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The Crash of Night Ship 282
By Curt Sutherly
FATE :: July 2005

On October 23, 2002, a light cargo aircraft—call sign “Night Ship 282”—plunged out of control into a wetlands/wildlife preservation area shortly after departing Mobile, Alabama. The pilot was Thomas J. Preziose, 54, a veteran aviator and flight instructor. The circumstances of the crash were unusual, to say the least, and remain under investigation and mired in controversy.

A former member of the New York City Police Department, where he served for 23 years, Preziose was also an Army veteran, having served as a helicopter medic in Vietnam. At 7:40 p.m. on the night in question, Preziose departed Brookley Downtown Airport in Mobile, bound for Montgomery, Alabama. His aircraft—a single-engine Cessna 208B Caravan “Cargomaster”—was hauling approximately 420 pounds of cargo, including business documents and letters and a shipment of baseball caps. The three-year-old aircraft was licensed to Atlantic Aero, Inc., and operated by Mid-Atlantic Freight, Inc., of Greensboro, North Carolina. The Caravan was mechanically sound, having received a complete flight-worthiness inspection on October 18, 2002—only five days before the crash.

The pilot, Thomas Preziose, was—as already stated—a veteran flyer. He was certified both as a transport pilot for single-engine aircraft and as a commercial pilot for multi-engine aircraft. In addition, he was an instrument-rated helicopter pilot. He had logged a total of 4,000 hours in the air, including time as a pilot for the New York City Police Department. (He retired from the force in 1994.) Prior to being hired by Mid-Atlantic Freight, where he worked for several months, Preziose had been employed as a Cessna 208 instructor for the Pan Am Flight Academy in Memphis, Tennessee. He was reportedly in excellent health and was a practiced martial artist with keen reflexes.

According to a preliminary accident report released in April 2004 by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the Mobile area was overcast on the night of the mishap, with some light rain in the vicinity and freezing conditions above 11,000 feet. Preziose was well below that altitude, having leveled off at 3,000 feet, and adverse weather was not believed to have been a contributing factor in the ensuing crash. Also not a factor was the presence of a commercial DC-10 operated by FedEx. Preziose had radioed that he was aware of the larger aircraft, which was flying 1,000 feet above him on a heading inbound to the airport. The DC-10 was later examined by investigators, who found no indication that it had in any way impacted the smaller aircraft. There is also no indication that the Cessna was caught in air turbulence from the larger plane. According to an updated advisory issued by NTSB on June 10, 2004, the Cessna “was not in a position to encounter the wake turbulance from [the] nearby DC-10.”

Five minutes into the flight, at 7:45 p.m., Preziose began a controlled descent from 3,000 feet to 2,700 feet. The descent lasted 14 seconds. He then descended much more rapidly—dropping another 300 feet in five seconds, which indicates a fairly precipitous dive, especially in the type of aircraft he was piloting. Three seconds later he transmitted his last message: “I needed to deviate,” he radioed urgently three times, and was repeating it a fourth time when the transmission abruptly ended. At about the same time, his aircraft disappeared from the Mobile radar screen.

In the NTSB preliminary report, Butch Wilson, who headed the Mobile accident investigation team, concluded that the Cessna went down after colliding “in flight with an unknown object at 3,000 feet.” As we shall see, this was no baseless declaration ....

Read the rest of this article in the July 2005 issue of FATE

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