Four killed as small jet crashes near golf course during landing at Truckee-Tahoe Airport
Four people were killed after a twin-engine jet crashed and burst into flames Monday afternoon near a golf course in Truckee.
The Truckee Fire Protection District said in a social media post that fire crews were responding to a plane crash and quarter-acre wildfire near Ponderosa Golf Course. Officials added that the blaze was quickly contained with no threat to Truckee residents.
According to California Highway Patrol dispatch information, the crash occurred a little after 1:15 p.m. The Nevada County Sheriff’s Office said Reynold Way was closed due to the incident.
The Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement that a Bombardier CL 600 jet crashed while the pilot was attempting to land at Truckee Tahoe Airport.
An FAA report posted Tuesday showed four people — two passengers and two crew members — were aboard when the plane crashed into the trees and burst into flames.
“There’s not much intact at the crash site,” Nevada County Sheriff Shannan Moon said at an evening briefing.
A five-engine strike team from Stanislaus County, on its way to battle the Dixie Fire after working at the Tamarack Fire, saw the fiery crash, the strike leader told The Modesto Bee. The crew was about a mile away and headed straight toward the crash after seeing it clip trees and burst into flames.
“As we were coming down Highway 26 we saw a huge fireball in front of us. I knew we were passing the airport. ... I immediately knew it had to be an airplane. It was a substantial explosion, at least 150 feet in the air.”
April Bushnell said her father and husband were on their way home from Coyote Moon Golf Course when they saw the jet crash. Bushnell said they saw it flying very low and making a turn but didn’t realize it was going down until it disappeared into the trees. Soon after that, they saw “a fireball and massive smoke,” she said.
Truckee Tahoe Airport said in a Facebook post that the jet “impacted heavily treed terrain,” and no structures or people on the ground were harmed in the crash. The airport said it will be closed until 7 a.m. Tuesday.
According to tower recordings hosted by LiveATC.net, the aircraft’s pilot told controllers that it needed to circle the runway after trying to land at about 1:14 p.m.
“Looking forward to seeing you guys,” the pilot told controllers after being instructed to report the “airport in sight,” a common indicator of a visual, or VFR, approach.
The pilot reported the runway in sight two minutes later.
The plane was then cleared to land on Runway 11, a 7,000-foot runway that requires a base turn to comply with noise abatement rules over Truckee.
Two minutes after that, a radio call was made from another aircraft indicating a problem with the landing jet. No other calls of an emergency were captured by LiveATC’s recording, which is crowdsourced from community radio operators.
The next transmission from the tower indicated the runway was closed.
Michael Kennedy, a pilot and a senior member of the Civil Air Patrol, was near the Experimental Aircraft Association building on the Truckee Tahoe Airport airfield at the time of the crash, spending time with children in the Civil Air Patrol Space Camp. While there, an 8-year-old girl asked him: “Hey Mr. Mike, what is that mushroom cloud behind your head.”
“I turned and I’m like ‘Oh my flippin’ God,’“ said Kennedy, who saw clouds of smoke from the crash that spread into the runway.
He told The Sacramento Bee that the Truckee Tahoe airport is in a very dangerous area for pilots to fly and land due to high elevations, changes in air density, mountains, wind shears and microbursts.
“We have crazy weather here,” he said. “It’s like the vortex of insane weather where it can look and appear clear, and you’re getting shoved into the ground from a wind shear that you’re not aware of and that no instrument can predict, or a microburst, which makes it very challenging.”
The FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board will investigate, according to the FAA statement. The NTSB will be in charge of the investigation and will provide additional updates. Neither agency identifies people involved in aircraft accidents.
According to the FAA’s registry, the jet was first flown in 2008. The Bombardier CL 600 is a fixed-wing, multi-engine aircraft with a turbo-fan engine. It seats up to 14 passengers and a crew of two.
Flight logs show the jet was traveling from the Couer D’Alene Airport in Idaho and was scheduled to continue to Thermal in Riverside County before heading to Van Nuys Airport in Los Angeles.
This story was originally published July 26, 2021 at 2:25 PM with the headline "Four killed as small jet crashes near golf course during landing at Truckee-Tahoe Airport."