Mid-air collision a symptom?

TALKEETNA — New details released this week regarding a 2011 mid-air collision point to what some aviators say is a dangerous problem with air travel in the Mat-Su Borough.

“There is a convention called a common traffic advisory frequency or CTAF and that’s designed by the FAA of an area of about a 10-mile radius around an airport and identifies a radio frequency that pilots are requested to use. It’s not a mandatory thing,” said Tom George, with the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association in Alaska and a member of a task-force set up to address the issue. “You’ve got over 200 private and public use airports in the Mat-Su Valley which is a huge number… Over time these get assigned one frequency or another and when you actually put them on a map and start to draw circles around them, 10-mile circles, you start to see that there’s overlap.”

How this applies to the crash that killed a family of four north of Talkeetna in June 2011 is that the pilots, though they were using the same airport in the Sister Lake area, were not on the same frequency and weren’t aware they were sharing the same airspace until it was too late.

A family member of pilot Corey Carlson, 41 — who died in the crash along with his wife, Hetty Barnett Carlson, 39, and two children, Adelaide, 3, and Ella, 5 — told investigators that he’d heard the pilot on a frequency of 122.9 megahertz. The FAA asks pilots using airports south and west of the Parks Highway to use the channel at 122.8 megahertz. The 122.9 channel is for the other side of the highway.

Kevin Earp, who was in the other plane and managed to land in Anchorage, was using that correct 122.8 channel.

“I could not have done anything different than I had in order to have prevented this tragic accident,” Earp wrote in documents the National Transportation Safety Board released. “I teach how to operate in all these types of airspace constantly. When teaching I ALWAYS teach to SCAN for TRAFFIC before and after turning.”

According to the NTSB reports, the crash happened at 2:15 p.m., July 30, 2011. Earp was heading from Sister Lake to Amber Lake, less than a mile away. As he made a turn he looked over his right wing and saw the plane flying at the same altitude he was.

“He reacted by pulling the nose hard up and rolling left,” the report says.

The collision lodged the left wing of the other plane into Earp’s float assembly, tearing most of it off. The second plane plummeted to the ground, smoke coming from its wing, according to the description of Earp’s wife, who watched the crash happen from the ground.

George said that the crash has spurred the creation of the Mat-Su Mid-Air Collision Avoidance Working Group.

“We’ve got confusion here in the system. We need to straighten this out,” George said.

According to the NTSB, the group includes members from FAA, George’s group, the Alaska Airmen’s Association, the Alaska Aviation Safety Foundation. George said they’ve also included the military, which sometimes uses Mat-Su airspace.

“Last summer we actually did a survey of pilots to kind of get a perspective on what the issues were in the pilot’s minds,” he said. “Radio communications was one of the top items of concern to them.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.