The Oklahoma State University Cowboys basketball team plane crash occurred on January 27, 2001, at 19:37 EST, when a Beechcraft Super King Air 200, registration N81PF, carrying two players on the Oklahoma State Cowboys basketball team along with six Oklahoma State broadcasters and members of the Oklahoma State coaching staff, crashed in a field 40 miles (64 km) east of Denver, near Strasburg, in the U.S. state of Colorado.
The aircraft was carrying two crew members (pilot Denver Mills, age 55, and co-pilot Bjorn Fahlstrom, age 30) and eight passengers involved with Oklahoma State basketball.
Both pilots were certified flight instructors and held the proper transport licenses to carry passengers, but only the Pilot in Command (PIC) was type-rated on the King Air. All ten occupants aboard were killed, and the plane was destroyed by inflight-breakup and postcrash fire.
Cause of the accident “was the pilot’s spatial disorientation resulting from his failure to maintain positive manual control of the airplane with the available flight instrumentation.” A contributing factor was “the loss of a.c. electrical power during instrument meteorological conditions,” which caused the pilot to lose most of the pilot-side instruments, including altimeter, attitude indicator, horizontal situation indicator (HSI), radio altimeter, RMI, and altitude preselect.
Although the copilot’s side may have had more working flight instruments, making it possible he could have provided assistance to the pilot-in-command (PIC), he had no formal King Air training, likely making him unfamiliar with the airplane’s systems and emergency procedures needed to act as pilot flying (PF).
The NTSB concluded that despite the failures of instrumentation, the situation should have been recoverable had the PIC “appropriately manage the workload associated with troubleshooting the loss of a.c. electrical power with the need to establish and maintain positive control of the airplane.” In other words, he failed to AVIATE, the first tenet in the expression “Aviate, Navigate, Communicate.”
