Fatal crashes, close calls cast pall over flight school

High above a rural stretch of Florida east of Fort Myers, a young student pilot on her first solo flight began to panic.
She had stopped receiving the radio signals that served as her way points in the sky. Now she was lost, and her single-engine trainer was running out of fuel.
Desperation set in.
If her instructor were there, he would have told her to call for help on an emergency frequency. Instead, the student reached for her cellphone and thumbed a text message to a friend, also enrolled at Kemper Aviation flight school near Lantana.
I’m lost, the message read. What do I do?
Moments later, the student’s plane crash-landed in a field of tall grass near LaBelle. She emerged with minor injuries.
Soon after that day, Aug. 23, Alain “A.C.” Cuvillier, a former flight instructor at Kemper Aviation, said he pulled aside his boss, flight school owner Jeffrey Rozelle.
“The next one,” Cuvillier remembered telling Rozelle, “is going to be a fatal one.”
The words proved prophetic.
During the next three months, two Kemper students, a veteran flight instructor and an experienced pilot from Pennsylvania would die in two crashes. A third student would survive to file a negligence lawsuit against the school.
After the second fatal crash, Kemper flight instructors who had taken other jobs began to fear for the safety of the friends they left behind.

• Indian student pilot, Swedish flight instructor die in Florida crash
• Pilots were ‘in a panic situation’ before crashing west of Boynton Beach
• Student pilot in Saturday’s crash hoped to fly in India
• Indian student’s death: Faulty fuel filter suspected in US plane crash
• Another Indian pilot student die in US crash
• Planes collided over Everglades: Indian student pilots body still missing
• Family grieves for lost son half a world away
• “The door of a plane came off once while he was learning to fly”

Kemper Aviation puts a fleet of aging airplanes in the hands of poorly disciplined students and is a risky place to work and learn, according to interviews with more than a half-dozen pilots who fly or flew for the school as instructors. Federal crash reports and court documents at least partially support the instructors’ assessment.
The pilots portrayed a climate of tension and anxiety that arose from flying planes that reeked of gasoline or had sputtered and broken down in the past.
They also described a lack of self-control among some trainees; a pattern of behavior that extends from the students’ turbulent private lives to the skies above South Florida.
Kemper students have crashed at least four times since September 2006, killing four people and seriously injuring a fifth, federal records show.
That record, accumulated in barely a year and a half, is the worst among flight schools in Florida, one of the nation’s busiest states in terms of aviation, according to National Transportation Safety Board data.
Although students from another school, Delta Connection Academy in Sanford, were involved in five crashes to Kemper’s four since 2004, those instructors and trainees walked away unharmed or with only minor cuts and bruises, records show.
Rozelle, who took over Kemper Aviation in 2004 with a partner, Akshay Mohan, said his flight school’s planes aren’t the prettiest, but they are inspected rigorously and held to high safety standards.
“I take my son up and my family up at times, and I wouldn’t do it if I felt it was unsafe,” Rozelle said.
He said the recent crashes probably spooked his instructors but contended that each incident could be traced to pilot error.
Even so, some current and former Kemper instructors are afraid more of the school’s planes will crash if federal regulators, whom observers say are overworked, don’t step in.
“I’ve had situations when the airplanes scared me,” said one instructor, who requested anonymity because he still works at Kemper. “It’s sad to say, but it just becomes normal working over there.”
‘It could have ended horribly’
All but three of 21 planes Kemper has used during the past two years were manufactured before 1980; one Cessna, a single-engine 150L, is 37 years old, Federal Aviation Administration records show.
Anders Selberg, 46, one of Kemper Aviation’s senior-most pilots, used to listen to the younger instructors’ concerns about flying in the school’s aging planes.
“He told me, ‘The conditions of the planes here are not the greatest. The only thing we can do is check to the extent that we can check and fly the planes,’ ” said Cuvillier, who left the school in June to fly for Northwest Airlines.
Four months later, Selberg was dead.
He and two students were flying a Piper Archer on a night flight from the Lantana area on Oct. 27 when they reported engine trouble. Over a golf course west of Boynton Beach, the terrain below would have seemed a vast and terrifying black expanse.
The plane clipped a stand of trees before plowing into the course and sliding to a stop on a putting green. Selberg and his copilot, 18-year-old Arjun Chhikara, Arjun Chhikara died instantly.
A second student, 39-year-old Chandrashekhar Godghate, was critically hurt. After his release this month from Delray Medical Center, Godghate sued Kemper, its mechanic service and the Kansas-based company that leased the Piper to the flight school, alleging that the companies failed to properly maintain and repair the plane, among other claims.
An air safety investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board pored over the wrecked Piper and found an extra washer between the fuel filter bowl and its tightening screw, according to his preliminary report. The fuel filter was loose, and “fine-grained black particulate matter was found inside the electric fuel pump and adhering to its screen,” the investigator reported. He also noted that the Piper’s engine was set to draw from the right wing tank, which contained only about a half-cup of fuel. He has yet to release a final report on the crash.
People at the flight school couldn’t believe it. Some instructors left. Others made rules for themselves about the planes, even refused to fly some of them under certain conditions.
Many instructors had their own stories about Kemper equipment.
Interviewed separately, former instructor Andrew Flaxman singled out N105CT as a plane that always smelled of leaking fuel.
The Cessna remains among Kemper’s fleet – “It’s in airworthy condition,” Rozelle said – as do the planes damaged in the recent nonfatal crashes, records show.
Although a Cessna 152 was damaged badly in a botched landing in September 2006 in suburban Lantana, AIM High, a maintenance company co-owned by Rozelle and Mohan, petitioned the FAA to re-register it three months after the crash. The plane’s status remains “in question,” records show.
Likewise, despite “substantial damage” to the plane the student crashed in LaBelle, Kemper registered the plane with the FAA less than two months after the incident, records show.
On Dec. 8, less than two months after Selberg and Chhikara died, Kemper student Cleon Alvares was killed along with another pilot, 56-year-old Harry Duckworth III, when Alvares’ Cessna collided with Duckworth’s Piper in a high-traffic training area over the Everglades west of Boca Raton.
The NTSB is investigating the crash, and it’s still unclear whether Alvares, 25, or Duckworth was at fault. However, on other occasions, Kemper students have made mistakes or poor decisions, according to federal records and interviews with instructors.
Less than a year before the Kemper student crash-landed in LaBelle, another student smashed the Kemper plane against a runway at the suburban Lantana airport in September 2006. Contrary to FAA rules, the pilot never notified federal authorities about the crash. When an NTSB investigator learned of the incident, he noted the pilot’s omission in his report.
Kemper’s students, who primarily are young men and women recruited in India, pay more than $35,000 each for training.
Cuvillier chalked up the nonfatal crashes to a lack of training.
Students’ poor discipline or lack of judgment sometimes showed itself on the ground, instructors said.
Cuvillier, who lived for a time in the same apartment complex as the Kemper students – who pay about $750 a month to sublet space from the flight school in the Palm Club apartments on Second Avenue North west of Lake Worth – said it wasn’t unusual for him to catch pupils drinking or smoking marijuana.
“There’s no control,” Cuvillier said. “There’s no supervision.”
In another instance last year, a mechanic smelled marijuana smoke in the cockpit of a Kemper plane two students had just returned.
Rozelle said the students told him the odor came from clove cigarettes. Both pupils were suspended. One left the school to finish his training in California, Rozelle said. The other stayed on and graduated.
“A lot of these kids are 18, 19 years old, it’s the first time they’ve ever been away from home, they’re in a new country, it’s kind of like the college years,” Rozelle said.
The school still is working out how to deal with young students, he said.
After the fatal crash on Dec. 8, Kemper instructors were certain the FAA would step in.
“We all said, ‘OK, this is it. Now they’re going to shut it down,’ ” said the instructor who requested anonymity.
But since Alvares and Duckworth died, federal regulators have taken no action against the school, records show.
“We haven’t been cited by the FAA as far as doing anything wrong,” Rozelle said.
Any flight school that records two fatal crashes in less than three months should draw immediate FAA scrutiny, said Mary Schiavo, former inspector general of the U.S. Department of Transportation. And in cases of schools racking up multiple crashes, the FAA has the power to revoke certification on an emergency basis.
“Not only is it possible the FAA is missing something, but it’s obvious they’re missing something, and it’s because they’re spread so thin,” said Schiavo, now a private practice attorney based in Mount Pleasant, S.C. “They could have shut their doors in a heartbeat.”
The FAA has 182 general aviation inspectors to police 66 flight schools in Florida. In addition, these inspectors renew pilot certificates, oversee air shows and investigate crashes.
Schiavo said that workload translates to a self-regulating industry.
“It’s up to the operator to maintain a level of safety. All the FAA can do is spot-check,” she said. “They are woefully understaffed for inspections.”
Although instructors said they often raised maintenance concerns with Rozelle and Mohan, federal regulators cited Kemper for maintenance problems only three times in the school’s 18-year history. Most recently, Kemper was fined $1,000 for a maintenance problem detected in 2000 – four years before Rozelle and Mohan took over.
Meanwhile, the FAA has a record of only one crash – the September 2006 botched landing – involving Kemper planes since the school opened.
27/01/08 MICHAEL LaFORGIA/Palm Beach Post, United States