On Sept. 27, 2018, a Falcon 50 overran a runway at Greenville, South Carolina. Both pilots died and the two passengers received serious injuries. Air America Flight Services, a Part 135 charter company based at St Petersburg-Clearwater International Airport in Florida, operated the aircraft, N114TD. Company management insisted it was not a revenue flight but invoices presented by the passengers, and the assessment of investigators, proved otherwise. Air America’s owner died in the accident, leaving unanswered questions about the company’s murky history of Part 91 versus Part 135 operations, and the almost total absence of documentation from the FAA has made it difficult to obtain clarity on the issue. The convoluted sequence of events that led to what went wrong during the landing in South Carolina offers proof yet again that an accident’s cause is often far more complex than what occurs in its final moments.
In its investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) determined that discrepancies in N114TD’s anti-skid system likely caused a braking system failure right after touchdown. On the flight deck voice recorder, the pilot-in-command can be heard repeating in rapid succession, “whoa, whoa, whoa,” and “where are the brakes,” “I have no brakes,” “no brakes,” and “get on the brakes,” until the aircraft went over an embankment and then stopped on the airport perimeter road. Photographs of the Falcon 50, its fuselage broken in half, circulated widely on the internet.
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