Alerts Sign-up
An NTSB Preliminary Report suggests former astronaut Bill Anders was performing a Split S maneuver in his Beech A45 Mentor but ran out of altitude and crashed into the ocean off Deer Harbor, Washington, on June 7. The NTSB does not use that term, but its narrative of cellphone video of the 90-year-old Anders’ final moments accurately describes the maneuver taught to all fighter pilots as a means of reversing direction quickly.
“At the beginning of the recording, the airplane was inverted with a slight nose-down attitude and heading generally to the south. Over the next 3 seconds, the airplane had transitioned to an almost vertical dive,” the report states. “As the airplane approached the water, it began to pull out of the dive, now facing the opposite direction. By the time it had recovered to almost wings level, upright attitude, the airplane struck the water with its right wingtip and spun across the water on a northern trajectory.”
The report said Anders took off from Skagit Regional Airport around 10:50 a.m. in his Mentor aircraft, which is part of the collection at the Heritage Flight Museum he founded there. He told his son, who was working at the museum, that he was doing what he termed an “Orcas Run,” where he flew around the San Juan Islands just off Washington's coast. He texted a friend on Orcas Island that he would be flying by about 50 minutes later and arrived on time. The friend told NTSB investigators that Anders would frequently fly past her house but “he never performed any kind of aerobatic maneuvers.”
