The November skies over Dayton were gloomy as Captain Oscar Chavez and Flight Officer Renato Marchese readied their Hawker for one final business stop in Akron.
For the past two days, the chartered crew had been shuttling a group of Florida real estate developers on a four-state tour of the Midwest, looking for potential investments. The jam-packed itinerary called for a three-hour afternoon visit in Akron before returning to the corporate jet’s home base in Fort Lauderdale.
Marchese handed his company credit card over to pay for the 410 gallons of fuel that filled both wing tanks to capacity.
Chavez filed a 34-minute flight plan for Zipline Flight 1526. Zipline was the call sign for his employer, ExecuFlight.
As seven passengers buckled in for the short ride, Chavez settled into the left seat of the cockpit. Marchese took his position on the right.
Then Chavez reached for his cellphone and sent a brief group text.
“DC@KMGY” let half a dozen supervisors back home know that the plane’s doors had closed at Dayton-Wright Brothers Airport. The shorthand is how the company tracks the progress of its fleet.
Chavez knew that the next time he pulled out his cellphone, it would be to type “DO@KAKR,” announcing that the doors had opened and the nine souls aboard had safely landed at Akron Fulton International Airport.
It’s a text he would never send.
Background of pilots
Oscar Andres Chavez and Renato Marchese loved flying. That much was clear to most everyone around them.
It was a childhood dream for Chavez, who grew up in Colombia. At the age of 40, he’d built a resume that included piloting planes for a cargo company, working for a Bogota enterprise that flew helicopters, and ultimately, following his passion to the United States.
When he accepted a job in Miami in 2014 to become a Hawker captain for the construction company Heralpin, it meant leaving a 5-year-old son behind.
But he flew the boy in from South America or returned to visit him whenever he could, leaving no doubt among his co-workers that fatherhood was precious to him.
The Heralpin job lasted only a year. He was fired in the spring of 2015 after failing to report for recurrent training.
Chavez saw the split as voluntary, a dispute over an administrative issue. He didn’t show up for class because he’d already been talking to a new employer.
On June 22, 2015, ExecuFlight added Chavez to its stable of five Hawker pilots.
Chavez had logged just over 6,000 flying hours in his career, 3,414 of them as the pilot-in-command. The only blemish on his record was a 2014 rule violation that led to brief remedial training, a matter the FAA considered closed.
Marchese, 50, was also a foreign national, a former member of the Italian air force.
Born in Rome, Marchese was a jovial man who talked happily about his home life in Boynton Beach, Fla. He had been married the past 11 years to Raquel and was dad to 6-year-old Augusto. His devotion to his family was evident each time he’d request a schedule change to deal with their needs.
Throughout Marchese’s post-military career, he played the role of first officer, working for personal carriers flying the likes of Hawkers and Learjets. He’d accumulated 4,382 miles of flying time, with 3,200 as the pilot-in-command.
Still, he struggled to make the jump to larger aircraft.
Florida-based Sky King Airlines hired him in September 2014 as a Boeing 737 first officer, an opportunity that ended badly.
An instructor trying to train Marchese in a simulator called his skills “ridiculously weak.” Marchese couldn’t memorize items that needed to be second nature and couldn’t grasp routine checklist procedures. Sky King let him go.
Three months later — the same month Chavez was hired — ExecuFlight brought Marchese on board.
Flight to Akron
At 2:14 p.m. on Nov. 10, 2015, the wheels of Flight 1526 left the Dayton runway. The plane ascended to 17,000 feet, well above a blanket of clouds that hid Ohio’s rural landscape. The pilots would need to rely on their instruments.
For this flight, Chavez and Marchese were matched by ExecuFlight’s sales department, which assigned jobs based on whomever was available.
They were not strangers. They had been paired three times before, spending more than 40 hours in each others’ company.
Still, something about this journey was out of the ordinary. With passengers aboard, ExecuFlight’s unwritten custom called for the captain to pilot the aircraft. Typically, first officers maintained their skills by flying empty legs.
At Chavez’s discretion, however, Marchese was given control.
Neither of the pilots had been to Akron Fulton before, and Marchese’s lack of confidence in the weather, in the destination, in the airplane itself, crept into the cockpit conversation soon after takeoff.
Routine decisions a pilot would simply announce were asked as questions, as if Marchese were seeking approval or simply didn’t know the answer.
He asked Chavez to brief him on the final approach to Akron, the cue for Chavez, in his supporting role, to recite all the necessary speed and altitude milestones the plane would follow on its descent to the airport.
But a list of facts that should take less than a minute for the nonflying pilot to convey and the flying pilot to absorb extended into a lengthy discussion, with Marchese repeating and questioning the data for most of the flight.
And Marchese didn’t know it, but he was incorporating errant weather information into his mental calculations.
Chavez dialed in a frequency that picked up automated information from Lancaster Airport, a report of overcast skies at 1,800 feet. But Lancaster was 150 miles from where the Hawker would ultimately need to break through the clouds.
Marchese told Chavez he hoped air traffic would offer him the “localizer” approach into Akron Fulton. It was the easiest of three options, using a beam that offers the aircraft horizontal guidance along the center line of the runway.
His thoughts of that localizer were interrupted by a passenger who popped his head into the cockpit.
“You guys know where you’re goin’? You know where you’re goin’?”
Chavez laughed and Marchese told the passenger he could only linger for a minute, “then you gotta go because there’s gonna be weather. We cannot be distracted.”
Back to business, Chavez and Marchese reviewed procedures for using the localizer, as well as the rules for a missed approach — step-by-step actions to be taken if landing is too risky.
But that overcast sky was still on Marchese’s mind as he talked through more calculations, trying to decide how far it would be to the ground once they pierced the cloud veil.
The margin for error was suddenly narrowed. Chavez correctly dialed in the frequency for Akron Fulton weather to learn the clouds were at 600 feet, much lower than Lancaster’s 1,800 report, though still above the minimum allowed for a safe landing.
As Marchese verbalized his calculations, he seemed unsure of his math. He repeatedly asked Chavez to confirm that overcast is measured from the ground and not sea level.
His thought process was again interrupted as the Cleveland center handed Flight 1526 over to air traffic at Akron-Canton Airport, which told Marchese he would indeed use the localizer, and to descend to 5,000 feet.
Marchese returned to recitations of altitude minimums and overcast data, to Chavez’s frustration.
“Listen. Focus,” the captain told him.
Confusion in the sky
At 2:46 p.m., an instructor and his student were using the Akron Fulton localizer approach, so Akron-Canton gave the Hawker a new heading to slow them down. The controller told Marchese to alter his heading to 360 degrees, reduce speed to 170 knots and descend to 3,000 feet.
The pilots repeated the information to each other, but mixed up the numbers. Chavez chuckled as they corrected their mistakes, but the dialogue caused them to miss Akron-Canton’s order to adjust their heading again. When the pilots didn’t acknowledge the command, the controller repeated the order.
One minute later, a startled Chavez admonished Marchese.
“We got nine degrees pitch up!” he said firmly, the angle of the plane now similar to that of an aircraft in the midst of a takeoff.
Marchese added power to correct the pitch, but Chavez was now concerned about getting too close to the training flight ahead of them.
“He hasn’t canceled,” Chavez emphasized to Marchese. “We don’t know if he’s on the ground!”
The awaited cancellation finally came and the Hawker was cleared for the approach, but Marchese responded by decreasing the speed too much.
“You’re going 140,” Chavez told him. Then, “Look, you’re going 120. You can’t keep decreasing your speed.”
“How do you get 120?” Marchese snapped back.
“V-Ref plus 15,” Chavez said, doing an automatic calculation and reminding Marchese that when he puts down the flaps, the plane will slow even more.
“If you keep decreasing your speed ...” Chavez said.
“But why?” Marchese asked.
“Because we’re gonna stall. I don’t want to stall,” Chavez said.
At 2:50 p.m., a new voice filtered into the cockpit: the instructor of that training flight.
“Hey guys, ah, we just landed on the localizer and, uh, broke out right at minimums, right at a mile,” he told them.
“Appreciate it,” Chavez responded.
Four miles from the runway, Chavez began the landing checklist. But the plane’s rate of descent alarmed him.
“You’re diving. You’re diving. Don’t dive — 2,000 feet per minute, buddy!” Chavez said. “Two thousand feet per minute! Don’t go 2,000 feet per minute!”
The plane broke through the clouds.
“Ground,” Chavez announced as he activated the windshield wipers to wipe away the mist, but the ground was coming up too fast.
“Level off, guy,” Chavez said rapidly.
“Got it,” Marchese said.
But Marchese didn’t compensate correctly, and in his hands he felt an ominous movement. The stick shaker gripped in his palm rattled violently, a warning that a stall was imminent.
Chavez shouted expletives. Marchese added his own howl.
At 2:52 p.m., the sound of the ground proximity warning system joined the chaos in the cockpit.
A recorded male voice, firm but emotionless: “PULL UP.”
Waiting for landing
At Akron Fulton International Airport, flight instructor Jason Edwards and student Milan Milosevic sat in the single-engine Cherokee they had just landed after practicing an instrument flight approach.
They knew the Hawker was behind them and decided to taxi out of the way, facing east to watch the incoming jet. They had even radioed those pilots to advise that cloud cover was right at the minimum height allowed for a landing.
The lights along Runway 25 that they had activated remained lit, waiting for the next arrival.
But less than a minute after the Hawker’s pilots thanked Edwards for his advisory, the radio crackled.
A male was trying to speak, a garbled sentence that turned into a terrifying “Ahhhhhhhhhh!” It was joined by more screams in the background.
Edwards turned to Milosevic: “I hope that’s not someone joking around because it’s certainly not funny.”
“Hawker, repeat your last transmission,” Edwards called on the radio. There was no answer.
Not wanting to suggest a possible disaster over the airwaves, Edwards took off his headset and placed a direct call to Akron-Canton. Were they still communicating with the Hawker?
No, the controller said. The plane was no longer on radar. Air traffic was waiting for the pilots to confirm their landing.
But too much time had passed, Edwards knew. The controllers were waiting for a report that would never come.
Just then, Milosevic, a state trooper in the aviation unit, received a page, a report of a downed plane near Davenport Park.
In the distance, they heard sirens.
Paula Schleis can be reached at 330-996-3741 or pschleis@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/paulaschleis.