Colorado Aviation Accidents & Incidents

The Board's full report is available at http://www.ntsb.gov/publictn/publictn.htm.

On January 27, 2001, about 1737 mountain standard time, a Raytheon (Beechcraft) Super King Air 200, N81PF, owned by North Bay Charter, LLC, and operated by Jet Express Services, crashed into rolling terrain near Strasburg, Colorado. The flight was operating on an instrument flight rules (IFR) flight plan under 14 Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) Part 91. The flight departed about 1718 from Jefferson County Airport (BJC), Broomfield, Colorado, with two pilots and eight passengers aboard. The
pilot who occupied the left seat in the cockpit was solely responsible for the flight. The pilot who occupied the right seat in the cockpit, referred to in this report as the "second pilot," was not a required flight crewmember. N81PF was one of three airplanes transporting members of the Oklahoma State University (OSU) basketball team and associated team personnel to Stillwater Regional Airport (SWO), Stillwater, Oklahoma, after a game at the University of Colorado at Boulder that afternoon. All 10 occupants aboard N81PF were killed, and the airplane was destroyed by impact forces and a
postcrash fire. Instrument meteorological conditions (IMC) prevailed at the time of the accident.
On the day before the accident, the pilots departed Wiley Post Airport (PWA), near Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, for a positioning flight to SWO. At SWO, members of the OSU basketball team and associated team personnel boarded the airplane, which then continued to BJC. According to ATC records, N81PF made its first radio contact with the Kansas City ARTCC about 1449 (1549 central standard time) and its last radio contact with the Denver Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) about 1652. Records from Stevens Aviation, a fixed-base operator at BJC, indicated that the airplane landed at 1700 and was placed in a hangar overnight.
ATC records indicated that the pilot contacted the Denver Automated Flight Service Station about 1100 on the day of the accident to obtain a weather briefing and file IFR flight plans for the return trips to SWO and PWA. The weather briefing included a general synopsis of the weather situation for the proposed flights, AIRMET [airmen’s meteorological information] flight advisories for occasional moderate icing and occasional moderate turbulence, forecast airport conditions, winds and temperatures aloft, and notices to airmen in effect. A Stevens Aviation ramp worker at BJC stated that the airplane was pulled outside from its overnight hangar between 1115 and 1130 on the day of the accident. The ramp worker also stated that the pilots arrived at the airport sometime after 1300. The pilot requested that the airplane be returned to a hangar until after the passengers boarded. According to the ramp worker, the airplane was subsequently returned to another hangar. The pilots left the airport to attend at least the first half of the basketball game, which began at 1400.
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