Retired NASCAR driver Greg Biffle was not flying his own jet when it crashed last month, killing him and six others, according to a Friday report from investigators.
The preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board also concluded that while an experienced pilot was at the controls, the person sitting in the right seat wasn’t qualified to be the copilot.
Biffle and the retired airline pilot at the controls, Dennis Dutton, and his son Jack, who were all licensed pilots, noticed problems with gauges malfunctioning on the Cessna C550 before it crashed while trying to return to the Statesville Regional Airport in North Carolina.
The plane erupted into a large fire when it hit the ground about a third of a mile from the airport’s runway.
The NTSB made clear that Jack Dutton was sitting in the copilot seat. Neither Jack Dutton nor Biffle had the right endorsement on their pilot’s licenses to serve as a copilot on that plane, and the younger Dutton had only about 175 hours of flying experience.
Aviation safety consultant Jeff Guzzetti, who used to investigate crashes for both the NTSB and Federal Aviation Administration, said he believes the lack of an experienced copilot may have been a key factor in the crash.
“This airplane requires two trained pilots, and if things go wrong and you don’t have a trained pilot, then bad things can happen,” Guzzetti said. “The airplane might have been able to be landed safely if there were two qualified pilots up front.”
The report said that a thrust reverser indicator light wasn’t working before takeoff, but after the plane got into the air, the pilot’s altimeter and some other instruments weren’t working on the left side of the cockpit. After that the report said the pilot temporarily transferred control over to the copilot while he tried to troubleshoot the problems.
The cause of the problems with the plane isn’t clear at this stage in the investigation, partly because the cockpit voice recorder cut out at times and NTSB experts have only just begun to dig into what caused the crash. Over the radio, Jack Dutton announced, “we’re having some problems here” and the cockpit recorder captured part of the conversation between the three pilots about the issues with the plane.
John Cox, who is the CEO of Safety Operating Systems, said he thinks the instrument problems on the plane might have been a bigger factor in the crash than the inexperience of the copilot.
“In the clouds with failing flight instruments is a serious situation,” Cox said.
But the report indicates that the pilots were able to resolve the problems with the gauges before they tried to land back at the airport.
The NTSB said that after a few minutes of discussion where Biffle was suggesting possibilities about what was going wrong, the pilot indicated that he had found the problem but didn’t say what it was.
At that point, the audio in the cockpit recorder returned to normal, and there was no further discussion of instrument problems before the crash.
It’s not clear why the plane came in so low and slow that it clipped two poles of landing lights before it crashed. Investigators discovered the throttle in the full forward position when they examined the wreckage. Guzzetti said that suggests the pilot may have realized the plane was too low and tried to pull up and maybe even go around.
Biffle’s wife, Cristina, and children Ryder, 5, and Emma, 14, were killed in the crash along with his friend, Craig Wadsworth.
Biffle, 55, won more than 50 races across NASCAR’s three circuits, including 19 at the Cup Series level. He also won the Trucks Series championship in 2000 and the Xfinity Series title in 2002.
In 2024, Biffle was honored for his humanitarian efforts after Hurricane Helene struck the US, even using his personal helicopter to deliver aid to flooded, remote western North Carolina.
Hundreds of people in the NASCAR community gathered at an arena in Charlotte earlier this month to honor Biffle at a public memorial service.
The jet had departed Statesville Regional Airport, about 45 miles north of Charlotte about 10 minutes before it crashed while trying to return and land.
Every indication is that the plane needed to land quickly because of the problems, so it wouldn’t have been a good option to fly to Charlotte.
The plane’s speed and altitude fluctuated significantly during the brief flight. At one point, the plane quickly soared from 1,800 feet up to 4,000 feet before descending again.
Just before the crash, it was only a couple of hundred feet off the ground.
An unqualified copilot in that seat is a violation of FAA rules that could have led to suspended licenses for both the pilot in charge and the unqualified copilot if the agency had discovered it under normal circumstances. But the FAA might not have known about that unless someone reported it.
