The National Transportation Safety Board has published its preliminary report on the mid-air collision between two planes in Dallas that killed six people. The report identifies some of the key components found in the wreckage and includes information that investigators have gathered from recordings of radio traffic between the pilots and the "air boss" for the Wings Over Dallas airshow on November 12th. It does not include any information about a likely cause for the crash.
"It's absolutely normal," said aviation attorney Kent Krause. "They would not venture a probable cause. They won't do that until a final report is issued." That final report will likely take between one year and 18 months to complete.
Download the NTSB report here (PDF)
The preliminary report notes that investigators found GPS gear that was on-board the P-63 Mustang and the B-17 Flying Fortress. Those planes were not equipped with modern flight-data recorders, so the data from the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) gear on the planes will help determine the sequence of events leading up to the collision.
"They may be able to use some of that information in conjunction with radar sweeps that occurred naturally there to pinpoint the location of the planes as they moved along," Krause said. "The biggest thing in this instance is all the pictures and the video that exist out there. I think that, more than anything, is going to be what the NTSB relies upon to piece things together and determine what exactly happened."
The investigators point out that there was not an "altitude deconfliction" briefing before the air show. Those meetings can facilitate the exchange of information between pilots and dispatchers on the ground about their plans.
"That would sort of be the deconfliction concept of...'how do we do this so we don't run into each other'," Krause said.
Six people died when the P-63 banked into the B-17. The B-17 caught fire after the collision and burst into flames when it hit the ground.
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