UND Fatal

gotWXdagain

Polished Member
Uhhh… that is a totally different airport and if I’m not mistaken happened a long time ago. Bruce Smith hasn’t been the dean at UND for a while.
 
No worries.



This video has what was described as the Flightaware from the incident aircraft. Not sure how frequent the sampling is but it looked live a pretty dramatic dive.

After viewing this video, I saw the post from the accident years ago, another UND pilot crashing on a Monday that still showed up among the first Google results. I jumped the gun. The page looked amateurish and then I saw the dates.
 
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Heard from someone he sent a text out before his flight, was just signed off. The family called 911 to try and get him to stop but he had already taken off. Then found an article confirming they suspect it could have been suicidal.
 
Quite a different tone of sadness if this was (another) suicide. We had one in 2000 or 2001 with a guy who'd just received his second DUI. Took a Seminole down to Rapid City, rolled it inverted, and pulled.

That sucks... all he had to do was keep his nose clean for a few years. Probably would have been kicked out of the aviation department. So get a degree in something else, then flight train elsewhere in a few years, when he could get his medical back. Explanations would have to be given during airline interviews. But it wasn't the end of his career potential. Just a setback. Sad.
 
That sucks... all he had to do was keep his nose clean for a few years. Probably would have been kicked out of the aviation department. So get a degree in something else, then flight train elsewhere in a few years, when he could get his medical back. Explanations would have to be given during airline interviews. But it wasn't the end of his career potential. Just a setback. Sad.

Ahhh...yeah I don't know about that. I don't know about it being IMPOSSIBLE to get past 2 DUI's, but that's an uphill battle.
 
Ahhh...yeah I don't know about that. I don't know about it being IMPOSSIBLE to get past 2 DUI's, but that's an uphill battle.

Maybe, but I've read about guys with 2-3 DUI's getting hired at a legacy. Probably pretty rare, they might have known someone, who was someone. But it can happen.
 
Quite a different tone of sadness if this was (another) suicide. We had one in 2000 or 2001 with a guy who'd just received his second DUI. Took a Seminole down to Rapid City, rolled it inverted, and pulled.

There was one at UM Flyers (a flying club in Ann Arbor, not associated with the University), took off in a Cessna 172 and went north, northwest bound. They found the Cessna 172 wreckage in Canada from fuel starvation. No body was ever found to this day.
 
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A guy in NorCal topped off and pointed the plane west, out to sea.

A couple days later the wife filed a missing person report after finding his car at the airport. Radar tapes showed a 1200 code heading out to sea and never coming back.
 
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