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Jet's wake cited as cause of fatal crash
An investigation also shows that the twin-engine plane was too close to the larger aircraft in the 2003 accident.
By Times Staff
Published July 12, 2005
TAMPA - The National Transportation Safety Board confirmed Monday that a twin-engine aircraft that crashed at Memphis International Airport in 2003, killing two men including a prominent Tampa surgeon, was spun out of the air by invisible whirlwinds coming of the wingtips of a jet landing on an adjacent runway.
The NTSB did not specify whether the pilot, Dr. David Cahill, a spinal neurosurgeon, or air traffic controllers were at fault. John Murphy, who sat next to Cahill in the 1981 six-seat Beechcraft, also was killed. Two passengers in the back, Ed Brown and Charles "Chip" Lomel, survived serious injuries.
The Federal Aviation Administration requires that a small plane flying behind a large one maintain a horizontal separation of 4 miles. Radar data show that before the crash, when the jet was at an altitude of 500 feet and the Beechcraft was at 1,700 feet, the two planes were 3.52 miles apart, and the Beechcraft was closing.
Because the wingtip whirlwinds, called wake turbulence, can drift on the breeze and last for as long as five minutes, the FAA also requires that parallel runways separated by fewer than 2,500 feet be treated as one runway. In Memphis, the runways on which the jet and the Beechcraft were landing are only 972 feet apart.
[Last modified July 12, 2005, 01:25:07]
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