A couple of years ago, a good friend of mine died. He was a general aviation pilot, and he passed away when the Cessna 172S he and his flight instructor were flying struck the ground seventeen minutes after taking off from Caldwell Airport in New Jersey. I've written about that and about him here before.
Today I got a call from a mutual friend of ours. The final NTSB report on the incident was published today.
For that friend, and others who have asked, I am sitting here going through the NTSB report and its supporting raw data from the point of view of a once-professional analyst, a tyro private pilot, and an interested party. In other words, I'm being an amateur Air Crash Investigations doofus around the death of a lifelong friend. I need more bourbon.
I won't go into details. I can say that it appears the aircraft was fine and neither pilot was impaired.