409 Statesville Citation 550 Crash (Greg Biffle): New ADS-B Clue & Rain-Induced Illusions

Max talks with host Scott Hamilton of WBT, Charlotte's News Talk radio, about the Statesville, North Carolina Citation 550 crash that killed NASCAR driver Greg Biffle and six others, then expands the conversation with a fresh technical finding and a practical training takeaway for pilots. While preparing for the short radio interview, Max revisited the ADS-B track and noticed something he hadn’t seen anyone else write about: the altitude anomaly isn’t merely a “jump,” it’s an impossible spike.

The key number is stark. The ADS-B data shows a reported climb of 1,374 feet in 1.64 seconds, which implies a climb rate of almost 50,000 feet per minute—a rate that doesn’t make sense for a Citation.

Max’s point is that this isn’t a real aircraft maneuver; it’s a data or sensor-path artifact. What makes it more compelling is what happens immediately beforehand: for 34 seconds, there were 14 ADS-B transmissions in a row with the exact same reported altitude.

That kind of perfectly flat series is abnormal even if an aircraft is “steady,” because pressure altitude reporting typically wiggles at least a little from sample to sample.

Max lays out a simple, pilot-intuitive interpretation: the aircraft was likely climbing normally, but the altitude value feeding ADS-B froze for about 34 seconds and then unfroze, “catching up” in one big correction.

If you treat that 1,374-foot change as occurring across the 34-second freeze rather than across 1.64 seconds, you get a climb rate around 2,200 fpm—entirely plausible for a departing Citation.

About 20 seconds after the correction, the aircraft turned back toward the airport.

Max also notes there is audio where a pilot announces on CTAF they are returning because they were “having issues,” and he believes those “issues” were likely altimeter/altitude-related rather than a direct cause of the crash.

From there, he turns the discussion into something useful for any pilot: how altitude gets measured, encoded, and transmitted—and what kinds of failures can create misleading outputs. In the Citation 550, there are multiple static ports feeding pilot-side and copilot-side instruments, plus potentially additional static sources feeding backups.

Depending on the configuration, ADS-B altitude can be sourced through a blind encoder tied to the static system, an air data computer, or an encoding (“coding”) altimeter common in older round-gauge aircraft.

The operational point: pilots might see one thing on their instruments while the transmitted pressure altitude shows something else—or the opposite—depending on where the fault lives.

Max then shifts to the accident sequence on return. Regardless of what prompted the turnback, he argues the crash itself likely occurred on short final for a different reason: visual illusions in rain and degraded visibility.

The aircraft struck the approach lighting system short of the runway threshold, which is exactly the kind of outcome that can happen when pilots subtly, unknowingly fly a shallow or low path while “going visual.”

He emphasizes that we don’t yet know the cause with certainty, but absent evidence of an engine failure on short final, illusions are a credible explanatory bucket—and one pilots can learn from immediately.

The primary illusion he highlights is water refraction. Rain on the windshield can make the horizon appear lower than it is, which creates the sensation of being higher than you really are—leading to an unconscious nose-down correction and a lower-than-intended glidepath.

He also cites guidance that rain, mist, and limited slant visibility reduce and distort visual cues during the instrument-to-visual transition, exactly when pilots are most vulnerable to subtle errors.

These effects are also documented in Flight Safety Foundation’s ALAR “Visual Illusions” briefing note, which specifically calls out rain-on-windshield refraction and the way rain can change the apparent intensity/brilliance of approach lighting.

Max closes with a concrete “do this next time” list. First, if you accept a visual in marginal conditions, load the ILS and use it to back up the visual—it would have shown a low path before contact with approach lights.

Second, he discusses a tech-forward defense: using Garmin visual approaches (the NTSB recovered a Garmin GTN 750 from the wreckage) and tools like Pathways in synthetic vision to help maintain a stable vertical picture.

But he adds a blunt warning that pilots routinely get wrong: Garmin visual approaches do not guarantee terrain clearance, and in hilly terrain or limited visibility they can route you into terrain unless you’ve validated them in good conditions.

The takeaway is simple: when your eyes can lie, disciplined cross-checking—and knowing the limitations of your tools—is what keeps you off the lights and on a safe path to the runway.

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