Investigation Continues into Colorado Mid-Air Plane Crash

February 8, 2010, 1:00PM. By Gordon Gibb

Boulder, COInvestigators of the plane crash over Colorado that killed three people on February 6 plan to seek input from other pilots in the area for clues.

The airplane accident occurred about 1:30 pm Saturday near the Boulder Municipal Airport when a southbound Cirrus SR20 collided with a westbound Piper Pawnee towing a glider, causing the "immediate disintegration and explosion of both airplanes," said Jennifer Rodi, an investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), according to the Associated Press (AP).

There were three people in the glider, all of whom survived. A relative of the glider pilot told AP that Ruben Bakker, seeing that a collision between the two powered planes was imminent, cut his glider loose and banked in an attempt to avoid the collision. While he did not manage to avoid the flames, Bakker was still able to fly the glider and his two passengers to safety.

Those aboard the powered aircraft were not so lucky. The Boulder County Coroner's Office said yesterday that 25-year-old Alexander Howard Gilmer of Evergreen, Colorado, had been piloting the Piper Pawnee. The pilot of the Cirrus was tentatively identified as 58-year-old Robert Matthews of Boulder and the passenger as 56-year-old Mark A. Matthews of Englewood, Colorado.

While the crash is in the initial stages of investigation, officials with the Boulder County Sheriff's Office indicated that the single-engine Cirrus clipped the glider towline just before the collision. It is not known if that event led to the mid-air plane crash.

The Piper aircraft belonged to Mile High Gliding Inc. According to the AP report, it had just lifted off from the Boulder airport with the glider in tow when the crash occurred.

The Cirrus, meanwhile, lifted off from the same airport at around 12:45pm—presumably ahead of the Pawnee—but became lost on radar for about 10 minutes, NTSB officials said. The crash occurred after the Cirrus had been in the air for about 45 minutes.

Eyewitnesses reported the planes collided in a ball of fire. Some witnesses said they could see people falling from the planes, although NTSB officials say individuals would be hard to distinguish from debris. Amateur video showed a hulking piece of plane falling slowly to the ground under a parachute. Such parachutes are designed to deploy if a plane becomes disabled and are attached to the fuselage, not an individual.

While no one on the ground was hurt, the debris field encompassed 1.5 miles. Neither plane was outfitted with a black box. The Cirrus has the capacity to provide data from avionics, but they were destroyed in the crash.