Accident Overview
On May 15, 2017, at about 1529 eastern daylight time, a Learjet 35A, registration N452DA, departed controlled flight while performing a circling approach to runway 1 at Teterboro Airport (TEB), Teterboro, New Jersey. The airplane struck a commercial building and parking lot. The pilot-in-command (PIC) and second-in-command (SIC) died; no persons on the ground were injured. The aircraft was destroyed by impact forces and postcrash fire. The airplane was registered to A&C Big Sky Aviation, LLC and operated by Trans-Pacific Air Charter, LLC under 14 CFR Part 91 as a positioning flight. Visual meteorological conditions prevailed, and an instrument flight rules flight plan had been filed. The flight departed Philadelphia International Airport (PHL) at about 1504 and was destined for TEB.
Flight and Crew Actions
The accident leg was the third and final scheduled flight of the day. Earlier, the crew had flown from TEB to Laurence G. Hanscom Field (BED) and then from BED to PHL. The PIC checked weather before departing TEB at about 0732 but did not check again before the PHL–TEB flight, despite a company policy requiring weather information within 3 hours of departure. The crew filed a flight plan for the accident flight with incompatible entries for altitude (27,000 feet) and time en route (28 minutes), suggesting little attention to preflight planning. The crew had limited time in flight for approach planning and briefing as required by company policy and did not conduct an approach briefing before attempting to land.
Cockpit voice recorder data indicated that the SIC was the pilot flying (PF) from PHL to TEB, contrary to a company policy that prohibited the SIC from acting as PF based on his experience level. The PIC regularly coached the SIC on checklist initiation and airplane control from before takeoff until the final seconds of the flight. This coaching likely distracted the PIC from his duties as pilot monitoring, such as executing checklists and entering approach waypoints into the flight management system. Procedural deviations and errors resulted in the flight crew’s lack of situational awareness throughout the flight and approach.
Neither pilot realized that the airplane’s navigation equipment had not been properly set for the instrument approach clearance they received. Consequently, the crew improperly executed the vertical profile, crossing an intermediate fix and the final approach fix hundreds of feet above the specified altitudes. The controller had vectored the flight for the instrument landing system runway 6 approach, circle to runway 1. When the crew initiated the circle-to-land maneuver, the airplane was 2.8 nautical miles beyond the final approach fix (about 1 mile from the runway 6 threshold) and could not be maneuvered to align with the landing runway. The situation should have prompted a go-around because the flight did not meet the company’s stabilized approach criteria, but neither pilot called for a go-around. The PIC, who had assumed control, continued the approach by initiating a turn to align with the landing runway. Radar data showed that the airplane’s airspeed was below the approach speed required by company standard operating procedures. During the turn, the airplane stalled and crashed about half a nautical mile south of the runway 1 threshold.
Probable Cause
The National Transportation Safety Board determined that the probable cause of this accident was the PIC’s attempt to salvage an unstabilized visual approach, which resulted in an aerodynamic stall at low altitude. Contributing to the accident were the PIC’s decision to allow an unapproved SIC to act as pilot flying, the PIC’s inadequate and incomplete preflight planning, and the flight crew’s lack of an approach briefing. Also contributing were Trans-Pacific Jets’ lack of safety programs that would have enabled identification and correction of patterns of poor performance and procedural noncompliance, and the Federal Aviation Administration’s ineffective Safety Assurance System procedures, which failed to identify these company oversight deficiencies.