Save Story: Air Traffic Controllers at FAA Denver Center Help Locate Pilot after Crash
Story written by Daniel Glover, FAA Office of Communications
Innovative thinking and quick action by a trio of supervisors at Denver Air Route Traffic Control Center (ZDV) led to the recent rescue of a pilot after his airplane crashed in a remote, mountainous part of New Mexico.
The Piper Lance II single-engine aircraft descended rapidly and disappeared from the radar coverage of Albuquerque Center on the afternoon of April 10. (FAA Air Traffic Control Centers control air traffic as aircraft move through the airspace after departure and before arrival.) Albuquerque Center issued an alert notice about the aircraft, and it reached Denver Center as the evening shift began.
Operations manager Adrian Lamport and operations supervisors Karl Sanderson and Nathan Zuck were on duty at the time. Lamport checked the flight databases and determined that the center hadn’t provided any services to the Piper and shared that information with Albuquerque Center. Then the team at Denver Center went to work to see what happened to the plane.
Lamport looked up the aircraft tail number in the FAA registry, and he was able to identify a likely base airport for the plane. He contacted the airport and its fixed-base operator to confirm that the aircraft had departed. But the team still didn’t have current contact information for the pilot.
Sanderson suggested a search using ForeFlight, a mobile flight application popular with general aviation pilots. Another operations manager had recommended it as a resource, and it had been useful in his previous attempts to learn about pilots. “ForeFlight is a good resource for information-gathering for search and rescue,” he said.
At that point, the search for the pilot became a training opportunity for Zuck, who moved into a supervisor’s role in January after a dozen years as a controller.
“[Sanderson] gave me the phone number to ForeFlight to see if they had the tail number on this plane in their system,” Zuck said. “They had the tail number and the pilot’s name and phone number.” He called the number, and the pilot answered.
“I’ll admit I was very shocked when I got any answer from the pilot,” Zuck said. He was even more surprised when he heard the pilot was standing outside his crashed plane.
“He didn’t know where he was. He was a little cold,” Zuck said. “I just tried to assure him that we were going to try to find him.”
The spotty reception from the remote location led to a dropped call — several of them, actually. The team connected with the pilot repeatedly as they coordinated with search-and-rescue officials in Taos, New Mexico.
During one of the calls, the team learned that the pilot had hiked away from the plane to stay warm. They advised him to return so rescuers could find him. Denver Center also texted a link to the pilot that, when clicked, created a beacon for rescuers to pinpoint his location.
“We checked back with the pilot every 5 or 10 minutes,” Lamport said. The New Mexico National Guard eventually spotted the crash site from a Blackhawk helicopter and transported the pilot to a local hospital.
“I was extremely pleased with that result because we were still in the throes of winter, and it was going to start getting dark,” Lamport said. The altitude of the site was about 10,000 feet.
None one at Denver Center had experienced anything like it before. “It felt surreal because when you’re in the midst of it, you’re not thinking about what’s happening,” Zuck said. “… We just got to be a very small part of a team helping find him. It was really awesome.”
