Greg Biffle's Jet *JUST CRASHED* | First Look N257BW

This is very devastating. Well, just moments ago, we heard of

another devastating plane crash. This apparently a Cessna 550 Citation 2

potentially operated, we don't know, by a single pilot with six occupants on

board. Five fatalities have been confirmed so far. This is tail number

November 257 Bravo Whiskey. There are some reports, we don't know this, but

some reports that people are linking the ownership of the aircraft to the uh

NASCAR uh driver Greg Biffle, also known as BIFF. Uh and uh what we did is we

took this tail number. A lot of this remains unconfirmed at this point, but

we took the tail number and we looked up the aircraft and we looked up the flight

path so we could try to understand what's going on as well as aligning the

weather uh at the airport at the time. Uh so now I I have a lot of experience

flying a uh a jet with a full Garmin 3000 suite, which I'll show you in just

a moment. Uh I've never flown with a six-pack like I'll show you uh in the

listing for this. Personally, I find that these sort of avionics are very

difficult to fly with in the weather. Uh I I find it remarkable that people can

do this very very well. But if these are the current avionics and the aircraft

did end up flying in what appears to be this thick fog, I think there could be a

contribution to, you know, a specul, this is full speculation at this point,

but a contribution of maybe a lack of autopilot, an overwhelmed departure into

the fog, into this weather right here, which may have been even worse at the

time of the air, you know, takeoff. uh and and spatial disorientation. Why

we could say that is take a look at this path right here, this flight path. So,

what appears to be uh or what we appear to have is a takeoff at 10:06 a.m. from

the Statesville, North Carolina Regional Airport. Uh this airport has a field

elevation of about 1,000 ft. Given the fog at the time, I don't suspect it was

windy at the time. So I I don't and really for a Cessna Citation 2, I don't

think this would be much of an issue. Uh any kind of uh whether crosswind or or

tailwind or any kind of wind issue I don't think would be an issue here. But

we've seen this happen off the coast of San Diego as well where pilots will take

off into this kind of weather and the worst moment is the moment of takeoff.

You rotate and a lot happens, especially when you're a single pilot. This is the

hardest part. So, imagine this. You go to take off and you rotate into the

weather. And what happens after you rotate into the weather, here's just an

example. Obviously, not into the weather, but h what happens is as you're

rotating into the weather, what you're going to be given an altitude,

potentially an initial climb altitude of 1500 or 2,000. You're going to get

talked to a lot. You've got to change the radio if you've got autopilot. You

got to make sure the autopilot's set. You got to make sure your heading is

right. There is a lot that happens that's very overwhelming at these phases

of flight and you could really quickly get off course because at the same time

you get to let's say a 1500 or 2,000 ft elevation uh and you're told to hold at

that elevation. Now you got to switch from your regional airport radio

frequency over to uh you know uh your your maybe um air traffic control uh

departure frequency. So you're switching frequencies at the same time as you're

switching frequencies, you're trying to maintain an altitude. This is hard to

do. And at the same time as you're trying to maintain altitude, switching

frequencies, especially if you don't have an autopilot, and you're trying to

keep your speed up, and you're going into the weather, and you're getting

disoriented because you don't have a Garmin flight deck, a lot can go wrong

really quickly. Uh, so take a look at this. We could see the aircraft climbs

from field elevation to 1,800 ft. So it's a climbing left turn. So a climbing

turn to the north over here. This is fine. It's actually very normal in a

departure to climb and maybe even do an obstacle departure procedure where

you're going to climb over the airport and then take off onto your destination,

which in this case looked like it was flight planned for Florida. But anyway,

we get to 1,800 here. If they were, let's say, given an instruction to hold

at 2,000, let's say, maybe thought, "Oh, I'm I'm approaching 1,800 too quickly,

right? Let's slow down a little or let's level off. There's our level off at

2,000. Let's slow down a little bit. So, we see that speed level off, but we're

losing that altitude. Now, we gas up a little bit because we're starting to get

slow and losing altitude. This is all within the first 3 minutes, right? So,

first minute is taking off. The first 2 minutes, you're fighting to maintain

that altitude. You just lost 500 ft of altitude. Why would you lose 500t of

altitude on takeoff? Well, probably because you just flew into the clouds

and you have no visual reference for what's going on and you're operating on

on a six-pack instrument, which is very difficult uh to do. This is very

difficult. That's why I I like I said, I I refuse to fly this and learn on this.

I was fortunate to learn on a uh on a Cirrus, but I mean, you know, here's us

uh doing um uh doing stalls over the coast of Santa Barbara on it. Uh and you

could see, look how much easier it is. Watch right here on the left. you'll see

uh you know, we're going to plummet here in just a moment as we do a pusher

stall, but it's so much easier to maintain uh a level aircraft when you

have a giant glass screen in front of you. It's like a video game where you

just line up the sticks, right? And so here, you know, we we drop, you know,

25° or whatever, uh and then go to level out and recover from our stall. So, this

is a lot easier to operate in than this. These appear to be photos of the

aircraft. Uh the aircraft has uh I believe it was 11,500 hours on it. We'll

look in just a moment. This is when it was for sale. It was certified as a 135

operator uh 135 certificate, so maintain. It's not uncommon for people

to buy these aircraft and then keep them in the 135 leasing cycle. So that way

you could offset some of the costs of ownership for the aircraft. You could be

uh Greg, by the way, was a pilot or is. We we don't know if he was on board the

aircraft, right? We don't know. Uh we know he was a helicopter pilot and a jet

pilot. Uh this plane is capable of being uh flown by a single pilot. But what a

lot of pilots do is they'll buy an aircraft, get the tax deduction, and

then throw it into a leasing business so other people can use it in the meantime.

So, we don't know who the occupants are of the aircraft, but we do know that as

we make this left turn, which as as having, you know, as a single pilot, jet

rated pilot, I'll tell you a climbing turn into the fog without autopilot,

especially if you're single pilot, we don't know if they're single pilot,

would be really disorienting. This is a very, this is a very, very hard uh uh

departure. And so I'm not surprised to see this stress in uh in in the

altitudes right here. Uh we should not be slowing down this much. Slowing down

somewhat, staying under 250, totally normal, but we're trying to get

somewhere. So if we stay at 225, that would be normal. Level off. Stay at 225.

To drop 50 miles of speed, knots really is what we'll use. Very unusual to drop

this altitude. very unusual. Uh and then what we'll see over here is we get back

to climbing. But unfortunately, while we climb here and we get back into our next

turn. So we've, you know, we've finished this turn. Now we're going to do our

turn back over the airfield, we see the same thing happen again. We speed up.

We're holding about 2,000. In this case, it's 1900. We're holding the altitude,

but something happens again. For some reason, it seems like we get disoriented

again or something. We pull back the throttle a lot. Maybe as because we're

reaching 250. 250 is your ceiling. See how rapidly we're getting to 250 in

speed over here. We actually oversped. So, we went to 262. We're not legally

allowed to cross 250 right now. That is your legal speed limit. So, he goes, "Oh

crap, I'm too fast. Pull power." So, we pull power. Unfortunately, we pull too

much power and we get down to a slow 200 again. And as we get to 200, we start

turning. So now we're slow and we're turning, which is going to slow us down

even more. And so I I don't know if we just forgot here that the power was out

or who knows, maybe there could have been a mechanical issue, right? But we

get into a turn and we forget maybe that the gas is out. And I would suspect

right here that this sudden turn, this may have this may have been stall speed

right here. Worth noting right here, 129 mph. I we usually we we don't we're not

going to use miles per hour in aviation, but these tracking websites do. So, a

little confusing here. Uh to clarify, 129 mph is going to bring us down to

about 112 knots. That's closer to where we saw that stall speed in the phenom,

which does mean that maybe we didn't necessarily oversp speed here, but we

came close to it given this rapid sort of acceleration in speed here, right?

So, we rapidly move up from 191 mph in this case to 262. And we do pull that

power back. Again, we don't know why that power is pulled back. I still think

it's because, you know, there's there's a moment we're like, "Oh crap, we're

going too fast." And that power gets pulled back again. Who knows, maybe

there was an engine failure. Uh that's that's entirely possible as well. Uh but

you know, these aircraft are designed to fly with one engine out. Uh so we'll

have to wait and see what the uh extra details of this one are. This may have

been a final stall uh right here where all of a sudden we're just way too slow

and we essentially fall out of the sky when we're only 250 h four or 500 feet

above the ground. Right? So this the data ends at about a it ends at 1,000 ft

which is the ground. That's the ground at this case is about 1,000 ft. So keep

that in mind when when you're looking at an aircraft. Uh look at the stall speed

on the phenom. The stall speed on phenom I think is a little bit lower. But if we

jump over to that video again and we look at the stall speed here on the

Phenom, look at where the Phenom stalls. Uh, so we stalled at about 106

here. So they could be at a different configuration depending on where their

flaps are. So their stall speed could be very different. But it took us until

about 106 104 here to stall out. Uh, but we know we were getting really slow

there uh on on that uh that accident aircraft. We don't know why. We don't

know who was on board. Uh we just know that for some reason that aircraft got

slow. My suspicion again is they realized they were going too fast. They

broke the speed limit. Uh they pulled back power, forgot to put the power back

in. Uh and and that's when either we we stalled or we just kept going here, you

know, cuz it like I don't necessarily know that the citation 2 would have hit

stall speed here, but that turn at the end is a little bit indicative of of of

a stall. You know, just a roll over to the left and it's out. Uh this is really

unfortunate and really tragic. Obviously, this is all, you know,

breaking news information. So, there's a limit to how much we can know with

certainty what's going on here. Uh, if we do a quick refresh of just some

images here, we could see this is the latest information on this crash. Uh,

tail number uh, flight made a return to the airport shortly after takeoff. We

don't know if that's true. We don't know if that's true. It looks like that in

the pattern, but that's not unusual when you're waiting for air traffic to clear

you to continue on your path. And it could be a tool to circle. Like for

example, if you depart out of Heber, we don't know. We won't know all the

details with certainty, but if you depart out of, let's say, the Heber

airport, you're going to do a climb above the airport to get out of there

before leaving. So, we don't know if this was a uh a return to the airport. I

suppose it could have been, but why did we get up to 250 knots then? Uh, if we

were going to return into the pattern, we wouldn't have climbed all the way to

200 uh at one point 260 knots in speed. You know, you'd stay at traffic pattern

speeds, which would be more like 170 consistent. You know, to go to 260

doesn't really imply to me a return to the airport. But, uh, this appears to be

footage, uh, of the crash. This is very

devastating.

Yeah, this is really sad.

Oh, it looks like Oh, look at this. There's some components on the ground

over here. It looks like I don't know if this is where they hit the ground and

then Oh, yeah. Oh my gosh, dude. Holy smokes. That's devastating.

So, it looks like they they did eventually hit what looked like

the trees and the ground here potentially with the wing and a stall.

And then this is either a cartwheel. It looks like if this was horizontal, we

would see more fence damage here. This looks like it cartwheelled.

Oh my gosh. Hard to say. Hard to say. Uh, wow. That's

That's devastating. That's really sad. So, um,

here again, footage of what the uh what the weather looked like. You could see

the sun right here through the fog. >> Why not advertise these things that you

told us here? I feel like nobody else knows about this.

>> We'll we'll try a little advertising and see how it goes.

>> Congratulations, man. You have done so much. People love you. People look up to

you. >> Kevin Pra there, financial analyst and

YouTuber. Meet Kevin. Always great to get your take.