SCHOOLCRAFT TOWNSHIP — A small airplane taking off from a private grass airstrip near Copper City lost engine power Friday evening and crashed, resulting in injuries but no fatalities and bringing the National Transportation Safety Board into rural Houghton County to figure out exactly what happened.
And before we go any further, that last part is the important one: nobody died.
Michigan State Police responded to the crash on Township Park Road in Schoolcraft Township after it was reported at approximately 7:45 p.m. Friday, Aug. 14. Spl/Lt. Ashley Miller, public information officer for the MSP Seventh District, told the Daily Mining Gazette that injuries were believed to have occurred, but she did not yet have the names of those injured or information about the severity of those injuries when contacted Monday.
The federal investigation has since given us a little more information.
According to the NTSB, the aircraft was a Taylorcraft DCO-65, and preliminary information indicates it lost engine power during takeoff from a private grass strip near Copper City. What caused that loss of power remains unknown.
That’s an important distinction because aviation accidents produce amateur investigators faster than a snowstorm produces Facebook meteorologists. At this point, the federal government does not know why the engine lost power, which means the guy in the comments who has already determined it was definitely the carburetor probably doesn’t know either.
The NTSB says its investigation will focus on three broad areas: the pilot, the aircraft and the operating environment.
That’s pretty much everything except the pasty the pilot may or may not have eaten beforehand, and we’re confident they’ll get there if necessary.
The aircraft itself is an old one. Registration information associated with the Taylorcraft involved identifies it as a 1943 DCO-65, a two-seat, single-engine airplane powered by a Continental reciprocating engine. In other words, federal investigators aren’t dealing with a Gulfstream that wandered off course on its way to Aspen. They’re investigating a small airplane from an era when Franklin Roosevelt was president and somebody could apparently look at a patch of reasonably flat grass and say, “Yeah, we can fly out of that.”
To be clear, operating small aircraft from grass airstrips is a perfectly legitimate part of general aviation. The Daily Pasty is not suggesting otherwise.
We’re merely pointing out that “private grass strip near Copper City” may be the most Upper Peninsula phrase ever to result in an NTSB investigation.
Now comes the slow part.
The NTSB expects to issue a preliminary report within about 30 days. That report should contain factual information gathered during the opening phase of the investigation, but it should not be confused with a final determination of what caused the crash. According to the agency, a final report identifying probable cause and contributing factors typically takes roughly 12 to 24 months.
That means sometime between next summer and the summer after that, federal investigators may finally be able to tell everyone what happened during several seconds on a grass runway outside Copper City.
This is why actual accident investigations take longer than Facebook investigations. Federal investigators have this irritating habit of examining evidence before announcing conclusions.
For now, the established sequence is relatively short. The Taylorcraft was taking off from a private grass strip Friday evening when it lost engine power under circumstances that remain unknown. The aircraft crashed, Michigan State Police responded, injuries were reported and there were no fatalities.
Several significant details remain unavailable publicly, including the identities of the people aboard, how many occupants were in the airplane and the extent of their injuries. Those gaps are worth leaving as gaps rather than filling them with guesses.
The Daily Pasty will therefore leave the mechanical diagnosis to people who can distinguish an aircraft carburetor from whatever is underneath the plastic cover when we open the hood of a Subaru.
But considering that the trouble began during takeoff with a loss of engine power, there is already one piece of information in this story that matters more than anything investigators eventually put into a report.
Everyone survived.
For a Friday evening flight that ended considerably closer to the ground than intended, that’s a pretty damn good place to start.
