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NTSB seeks flight instructor monitoring after deadly crash

HONOLULU — Federal safety investigators said Thursday that the pilot of a skydiving plane that crashed in 2019, killing all 11 people on board, had not received training to become a competent pilot.

The National Transportation Safety Board, in response to these findings, called on the Federal Aviation Administration to better monitor the effectiveness of flight instructors.

The pilot in the Hawaii crash, Jerome Renck. had failed three initial flight tests in his attempt to obtain a pilot certificate, instrument rating and commercial pilot certificate, the NTSB said. The pass rate for other students taught by the same instructor was just 59% over a two-year period ending in April 2020. The average pass rate for students of all flight instructors is 80%, the agency said.

The board called on the FAA to develop a system to automatically alert its inspectors to flight instructors whose students' pass rates fall below 80%

The board quoted from the FAA's Aviation Instructor's Handbook, which says the goal of instructors is “'to teach each learner in such a way that he or she will be come a competent pilot.'” In Renck's case “the flight instructor did not achieve that goal,” the NTSB said.

The FAA said in a statement it is working closely with the NTSB to investigate the crash.

“The agency takes NTSB findings and recommendations very seriously. The FAA will carefully evaluate and consider all findings and recommendations the NTSB issues as a result of this investigation,” it said.

The crash occurred June 21, 2019, on the North Shore of Oahu. The plane banked sharply before plunging to the ground shortly after takeoff from Dillingham Airfield. Renck and his 10 passengers were killed in the deadliest civil aviation accident in the U.S. since 2011.

Documents that the board released in October painted a picture of a pilot who took unnecessary risks and pushed the limits of his skills to give passengers a thrilling ride.

The plane was operated by Oahu Parachute Center, which lacked permits for skydiving flights, according to state records. The owner, George Rivera, received a permit in 2010 under a different company name for parachute repairs and rigging but not skydiving.

Renck, a French national, was the company’s only pilot at the time of the crash.

The plane had undergone repairs after a crash in 2016 in California badly damaged the tail section. In that incident, skydivers struggled to jump out as the plane went into a spinning dive.

The NTSB previously said FAA records showed that Robert Seladis, a contract mechanic who worked on the plane, had his certificate revoked in 2005 after falsifying records on two planes. He regained his certificate in 2015.

Seladis was interviewed a few days after the crash, then stopped talking to investigators, who were unable to get the plane’s logbooks from him, the NTSB said.

NTSB to FAA: Watch Those CFIs

The National Transportation Safety Board has issued a set of recommendations to the FAA intended to increase scrutiny on flight-instructor performance. Using the 2019 crash of a parachute-jump Beech King Air in Hawaii as the impetus, the NTSB latest recommendations ask the FAA to more closely watch pass/fail rates of students from any given instructor to help detect sub-par training. The June 2019 accident resulted in 11 deaths, including the pilot, after the Oahu Parachute Center King Air impacted terrain shortly after takeoff. 

The NTSB said that the “accident pilot had failed three initial flight tests in his attempts to obtain his private pilot certificate, instrument rating, and commercial pilot certificate after receiving instruction from a single instructor. The pilot subsequently passed each flight test. The…accident pilot was not alone in his failed attempts; the pass rate for other students taught by the same flight instructor was 59 percent (for the two-year period ending in April 2020). FAA data show the average national pass rate for students of all flight instructors is 80 percent.” According to NTSB documents, the accident pilot trained with Ritter Aviation in Torrance, CA.

The instructor operated a Beech C90GTx out of Torrance and, according to the NTSB documentation, “During his initial flight training, the accident pilot logged about 53 hours in the King Air C90GTx airplane, but this time was logged during flights that included

extended cross-country commercial Part 91 operations conducted with passengers in the cabin. In addition, the flight time was primarily logged as dual instruction while the accident pilot was still a student pilot. Thus, the flight instructor had provided training that the accident pilot could not have been expected to fully comprehend as a student pilot, and the flights were most likely conducted by the flight instructor with the accident pilot sitting in the copilot seat.”

The NTSB admitted that while a system does exist to track pass/fail rates from specific instructors, it lacks an automated component to alert CFIs when their students fall below the FAA’s 80% threshold. A pass rate below 80% is considered “substandard.” The NTSB contends that the accident pilot’s sole instructor “was not receiving appropriate additional scrutiny” for his charges’ low pass rates.

The recommendations from the NTSB and the FAA are as follows:

• Develop a system to automatically notify your inspectors of those flight instructors (within each inspector’s geographic area of responsibility) whose student pass rate in the Program Tracking and Reporting Subsystem has become substandard so that the inspectors can perform additional surveillance according to the guidance in Order 8900.1, Flight Standards Information Management System, volume 6, chapter 1, section 5, “Surveillance of a Certificated Flight Instructor.” (A-20-40) 

• Until the system proposed in Safety Recommendation A-20-40 is implemented, direct your inspectors to (1) review the Program Tracking and Reporting Subsystem on an ongoing basis to identify those flight instructors (within each inspector’s geographic area of responsibility) with a substandard student pass rate and (2) provide additional surveillance of those instructors according to the guidance in Order 8900.1, Flight Standards Information Management System, volume 6, chapter 1, section 5, “Surveillance of a Certificated Flight Instructor.” (A-20-41)

• Revise Order 8900.1, Flight Standards Information Management System, volume 6, chapter 1, section 5, “Surveillance of a Certificated Flight Instructor,” to include flight instructors with a substandard student pass rate as one of the criteria necessitating additional surveillance of a flight instructor. (A-20-42)