The plane approached University Park Airport high. Then it dropped sharp and fast

The latest report on a fatal plane crash offers data without interpretation.

The factual report on the June 16, 2016 crash of a Piper PA-31 in a wooded area on approach to the University Park Airport is supposed to do just that.

The report details all of the facts that have been gathered over the National Transportation Safety Board’s investigation. It includes everything from toxicology reports to engine testing to crash scene photographs. It also includes instrument data.

What the report does not include is an official rubber stamp cause and an assignment of responsibility. That is something that might come in a final report, a document that should have come within a year of the crash, but which an NTSB spokesman told the Centre Daily Times in December might take up to two years.

The factual report does fill in more information about the crash that killed pilot Gary Orner, 60, of White Oak, and his passenger, eye surgeon Robert Arffa, who regularly came to perform procedures in State College.

Most areas of the report note that everything was uneventful.

The plane owned by Aeronational Inc., of Washington, Pa., had been inspected less than four months earlier and had flown 44 hours since. Orner was rated to fly multiple kinds of aircraft and had logged more than 12,000 hours in the cockpit. It was a morning flight, and Happy Valley was overcast and misty but there was a mile of visibility.

The wreckage was not so placid. The two engines couldn’t be tested because of fire damage from the crash. Both Orner and Arffa died from the fire, too. While all parts of the plane were recovered, most were mangled.

“Both engines and each main landing gear were separated and scattered along the wreckage path,” wrote investigator Brian Rayner. “The instrument panel, cockpit and cabin area were destroyed by postcrash fire.”

What could be determined was the path of the plane in the last minutes of the flight.

“...With you on approach,” Orner told the airport tower control at 8:25 a.m., five minutes before the crash.

The tower gave clearance. Orner acknowledged. There was never another message from the plane.

Rayner’s report says that about 5.5 nautical miles from the runway, the Piper was about 500 feet higher than it should have been to land, an approach called the glideslope. The last radar contact was at 3.2 nautical miles, when the plane was 250 feet above the glideslope.

“Interpolation of the radar data revealed that, during the last 2 minutes of the accident flight, the airplane’s rate of descent increased from 400 (feet per minute) to greater than 1,700 fpm. During the final minute of the flight, the rate decreased briefly to 1,000 fpm before radar contact was lost,” the NTSB report reads.

According to the company’s standard operating procedure, if a plane was coming in too high, a “missed approach” should be performed. The Federal Aviation Authority says a missed approach is a maneuver conducted when an instrument landing cannot be completed.

One other note in the report showed that Orner had just completed what would be his last medical certification. The pilot, who had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2001 had two new conditions: obstructive sleep apnea and diabetes.

On March 7, 2016, his last first-class medical certificate was issued “with the limitation, ‘Not valid for any class after 3/31/2017.’ ”

Orner had just come back to work from a week’s vacation, Rayner noted. The State College flight was his first time back in the cockpit since that break.

This story was originally published February 5, 2018 at 4:48 PM with the headline "The plane approached University Park Airport high. Then it dropped sharp and fast."