Plane Struck Poles, Terrain; It Was Borrowed

For Lantz B. Bricker, the chain of events that would end his life began with running low on gas three days prior.

Bricker made a safe precautionary landing in a field owned by Darrell Stover near Point Pleasant, WV, just across the Ohio River from Gallipolis, OH, on Sunday. He had become concerned about low fuel. He tried to take off from a gravel parking lot there, paralleling US Route 35, at about 10 AM Tuesday morning.

Stover, who had befriended Bricker and lent him a vehicle to go get avgas with Tuesday morning before his attempted flight, witnessed the crash. "The plane banked to the left, and he couldn't pull it back out. That's about all there is to tell," Stover told reporter Curtis Johnson of the Huntington, WV, Herald-Dispatch.

The aircraft sat for three days on the site before Bricker attempted to fly it out Tuesday. It apparently struck a low post on its takeoff run, which changed its direction, and then at about 30 feet of altitude struck utility poles and trees, crossing Route 35 before plunging nose down to the ground in a wood next to the highway.

Power lines were cut by the plane crash, and traffic on the two-lane highway backed up badly, with some local media saying the disruption lasted nine hours. US Route 35 connects Columbus to Interstate 64 and has heavy truck traffic.

Bricker was alive but unconscious immediately after the crash. He was trapped in the crushed cockpit and passers-by tried to lift his seat back to release the pressure on him. He was dead by the time paramedics summoned by a witness arrived. Volunteer firemen from Point Pleasant cut Bricker's body out of the airplane.

The accident will be investigated by the National Transportation Safety Board. An initial on-site investigation was conducted by FAA Safety Inspector David Green, from Charleston, WV. After outlining the crash sequence described above, he told reporter Johnson, "Not enough speed to obtain flight, and too much speed to stop before he struck the obstacle."

The airplane, a 1981 Piper Archer II (file image, below) PA-28-181, N8335Y, was substantially damaged, crushed back to the pilot seats with the left wing separated at the wing root. It is registered to a Canton, Ohio insurance agency; West Virginia State Police Senior Trooper J.M. Finnicum told the Charleston, WV, Gazette, that Bricker had borrowed the plane from a friend at the agency.

A Mason County 911 dispatcher told other local media that Bricker had delayed his takeoff several days due to the soft condition of the ground.

Photographs of the aircraft wreckage appear to show the flaps in the up position. The manual for a similar Piper Archer requires two notches of flaps for obstructed short- or soft-field takeoffs, but it is possible that rescuers moved the flap handle in their efforts to free Bricker or that it moved in the impact sequence. The manual also cautions that its take-off performance figures are based on a paved, dry, level runway. These will be among the issues that the investigation will examine.

According to FAA records, Bricker, from Salem, Ohio, held a Commercial Pilot Certificate issued in 2003 with single- and multi- engine privileges and was a Certified Flight Instructor and Instrument Instructor. He held a current First Class medical certificate with a standard corrective lens limitation. He was 25 years old.

The photograph of him was taken from Google cache of the web page of a flight school where Bricker formerly instructed. He had recently left to take a job in corporate aviation. He was working towards an airline transport rating, and his long term goal was to fly jets for a major airline.

Bricker learned to fly and acquired his ratings at Ohio University. 

His personal web page provides a glimpse of a young man who was socially active, a high-performance car fan, a bodybuilder and soccer player, and committed to flight as a career. He went to school on a budget, and complained that "these price hikes are robbing me blind" -- a complaint he illustrated with a graph made in Excel.

The site begins with a jaunty cartoon of an airplane, and an apparent Bricker tagline: "Everything that goes up must come down!"

Aero-News extends our condolences to the friends and family of Lantz Bricker.

FMI: www.ntsb.gov