Updated: 01/04/2009 9:56 AM KSTP.com | Print Story
By: Chris Keating

KEATING: Pilot error, strong winds cause Faribault crash

Chris Keating - Reporter READ ALL OF CHRIS' BLOGS EMAIL CHRIS READ BIO

                              

The NTSB has come back with it's findings and placed the cause of this crash on two factors.  The pilot Dr. Chester Mayo and especially high crosswinds at the Faribault Airport in November of 2007.  The report says that while trying to land Mayo failed to maintain the speed needed for those crosswinds which ranged between 17 and 25-miles per hour.

I remember covering that crash and just being stunned at the sight of the debris field.  There was nothing left of the plane which was a single engine Cirrus.  Just a stain and a pile of smoking debris.  You knew right away no one survived.  And no one did.  Mayo, an orthopedic surgeon, and his son Chester Junior along with his son's girlfriend Cory Creger and Jay Wang.

The horrible irony of the crash is that the Cirrus is one of the few planes that can deploy a parachute.  And there it was on the ground seemingly in perfect condition laying in the field, deployed only after the crash. 

Mayo was returning the kids to school.  They had been spending Thanksgiving in South Dakota and his son and Wang were due back at the exclusive private      school Shattuck St. Mary.  But while crossing from the north over Highway 21 to get to the runway the plane hit the wind.  The aircraft was tossed belly up and then down to the ground.

The NTSB had no "black box," to review for answers.  Only a burned up flight log and the information retained inside the instruments on board the plane.   And after 13-months of investigating the answers are in.  Family members said at the time that Mayo learned how to fly before he could drive.  But all it took was a slight mistake to end four lives.