Aspen Drama: ‘Are You Scared?’

The anxious pilots strained to see through a swirling snowstorm before their chartered jet from Los Angeles crashed while attempting to land at Aspen Airport last March, cockpit recordings released by federal officials showed Thursday.

“Can you see?” the pilot in command, Robert Frisbie, asked the co-pilot, Peter Kowalczyk, as the Gulfstream III jet descended into the steep, mountainous terrain surrounding the Colorado ski resort.

“I’m looking, I’m looking,’ Kowalczyk replied. “I . . . No.”

“Are you scared?” asked the flight attendant, Catherine Naranjo.

“Well, I hope we make it,” Frisbie replied, explaining that a plane ahead of them on the same approach path had aborted its landing attempt and gone around for a second try.

“I don’t want to hear that,” the flight attendant said. “Why didn’t you say, ‘No, I’m not scared?’ ”

“I’m not scared,” Frisbie replied.

The Gulfstream III was making an instrument approach, which meant that air traffic controllers were responsible for guiding it safely to the airport. Nonetheless, pilots are required to be able to see the ground in the moments before they touch down, and Frisbie and Kowalczyk were looking for visual reference points that would tell them where they were.

About three minutes later, Frisbie asked his co-pilot, “Can you see the highway directly down there?”

“No, it’s clouds over here,” Kowalczyk said. “I don’t see it.”

Frisbie swore.

Four minutes later, air traffic controllers advised the Gulfstream III that another plane had just abandoned its landing attempt.

“That’s not good,” Kowalczyk said.

“Are the [runway] lights all the way up?” Frisbie asked the Aspen control tower.

“Affirmative,” the tower replied. “They’re on high.”

About a minute later, the tower asked, “You have the runway in sight?”

“Yes, now,” Kowalczyk said. “Yeah, we do.”

Controllers handed over guidance of the plane to the cockpit crew, who were then responsible for flying it visually.

An automated ground-proximity warning system aboard the plane chanted off the diminishing distance between the plane and the terrain below: “500 . . . 400 . . . 300 . . . 200.”

The plane, which was not aligned properly with the runway, suddenly made a steep, banking turn in an effort to get back on course.

An alarm in the cockpit shouted “Bank angle!” indicating that the turn was too sharp.

“What’s this Gulfstream doing?” controller Tammy Jean Ford yelled to her colleagues in the tower as she watched the plane roll steeply to the left.

“Oh my God!” Ford said. “He’s going to crash!”

Seconds later, she said, she saw an explosion “light up the sky.”

The Gulfstream III had slammed into a hillside a few hundred feet short of the runway, bursting into flames and killing all 18 on board.

In addition to the pilots and flight attendant, the plane carried Robert New, a millionaire financier who had chartered the flight, and 14 of his friends and business associates.

The National Transportation Safety Board investigators revealed later that just two days before the crash, the Federal Aviation Administration had issued a strangely ambiguous Notice To Airmen concerning instrument approaches to Aspen/Pitkin County Airport.

The notice banned a circling procedure before landing at Aspen, but it failed to ban the instrument approach itself, which specifically called for circling.

“The language is confusing, quite frankly,” said Carol Carmody, who was then acting chairwoman of the NTSB.

Furthermore, the NTSB said, the FAA air traffic controllers who handled the approaches to Aspen that day did not know of the FAA notice.

“I find that troubling,” Carmody said.

There’s another question still to be answered.

Controllers directed Frisbie on a straight-in path in apparent violation of the original instrument approach procedure requiring circling. Why did they do this, especially if they were unaware of the subsequent notice banning circling?

In any event, the FAA has since dealt with the problem by banning all nighttime instrument landings at Aspen.