TRAGIC UPDATE: Entire Biffle Family Was On Crashed Plane

This is very devastating. Well, just moments ago, we heard of another devastating plane crash. This apparently a Cessna 550 Citation 2 potentially operated—we don’t know—by a single pilot with six occupants on board. Five fatalities have been confirmed so far. This is tail number November 257 Bravo Whiskey.

There are some reports—we don’t know this, but some reports—that people are linking the ownership of the aircraft to the NASCAR driver Greg Biffle, also known as “Biff.” What we did is we took this tail number. A lot of this remains unconfirmed at this point, but we took the tail number and we looked up the aircraft and we looked up the flight path.

We wanted to try to understand what’s going on as well as aligning the weather at the airport at the time. Now, I have a lot of experience flying a jet with a full Garmin 3000 suite, which I’ll show you in just a moment. I’ve never flown with a “six-pack” like I’ll show you in the listing for this.

Personally, I find that these sort of avionics are very difficult to fly with in the weather. I find it remarkable that people can do this very, very well. But if these are the current avionics and the aircraft did end up flying in what appears to be this thick fog, I think there could be a contribution to—this is full speculation at this point—but a contribution of maybe a lack of autopilot.

It could be an overwhelmed departure into the fog, into this weather right here, which may have been even worse at the time of the takeoff, and spatial disorientation. Why we could say that is take a look at this path right here, this flight path. So, what appears to be or what we appear to have is a takeoff at 10:06 a.m. from the Statesville, North Carolina Regional Airport.

This airport has a field elevation of about 1,000 feet. Given the fog at the time, I don’t suspect it was windy at the time. So I don’t, and really for a Cessna Citation 2, I don’t think this would be much of an issue. Any kind of weather crosswind or tailwind or any kind of wind issue, I don’t think would be an issue here.

But we’ve seen this happen off the coast of San Diego as well, where pilots will take off into this kind of weather and the worst moment is the moment of takeoff. You rotate and a lot happens, especially when you’re a single pilot. This is the hardest part. So, imagine this: you go to take off and you rotate into the weather.

And what happens after you rotate into the weather—here’s just an example, obviously not into the weather—but what happens is as you’re rotating into the weather, what you’re going to be given is an altitude, potentially an initial climb altitude of 1,500 or 2,000. You’re going to get talked to a lot.

You’ve got to change the radio if you’ve got autopilot. You’ve got to make sure the autopilot’s set. You’ve got to make sure your heading is right. There is a lot that happens that’s very overwhelming at these phases of flight, and you could really quickly get off course.

At the same time, you get to, let’s say, a 1,500 or 2,000-foot elevation and you’re told to hold at that elevation. Now you’ve got to switch from your regional airport radio frequency over to, you know, maybe your air traffic control departure frequency.

So you’re switching frequencies at the same time as you’re switching frequencies, you’re trying to maintain an altitude. This is hard to do. And at the same time as you’re trying to maintain altitude and switching frequencies, especially if you don’t have an autopilot and you’re trying to keep your speed up and you’re going into the weather, you’re getting disoriented.

Because you don’t have a Garmin flight deck, a lot can go wrong really quickly. So, take a look at this. We could see the aircraft climbs from field elevation to 1,800 feet. So it’s a climbing left turn—a climbing turn to the north over here. This is fine.

It’s actually very normal in a departure to climb and maybe even do an obstacle departure procedure where you’re going to climb over the airport and then take off onto your destination, which in this case looked like it was flight planned for Florida. But anyway, we get to 1,800 here.

If they were, let’s say, given an instruction to hold at 2,000, they maybe thought, “Oh, I’m approaching 1,800 too quickly, right? Let’s slow down a little or let’s level off. There’s our level off at 2,000. Let’s slow down a little bit.” So, we see that speed level off, but we’re losing that altitude.

Now, we gas up a little bit because we’re starting to get slow and losing altitude. This is all within the first three minutes, right? So, the first minute is taking off. The first two minutes, you’re fighting to maintain that altitude. You just lost 500 feet of altitude.

Why would you lose 500 feet of altitude on takeoff? Well, probably because you just flew into the clouds and you have no visual reference for what’s going on and you’re operating on a six-pack instrument, which is very difficult to do. This is very difficult. That’s why, like I said, I refuse to fly this and learn on this.

I was fortunate to learn on a Cirrus, but I mean, you know, here’s us doing stalls over the coast of Santa Barbara on it. And you could see, look how much easier it is. Watch right here on the left; you’ll see we’re going to plummet here in just a moment as we do a pusher stall.

But it’s so much easier to maintain a level aircraft when you have a giant glass screen in front of you. It’s like a video game where you just line up the sticks, right? And so here, we drop 25 degrees or whatever and then go to level out and recover from our stall.

So, this is a lot easier to operate in than this. These appear to be photos of the aircraft. The aircraft has, I believe it was, 11,500 hours on it. We’ll look in just a moment. This is when it was for sale. It was certified as a 135 operator, so it was maintained.

It’s not uncommon for people to buy these aircraft and then keep them in the 135 leasing cycle. So that way you could offset some of the costs of ownership for the aircraft. Greg, by the way, was a pilot—or is. We don’t know if he was on board the aircraft, right? We don’t know.

We know he was a helicopter pilot and a jet pilot. This plane is capable of being flown by a single pilot. But what a lot of pilots do is they’ll buy an aircraft, get the tax deduction, and then throw it into a leasing business so other people can use it in the meantime.

So, we don’t know who the occupants are of the aircraft, but we do know that as we make this left turn—which, as a single-pilot jet-rated pilot, I’ll tell you—a climbing turn into the fog without autopilot, especially if you’re a single pilot (we don’t know if they were), would be really disorienting.

This is a very, very hard departure. And so I’m not surprised to see this stress in the altitudes right here. We should not be slowing down this much. Slowing down somewhat and staying under 250 is totally normal, but we’re trying to get somewhere.

So if we stay at 225, that would be normal. Level off, stay at 225. To drop 50 miles of speed—knots, really, is what we’ll use—is very unusual to drop this altitude. Very unusual. And then what we’ll see over here is we get back to climbing.

But unfortunately, while we climb here and we get back into our next turn—so we’ve finished this turn, now we’re going to do our turn back over the airfield—we see the same thing happen again. We speed up. We’re holding about 2,000. In this case, it’s 1,900.

We’re holding the altitude, but something happens again. For some reason, it seems like we get disoriented again or something. We pull back the throttle a lot. Maybe because we’re reaching 250. 250 is your ceiling. See how rapidly we’re getting to 250 in speed over here.

We actually oversped. So, we went to 262. We’re not legally allowed to cross 250 right now. That is your legal speed limit. So, he goes, “Oh crap, I’m too fast. Pull power.” So, we pull power. Unfortunately, we pull too much power and we get down to a slow 200 again.

And as we get to 200, we start turning. So now we’re slow and we’re turning, which is going to slow us down even more. And so I don’t know if we just forgot here that the power was out or who knows, maybe there could have been a mechanical issue, right?

But we get into a turn and we forget maybe that the gas is out. And I would suspect right here that this sudden turn, this may have been stall speed right here. Worth noting right here: 129 mph. We’re not going to use miles per hour in aviation, but these tracking websites do.

So, it’s a little confusing here. To clarify, 129 mph is going to bring us down to about 112 knots. That’s closer to where we saw that stall speed in the Phenom, which does mean that maybe we didn’t necessarily overspeed here, but we came close to it given this rapid sort of acceleration in speed here, right?

So, we rapidly move up from 191 mph in this case to 262. And we do pull that power back. Again, we don’t know why that power is pulled back. I still think it’s because there’s a moment we’re like, “Oh crap, we’re going too fast,” and that power gets pulled back again.

Who knows, maybe there was an engine failure. That’s entirely possible as well. But you know, these aircraft are designed to fly with one engine out. So we’ll have to wait and see what the extra details of this one are. This may have been a final stall right here where all of a sudden we’re just way too slow.

We essentially fall out of the sky when we’re only four or 500 feet above the ground. Right? So the data ends at about 1,000 feet, which is the ground. The ground in this case is about 1,000 feet. So keep that in mind when you’re looking at an aircraft.

Look at the stall speed on the Phenom. The stall speed on the Phenom I think is a little bit lower. But if we jump over to that video again and we look at the stall speed here on the Phenom, look at where the Phenom stalls. So we stalled at about 106 here.

So they could be at a different configuration depending on where their flaps are. So their stall speed could be very different. But it took us until about 106 or 104 here to stall out. But we know we were getting really slow there on that accident aircraft.

We don’t know why. We don’t know who was on board. We just know that for some reason that aircraft got slow. My suspicion again is they realized they were going too fast. They broke the speed limit. They pulled back power and forgot to put the power back in.

And that’s when either we stalled or we just kept going here, because I don’t necessarily know that the Citation 2 would have hit stall speed here, but that turn at the end is a little bit indicative of a stall. You know, just a rollover to the left and it’s out.

This is really unfortunate and really tragic. Obviously, this is all breaking news information. So, there’s a limit to how much we can know with certainty what’s going on here. If we do a quick refresh of just some images here, we could see this is the latest information on this crash.

Tail number flight made a return to the airport shortly after takeoff. We don’t know if that’s true. It looks like that in the pattern, but that’s not unusual when you’re waiting for air traffic to clear you to continue on your path. And it could be a tool to circle.

For example, if you depart out of Heber—we won’t know all the details with certainty—but if you depart out of, let’s say, the Heber airport, you’re going to do a climb above the airport to get out of there before leaving. So, we don’t know if this was a return to the airport.

I suppose it could have been, but why did we get up to 250 knots then? If we were going to return into the pattern, we wouldn’t have climbed all the way to 260 knots in speed. You’d stay at traffic pattern speeds, which would be more like 170 consistent.

To go to 260 doesn’t really imply to me a return to the airport. But this appears to be footage of the crash. This is very devastating. Yeah, this is really sad. Oh, it looks like—oh, look at this. There’s some components on the ground over here.

It looks like—I don’t know if this is where they hit the ground and then—oh, yeah. Oh my gosh, dude. Holy smokes. That’s devastating. So, it looks like they did eventually hit what looked like the trees and the ground here, potentially with the wing and a stall.

And then this is either a cartwheel… it looks like if this was horizontal, we would see more fence damage here. This looks like it cartwheeled. Oh my gosh. Hard to say. Hard to say. Wow. That’s devastating. That’s really sad.

So, here again, footage of what the weather looked like. You could see the sun right here through the fog.