A pilot who crashed his small plane into a UPS delivery truck then into two homes in Santee had become disoriented while flying in overcast skies, and that was likely the cause of the crash, the National Transportation Safety Board found in its final report, released more than two years after the crash.
The pilot and the delivery truck driver died when the six-seater Cessna C340 crashed shortly after noon Oct 21, 2021. A couple in their 70s was injured, and neighbors pulled them from one of the burning homes. The neighboring house was destroyed, too, but the residents — a newlywed couple — were not home.
There were clouds, and the pilot, Dr. Sugata Das, was using instruments to fly when the plane went down roughly 11 miles east of its intended destination, Montgomery-Gibbs Executive Field in Kearny Mesa.
It crashed at Greencastle and Jeremy streets, less than two-tenths of a mile east of Santana High School’s football field, on the eastern edge of the campus.
Das was a cardiologist with Yuma Regional Medical Center. He was flying the Cessna from Yuma, Ariz., to San Diego County, where he lived. The delivery driver was Steve Krueger, a San Diego resident who had been a UPS employee for nearly 30 years.
According to the NTSB report released last week, investigators found no evidence of mechanical problems with plane. It found the circumstances were consistent with the known effects of “spatial disorientation” and determined it was likely what caused the crash.
The 13-page report includes communications between the pilot and the airport control tower right before the crash.
The report indicates that moments before the crash, an air-traffic controller repeatedly told the pilot, to “climb” or fly the plane higher. The report notes that the controller twice issued a low-altitude alert, essentially a warning to the pilot to make a correction.
Two aviation experts likened spatial disorientation to vertigo.
Max Trescott, a pilot and host of the Aviation News Talk podcast, explained that the finding means the pilot “was suffering from a visual illusion, in which since he was in the clouds and had to rely on his instruments, didn’t fully understand exactly what position the aircraft was in and exactly what it was doing as he experienced spatial disorientation.
“This is something that happens to pilots because our body, the senses that we have in the airplane are often incorrect as to whether the airplane is wings level or pointed up or down when you are in the clouds because you can’t see outside,” he told the Union-Tribune.
Robert Katz, a commercial pilot and flight instructor from Dallas with more than 40 years of flight experience, said flying in the clouds is “like being in a cotton ball. You can’t see anything outside the airplane. No natural horizon.”
Some of the victims sued the doctor’s estate after the crash. The status of those lawsuits was unclear Monday afternoon, and attorneys on both sides of the suit did not respond to requests for comment.
