November 5, 2006. Eleven years later, and it doesn’t get any easier.
I remember the morning I learned Ryan Sageser’s plane crashed. It’s forever etched into my mind. I woke up at 10:32 A.M. to the sound of my cellphone ringing. I couldn’t tell who the call was from. My screen was cracked, and every time I answered the phone, I rolled the dice.
It was Carlo.
“Hey man, are you sitting down?” he said.
I heard those words and tried to piece them together. Oh shit. Was someone in an accident? Was someone I knew hurt? Did the school burn down? Did someone die? Please don’t tell me someone died.
These thoughts ran through my head in about one second.
“Yeah … I just woke up. What’s up?” I responded. My stomach was already in knots.
I could hear the hesitation in his voice. The tension across the phone line grew more taut, second over second. “You know how Ryan and some other people flew to Tulsa for that concert last night?”
“…Yeah.” I eked out.
Son of a bitch. Recalculating: Did the plane crash? Did anyone die? Are they injured? Are they paralyzed? Are they okay? Fuck, fuck, fuck.
I heard a sharp inhale through the phone.
“Dave, the plane crashed last night. Ryan and his dad died. The other two passengers are in the hospital. We don’t know much more than that right now.”
My peripheral vision went dark. My throat tightened as I held back tears.
“Oh fuck. Are you kidding me? Are you serious? How did this happen?” I asked, as if Carlo would know. No one knew. No one would know for months until the NTSB released their report.
“I don’t know, man. All I know is that there will be a rosary said for him and his dad and the other passengers at St. Francis at 7:30,” he said. Going to a Catholic high school is helpful in tragedy. There’s always an emergency plan in place for things like this.
“I’ll be there … I — I have to go man. I’ll see you tonight,” I said. I closed my broken flip-phone and sat on the edge of my bed. I tried to process everything I just heard. In real-time, the phone call lasted about one minute. It felt like an eternity.
My entire body began to quiver as I held back tears. I grabbed a pair of jeans crumpled on the floor and slowly opened my door. I had to tell my mom. Even at 18 years old, I still went to my mom in times of tragedy. When tragedy flips your entire world upside down, your parents are usually a stable, reliable rock.
I heard water running in the kitchen. I walked towards the kitchen, quivering all the way. I didn’t know what to say. As a I crossed the threshold of the kitchen, tears started running down my unshaven cheek.
My mom’s back was to me as she was cleaning the dishes. I touched her shoulder and she spun around, startled.
“Jesus, what the hell?!” she said. My mom is easily startled. I apparently inherited that trait from her. She saw tears in my eyes.
“Ryan’s dead. The plane crashed. His dad died too.” There was no holding anything back now.
My mom turned off the water but didn’t bother drying her hands. She wrapped her arms around me and held me tight. My high school years began with the death of a best friend, and now they end with the death of a best friend.
Ryan was one of the most accomplished people I knew. At 17, he received a pilot’s license. He was set to attend the Air Force Academy in Colorado. Just days before the crash, he had his flight examination. High school years are plagued with change and uncertainty. Yet, Ryan knew exactly what he wanted.
Ryan shaped me as a person. We started learning Russian together one late summer night over AOL Instant Messenger (RIP). Five years later, I graduated with a degree in Russian.
We started learning about law together. Eight years later, I graduated from law school. This was shortly after a brief detour in my undergrad years when I thought medical school called my name.
Ryan introduced me to his passion — Aviation. We grew up in Wichita, Kansas, the self-proclaimed Air Capitol of the World. It’s a blue-collar city that lives and dies on the aerospace market. When he was 16, Ryan won a scholarship for flight lessons. Over the next year, he went to ground school and had flight lessons through Yingling Aviation, a fixed-base operator. In September 2006, Ryan received his pilot’s license.
His license allowed him to fly under Visual Flight Rules (VFR for short). Put simply, this meant that Ryan could fly a small single-engine plane based on what he could see from the plane. Flying by VFR means low-altitude flight and navigation by way-points on the ground.
Just like a teenager getting their driver’s license — something Ryan did less than a year earlier — Ryan wanted to take some friends on a flight to use his license.
Then inspiration came.
November 4, 2006. Ben Folds. Tulsa, Oklahoma. A short, 114-nautical mile flight from KICT to KTUL. A Cessna 172 Skyhawk seats a pilot and 3 passengers. It seemed like a perfect idea.
Ryan asked me if I wanted to go. I immediately said yes.
And as the concert grew closer, I backed out.
There was no way in hell I could afford it. Growing up with only my mom supporting me, there was no way I could ask her to pay for my concert ticket, much less chip in for aviation fuel, or “avgas.”
Instead, Ryan’s dad flew in the co-pilot seat, with two classmates and friends in the back seat.
I feel guilty about this, even to this day.
Over the next months, we pieced together what happened. After the concert was over, Ryan and his passengers went back to the airport to fly home.
Ryan taxied to the runway and took off.
75 Knots. V-1. Rotate.
Shortly after takeoff, Ryan apparently noted that the weather was bad. He returned to KTUL to look at the weather and refile a new flight plan.
By now, it was after midnight, and approaching 1:00 A.M.
A band of storms were coming in to the area. Ryan noticed this and filed a flight plan that supposedly would route them against the storms so that there wouldn’t be any impact on the flight.
Ryan and company got back into the plane and took off again.
The plane crashed less than 25 miles from KTUL. The plane hit terrain — most likely a tree. It cart-wheeled across barren farmland and left a path of debris in its wake.
Time of collision: 0124 CST.
I’m an attorney. I look to causation and fault to explain things I don’t understand. It took me years to understand Ryan’s death.
When the NTSB released its final report, I rejected it. It said that Cessna 172S, Registration No. N53443, crashed due to pilot error.
No fucking way.
“That’s bullshit,” I thought. Ryan was a skilled pilot. He knew what he was doing. He had 60 hours of VFR flight. He logged 4 hours of night flight, and 4 hours of simulated Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) training.
And now knowing what I do about aviation, I can’t push off accepting it anymore.
This was a cross-country night flight, with only 4 hours of night flight under Ryan’s belt. A VFR flight in a storm over dark pastureland is not something I would do.
The mean sea level (MSL) altitude is a term used to identify the average altitude of a place. When flying, a pilot needs to be aware of how altitude changes.
Kansas is notorious for being a flat state. In reality, there is a slight upward slope as you go west. If a pilot takes off from KICT and flies on a straight path toward Denver at 3,500 feet MSL without changing the altitude, the plane will crash in a field in Western Kansas.
Ryan had several forces working against him. He had the low ceiling — the band of storm clouds close above him. He had terrain below him at 1,015 feet MSL. He had turbulence. According to a survivor, Ryan flew into dense clouds.
Two things could have happened. Ryan could have tried to descend from the clouds while not paying attention to his altimeter. Or, he could have attempted to use the flight instruments equipped on the radio stack to fly IFR. He only had 4 hours of simulated IFR experience. He did not have a single second of real-time IFR flight.
Every year, I re-read the NTSB report on the anniversary of the crash. Sometimes I just skim it because it’s too painful to read. Sometimes I read it with a critical mind against the NTSB. I thought that pilot error was the easiest explanation for an aviation incident.
But last year, something caught my eye. It’s a sentence I’ve read many times but only recently understood. A survivor told an NTSB investigator that he noticed the altimeter below 2000 feet MSL. Ryan was flying with less than 1000 feet between his plane and the ground.
It was pilot error.
The five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.
Denial lasted nearly a decade. I refused to believe that this accident was pilot error. I only overcame it when I started to learn about Ryan’s passion and made it my own.
Bargaining never came, but anger was in full force shortly after Ryan was buried. How the fuck could an FBO rent a plane to a 17-year-old kid when he’s too young to rent a car? I submitted FOIA requests for everything on this flight and never heard back from the NTSB. Were they hiding something? What if they were? Did I go through the proper channels? Why the hell is the administrative state designed to give the run-around?
Depression stayed with me for years, and still rears its ugly head. Two thoughts ran through my head the week after the crash.
- I could have died.
- The crash is my fault because I wasn’t in the plane.
For years, I put myself in front of the circular firing squad of this logic. The two thoughts have nothing to do with each other. In fact, they’re nearly mutually exclusive. But someone dealing with the death of a loved one isn’t exactly the paragon of reason.
And now, I have acceptance. It was an accident. It wasn’t Ryan being dumb. It wasn’t a mechanical failure and an NTSB cover-up. It was being caught in a storm and getting lost. He should have waited out the storm and flew home the next morning. I’ll never know why he chose to fly. And that’s okay.
I’ve never written in length about Ryan and his death. It’s too damn painful to think about sometimes. Other times, I just don’t know what to say.
This tribute is noticeably a year late for the tenth anniversary of Ryan’s death.
This year, the days line up.
Ryan died on Sunday, November 5, 2006. Today is Sunday, November 5, 2017.
Eleven years later, I can’t help but be wistful and miss my best friend, the kid who never knew how much he shaped me as a person. Every day, I wish I could just tell him that.
Rest easy, Cessna 443.
