watsonville Municipal Airport in August 2022, the National Transportation Safety Board has found. The agency released its report March 28.
Pilot error was likely the cause of a midair collision that killed three people at Watsonville Municipal Airport in August 2022, the National Transportation Safety Board has found.
On March 28, the federal agency released a 12-page final report into the cause of the collision between two aircraft that found that the pilot of a larger, multiengine Cessna 340 failed to spot and avoid a smaller, single-engine Cessna 152 as both planes were attempting to land at the airport. The report also noted that the larger Cessna was flying much faster than a typical landing speed and was not properly configured for landing.
Investigators wrote that the pilot of the Cessna 340, Carl Kruppa, 75, and his wife, Nannette Plett-Kruppa, 67, had taken off from an airport in Turlock, near their home in Winton, California, on the afternoon of Aug. 18, 2022, and were preparing to land on the airport’s main runway.
The pilot of the Cessna 152, Stuart Camenson, 32, of Santa Cruz, had been doing “takeoffs and landings” at the airport and was also preparing to land on the same runway. His plane was registered to United Flight Services, a flight instruction, maintenance and aircraft rental operation based at the Watsonville airport.
Both pilots were regularly sharing their position in the sky on the airport’s common communications network. Watsonville’s airport doesn’t have an air traffic control tower, requiring pilots to communicate regularly with each other to avoid collisions.
Shortly before the crash, which occurred at 2:55 p.m., Camenson radioed that he saw Kruppa’s plane behind him. But, investigators found, 13 seconds later Camenson radioed that he was aborting his landing “because you’re coming at me pretty quick, man.”
A witness told investigators that he saw Camenson’s plane turn toward the runway before aborting the landing. He then saw Kruppa’s plane try to turn right to avoid the smaller Cessna before its wing hit Camenson’s plane and both aircraft crashed to the ground.
The Cessna 152 crashed short of the runway and broke apart while the larger plane crashed into a storage hanger room and caught fire. Camenson, Kruppa and Plett-Kruppa all died in the crash.
Investigators attributed the accident to Kruppa failing to see Camenson’s plane. They also noted that Kruppa’s plane was flying at around 180 knots (about 207 mph), much faster than a typical landing speed.
An examination of Kruppa’s plane found that both the flaps, which are used for landing, and the landing gear were retracted, meaning that the plane was not configured to land. The report found that there was no evidence of any mechanical issues that could have caused the collision.
Watsonville Municipal Airport Director Rayvon Williams assisted in the investigation and report. He told Lookout he and NTSB officials started their investigation on the same day as the “tragic event.”
“The impact here on the field has been just a heightened sensitivity of safety and trying to do those types of things that would prevent an accident like this in the future,” he said.
Williams said that as a participant of the investigation, he prefers his comments about the probable cause to come from the report itself. However, he said a review of the accident from the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association Air Safety Institute is “probably the best description of how this happened.”
In the YouTube video from the institute, the institute’s senior vice president, Richard McSpadden, uses flight data to show an animated recreation of the planes’ flights and when and what the pilots were reporting of their positions at different points.
“In general, we should just consider that we make our calls, we listen, and we establish deconfliction early and that’s probably the biggest lesson that will come out of this accident,” he said. “And that is, both pilots could see a conflict developing, and it appears that neither took action aggressively enough to avoid a collision.”
McSpadden added that investigators would likely try to understand the speed of Kruppa’s plane. He was going about 179 knots all the way through the incident when standard speed should be around 90 to 95 knots, McSpadden said.
McSpadden said “the lesson for all of us is that when you see any kind of conflict developing, take action early.”
According to the NTSB report, both pilots had multiple substances in their systems at the time of the collision but the amounts were too low to be “considered causal to the accident.”
A toxicology report for Camenson revealed THC and metabolites for cocaine and ketamine, while Kruppa’s toxicology report revealed THC, though investigators said in both cases the amounts of the drugs were too low to have contributed to the cause of the accident.
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