Officials Investigating Fatal Dallas Air Show Crash

Officials with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) are investigating a Nov. 14 collision between two vintage military aircraft at a Dallas air show that killed six, all of whom were experienced aviators with years of flight training.

The Commemorative Air Force, which put on the show, identified the victims as: Terry Barker, Craig Hutain, Kevin “K5” Michels, Dan Ragan, Leonard “Len” Root, and Curt Rowe. They died Saturday when a World War II-era bomber and a fighter plane collided and crashed in a ball of flames, horrifying spectators who had gathered for the air show that opened on Veterans’ Day.

Several videos posted on social media show the fighter plane flying into the bomber.

All of the men were volunteers, but each had gone through a strict process of logging hours and training flights and were vetted carefully, Hank Coates, the CEO of Commemorative Air Force said at a news conference.

“This is not their first rodeo,” Coates said. “These guys are very well versed. Many of them are airline pilots, retired airline pilots, retired military pilots like myself.

“These are very well-trained folks who have been doing this for a long time.”

Officials have not publicly identified which of the victims was piloting the aircrafts.

Hutain, of Montgomery, Texas, has been a commercial airline pilot since 1985. He started flying at the age of 10 and had logged more than 34,500 flight hours, according to his LinkedIn page.

Armin Mizani, the mayor of Keller, Texas, said Barker was a retired pilot who lived in Keller, a town of 50,000, where many of the residents know each other.

Barker was an Army veteran who flew helicopters during his military service. He later worked for American Airlines for 36 years before retiring in 2020, Mizani said.

Rowe, a member of the Ohio Wing Civil Air Patrol, was a crew chief on the B-17, his brother-in-law Andy Keller told The Associated Press on Sunday. Rowe, of Hilliard, Ohio, did air shows several times a year because he fell in love with WWII aircraft, Keller said.

Root, also from Keller, was a pilot and manager for the Gulf Coast Wing of the Commemorative Air Force who worked over the last year as a contract commercial pilot for various companies, according to his LinkedIn page.

The NTSB is investigating why both aircraft were flying at the same altitude and in the same air space, member Michael Graham said.

Graham said investigators are analyzing radar and video footage to pinpoint the exact location of collision. He said most of debris from the crash was scattered on the airport property and will be carefully examined, along with audio recordings from the air traffic control tower, pilot training records and aircraft maintenance records.

Neither aircraft was equipped with a flight-data recorder or a cockpit voice recorder, separate devices referred to collectively as the black boxes, and neither were required to have those devices, Graham said.

Although rain was hampering the collection of pieces of the B-17 bomber, Graham said Monday that an electronic flight display from the B-17 and a GPS navigational unit from the fighter, both damaged in the crash, will be sent to an NTSB laboratory to see if data can be recovered.

The crash came three years after the crash of a bomber in Connecticut that killed seven, and amid ongoing concern about the safety of air shows involving older warplanes. The company that owned the planes flying in the Wings Over Dallas show has had other crashes in its more than 60-year history.

Investigators will examine the wreckage from both aircraft, conduct interviews of crews present at the air show and obtain pilot training and aircraft maintenance records.

“We’ll look at everything that we can and we’ll let the evidence basically lead us to the appropriate conclusions. At this point, we will not speculate” on the cause, Graham said.

A preliminary report from the NTSB is expected in four to six weeks, while a final report will take up to 18 months to complete.