Fifteen minutes after takeoff, when the plane rose 32,500 feet, air traffic control asked Hefner to level 33,000 feet. He did not respond. The plane rose to 34,000 feet and followed the program scheduled on its autopilot. Once he arrived at Long Island, the plane went to Long Island MacArthur airport. Instead of descending, he continued to fly straight to the southwest, a course that took him directly over the center of Washington, DC. The Air Force stirred six three base F-16 fighters to intercept, its sound booms shaking windows underneath. When the pilots came to the appointment, they saw Hefner collapsed in the cabin. Shortly after, the appointment was left without fuel, entered a spiral immersion and crashed into a forest in the center of Virginia.

The speculation of why Hefner fell unconscious has focused on two possible causes. One is that, being an older man like Boehlke, he suffered a sudden and overwhelming medical event. If that is the case, then the three passengers on the back remained meaningless until the fatal descent, since they did not try to ask for help.

Another explanation is that the aging jet could have suffered a mechanical failure, such as a defective valve or a pressure seal that works badly, which caused the cabin to destroy as it climbed the altitude. In that case, the lack of oxygen would have caused everyone on board to faint in seconds.

Speaking to journalists after the accident, John Rumpel said a depressurization would have put his daughter and granddaughter softly to sleep. “That is the end of my family,” said a afflicted rumpel The Washington Post. “We are just my wife and me now.”

There is a final factor that makes commercial aviation safer than private jet trips: the rules. The strict government regulations listed in hundreds of small print pages cover everything, from the preparation of the tray tables to ads related to bathing smoke detectors. Private airplanes operate under sets of less strict rules. A set applies to flights made for personal use, without any passenger to pay. These so -called part 91 have very few restrictions. Hyde and Azaraian accidents were part 91 because they flew in planes that belonged to their family or company. Another set, called part 135, governs the operations of the air chart. The rules of part 135 are stricter, which requires, for example, that the operators obtain a document called Air Carrier certificate, which guarantees that the aircraft complies with the minimum standards. The rules also limit the amount of hours that pilots can fly per day. A pilot who flies with a co -pilot cannot fly more than 10 hours in a section, for example, while a airline pilot cannot fly more than eight.

Although Lax compared to commercial aviation regulations, the rules of part 135 can still be expensive to comply, and unscrupulous operators often have the temptation to avoid them, for example, jumping the long process of obtaining certification. A few years ago, FAA was associated with the National Air Transportation Association, a commercial group of the aviation industry, to create the Air Safe autonomous team to better inform pilots and passengers about how “the illegal operations of the air author represent a serious security danger for the itinerant public.” However, the problem has continued to get worse, especially during the pandemic, with FAA investigating more than one hundred cases every year from 2020 to 2022. “Unfortunately, there have been so many really intelligent people who have tried to find subtle ways to avoid 135 regulations that FAA has had to be increasingly artisanal when arriving with ways to stop them,” says Lee, the old pilot.

According to the documents presented to the FAA, the plane that the lenders and Vargas flew that night was one of several belonging to a man named Michael Morris of Imperial, California. Morris told Associated Press that Vargas was the “manager and main pilot of his flight company” and that he had agreed to lend the plane because he knew that Vargas “was responsible.”

Vargas “was my pilot for two years,” Morris told me when I contacted him on the phone. He described Vargas as a “great guy” and lenders as a “wonderful child”, then refused to speak more due to pending legal actions.

In early 2022, the lenders flew to Virginia for the inspections of three planes that Morris was in the process of buying a company called Central Virginia Aviation. “Riese flew two or three times. We passed a little at the airport,” he says Dennis Harrup, who worked with lenders and Vargas in the sale. One thing that stayed in Harrup’s memory was the description of the lenders of the long hours he was flying. “I remember that he told me how tired they put on: ‘I’m running irregular,'” recalls Harrup. And the lenders were happy with that: “He is excited because he is building double turbine time, which is what any young pilot dreams.”

“I would say I had been awake for three days in a row,” he says Mari Bolton, A friend of Gleiche and lenders. “I’m thinking, wait a minute, don’t you have regulations on this? I’m so confused. How is this happening?”

In rapid succession, Aviation Central Virginia solved Morris three aircraft: two appointments and a turboproopol King Air. “I assumed that they had many charter businesses,” says Harrup.

When the appointment crossed the Mojave desert, the lenders marked the automatic climate reports system for the French Valley. What he heard was not good. He had planned to land under visual flight rules, which means that he would only navigate to the track per sight, but in the last minutes, Fog had pushed from the coast. Visibility was now only three quarters of mile, with clouds floating only 300 feet above. The lenders would have to trust their navigation instruments to guide it. He settled air traffic control and presented a new flight plan. He had had to deal with conditions like before and knew the procedure well. But things were different now. It was late; I was tired; He had taken at least one drink, and his co -pilot was legally intoxicated. He had a lot of passengers on the back whose euphoria on Friday night was becoming the hangover on Saturday morning.

They descended to the clouds, the lighthouse in the tail sends flashes through the wrapping gloom. A thousand feet, 800 feet, 500 feet. The lenders looked through sadness looking for the track. The plane had reached its 250 feet decision altitude, the minimum altitude beyond which a pilot cannot descend without the track in sight. According to the latest weather report he had heard, he should have already been out of the clouds, but in the meantime the clouds had become lower and thicker. Unable to see anything, the lenders left their attempt to land and did what is called a “lost approach”, strangling the engines and going back to night.

When a pilot cannot land in an airport due to the unfavorable climate, the next step is to find a nearby airport where the conditions are better. The closest alternative at this time was Hemet-Ryan airport, 13 miles northeast. From there, there would be a half -hour trip to French Valley airport, where everyone’s cars were parked.

There was also another option: go around and try again. Write an aviation security expert Ian Twombly: “Many pilots have crashed trying to fly again the same approach, no doubt after convincing them that the roof or visibility would somehow improve rapidly.”

Whether or not he understood the danger, the lenders chose to go again. He approached a turn to the right, then leveled and began his second descent. Once again, he immersed himself in the clouds and watched the altimeter mark down while sliding towards the track.

The altimeter was reduced to decision altitude. The lenders decided.

The appointment affected a ravine at 800 feet without the track. The lenders and Vargas were killed instantly. The broken fuselage fell forward another 100 feet in a scrubal field. The impact threw another 200 feet to the pilot bodies, where they rested on a road, still tied in their seats. The bodies of the other passengers dispersed closer to the fuselage, which is quickly wrapped in flames fed by spilled kerosene.

The National Transport Security Board issued a preliminary report on the French Valley accident in August 2023. He pointed out that by when the lenders made their second landing attempt, a thick fog on the track had made the chances of success were essentially zero. He did not mention the illegal operations of aerial characters or the effects of fatigue. This type of detail is generally left for the full report, which has been completing a year or more.

But there is a limit of how effective the government’s action can be. No agency can order people to use a good judgment. The series of recent private jet accidents have revealed a lot about a travel mode that is otherwise involved in privacy. Often, it turns out that the purpose of the flight turns out to be surprisingly inconsequential. Adina Azaraian flew to spend four days with her adoptive parents. Dana Hyde was on a two -day trip to see the universities. Lindsey Gleiche was looking for something to do on Friday night. You should ask yourself: would they have made these trips that way if they had understood their choice to be at risk of inconveniences?

“The standardization of flying in private jets leads to the public to believe that it is safer than driving on the highway,” he says Amy Fulmer, One of Gleiche’s friends. “The only time they learn otherwise is when it’s too late.”