For those who lost loved ones in Wichita airport crash 20 years ago, memories remain fresh
Melva Bascue Kinkel couldn’t shake a deep sense of foreboding as the first October of the 2000s arrived.
Initially, she thought it was because the fifth anniversary of her father’s death was approaching. Then she thought something bad would happen to her while she was in New Orleans for the annual National Business Aviation Association convention.
“I just couldn’t explain this sense of death,” she said.
She shook it off and was circulating the convention as the communication advertising coordinator for Bombardier when a friend from Flight Safety International approached and asked if she’d heard about the plane crash in Wichita, involving a Challenger 604.
“That was Bryan’s plane,” Kinkel said of her boyfriend, Bryan Irelan, a test pilot for Bombardier.
She took off running toward Bombardier’s booth, where she was met by a company official who told her, “Bryan was in it. They don’t know if anyone has died.”
But they knew.
Irelan, 33, and flight engineer David Riggs, 48, died inside the plane after it crashed on Tyler Road, next to Mid-Continent Airport, on October 10, 2000. Co-pilot Eric Fiore, 43, died 36 days later in the burn unit of Via Christi Medical Center-St. Francis.
In its report released three years later, the National Transportation Safety Board cited pilot error and other factors for the crash, which occurred just 10 seconds after takeoff.
Irelan pulled too aggressively on the control yoke of the aircraft on takeoff, the NTSB report stated, causing the aircraft’s nose to pitch up excessively. That angle prompted fuel to shift backward during the acceleration and takeoff. The shifting fuel made the plane too heavy in the rear, causing a stall. Because the stall occurred just after takeoff, the plane did not have sufficient altitude to recover.
The NTSB report also cited “inadequate flight-testing procedure for the Challenger flight test program” and “the lack of direct, on-site operational oversight by Transport Canada and the Federal Aviation Administration” as factors in the crash.
In the aftermath of the crash, Bombardier revised its flight manual for the Challenger 604 and put new limits on how far aft the plane’s center of gravity should be. Mid-Continent Airport – now Wichita Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport – purchased a fire truck with a bayonet-style arm capable of piercing the skin of an airplane and shooting fire suppressing foam into the cabin.
For those who lost loved ones in that crash 20 years ago, the memories remain fresh – so fresh they still often use the present tense when referring to those lost.
Flight Through Fire
Carol Fiore will mark the anniversary by giving away free electronic copies of “Flight Through Fire,” the book she wrote about her husband’s fight for life in the hospital after the crash. She will also host a Facebook Live event to discuss the book and share stories about Eric.
She would have flown to New York to announce a scholarship in Eric’s name at the high school he attended, but the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed those plans back a year. The scholarship will go to a Yorktown High School student who plans to major in a hard science.
Using money donated by Wichitans in the wake of the crash, Fiore also set up a scholarship at the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center and has sent 21 children to the Cosmosphere’s annual space camp.
“It’s been really hard,” said Fiore, who now lives in Arizona. “People don’t like it when you say, ‘It ruined our lives,’ but it did. There’s no other way to say that. I think it ruined a lot of people’s lives.”
Losing her husband sent her into a spiral of complicated grief so intense Fiore figures she lost 10 years of her life working through it. Her daughters, who were 13 and 10 when their father died, struggled as well.
But a promise she made to her husband before he died kept her going, Fiore said.
“Eric’s dying wish was that I tell people about him,” she said, calling the book “this single mission” she took on.
“I took care of my kids and l learned to write. I needed to keep this promise to Eric.”
It was intimidating, she said, because she was a self-described science geek and his parents were English professors. It took her 12 years to get it written and published. Along the way, she discovered that she liked to write. She’s about to publish her fifth book.
She doesn’t dwell on why the plane crashed or who’s to blame, Fiore said, because Eric wouldn’t want that. Instead, she wants to focus on gratitude.
“My daughters and I would like, after 20 years, to again say thank you to the very generous people in Wichita,” Fiore said – not only for their donations that led to the Cosmosphere scholarship, but for the food and gifts they brought to the house in the days and weeks after the crash.
People even spent time watching after her children when she had to be somewhere, Fiore said.
“When there’s an accident, they really rise up and do good things for people,” she said of Wichita.
Riggs Family Scholarship fund
So many people donated money to the family of David Riggs that they combined that money with some of their own to establish the Riggs Family Scholarship at Berry College, a private liberal arts college in Mount Berry, Georgia. A Riggs ancestor helped found the college more than 100 years ago.
“We are so grateful for the work of our father and husband, Brian Irelan and Eric Fiore to make the skies safer,” Riggs’ daughter, Julie Homrich, said in a statement released on behalf of the family. “Every time we step foot on a plane, we are comforted by the knowledge that they gave their lives for a worthy cause.”
Homrich was 16 when her father died, and she says the crash helped shape her future. She became a mental health counselor specializing in trauma as a way to support others who have experienced Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
October 10 is never an easy day for Homrich, whose last words to her father were to turn off the light after he’d ducked in for a quick word early that morning before he left for what was supposed to be a routine flight.
“I don’t dread it like I used to,” Homrich said via email about the anniversary date, “but it still feels heavy every time it comes around.”
Homrich kept a journal in those months after the crash, haunted by the fear that her memory of him would become fuzzy.
“The sound of his voice and the lines on his face stayed etched in my memory so clearly until one day…things started to blur together a little bit,” she said. “His memory began to feel like someone I used to know and not the man who woke me up every morning and prayed me to sleep every night.
“I used to feel guilty about this, as if holding onto the pain and the past would somehow prove how much I loved him. And, God, I loved him so, so much. Our whole family broke when he died, and I don’t believe it’s ever been really repaired. He is truly irreplaceable.”
“Nobody left me alone for two weeks”
Kinkel also reflects on the friends and coworkers who stepped up and nurtured her as she grappled with the loss of the Irelan, whom she was convinced she would marry. A strong friendship had blossomed into romance just four months before the crash, she said, and they were already envisioning a future together.
“Nobody left me alone for two weeks,” she said. “I had people in my house or I had friends stay with me.”
Her pilot friends warned her that the NTSB report would blame Bryan – at least in part – for the crash. That way, they told her, “nobody gets sued” and “people aren’t afraid to fly.”
She just knows how meticulous Bryan was about everything – not just his work as a test pilot. He was particular about his beloved Corvette and mapped out every contingency on vacations.
When he ate cereal, he wouldn’t eat just one. He’d mix four different kinds together in the bowl. He didn’t like decals or ornaments on his vehicles, so when he bought an F-150, he ordered it without labeling.
While Irelan “excelled at everything,” a statement released by his younger sister, Shelly Seaton said, his strongest passions were flying and family.
The crash “had an everlasting effect on the families,” Seaton said in the statement. “Their work made the aviation world safer.
“Bryan is looking down and smiling at how well his family is persevering,” Seaton said. “He would be ecstatic on how aviation is changing for the pilots of the future, who will be flying to Mars and beyond, experiencing the ultimate flight.”
Whenever she is down, Seaton said, her brother’s favorite song, U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” seems to come on the radio.
“We are grateful to have known and loved him,” she wrote.
“What ifs”
For Kinkel, the hardest part was the “What ifs.”
“Where would we be now?” she asked. “Would we have gotten married? Would we have kids now? What would we name them? I had to let go of the hopes and the ‘What ifs.’”
Her heart wasn’t ready to risk love again for years, though she eventually married 13 years after his death. Kinkel credits her deep faith with carrying her through those dark times, and she said she believes God works in mysterious ways. She points to two of her friends who “never left my side” in those dark days after the crash.
Over the course of that time, they each met a friend of Bryan’s, fell in love and eventually got married.
“I keep thinking that’s some good that came out of this,” she said.
Irelan’s family has adopted a hopeful perspective as they reflect on the anniversary of his death.
“Bryan has a heavenly logbook, eternal blue skies, wings straight and level until we see him again,” his sister wrote.
Grief and gratitude
As Homrich was reflecting on the plane crash recently, she saw a butterfly fresh from its cocoon holding onto a branch so its wings could dry before flying away.
“Butterflies symbolize new life,” she said in an email.
They also remind us that although drastic changes can happen on the exterior, the core remains the same. No amount of time can erase the things her father taught her, she said, the love he poured out on her “and the way he fought tirelessly for me to become the person God created me to be.”
She’s finally coming to a place where “the grief of losing him doesn’t overshadow the gratitude for his life,” she said.
“Sometimes the depth of our love equals the depth of our pain, so it’s hard to allow the grieving process to move forward,” Homrich said. “But time has a strange way of passing unprovoked, and healing and transformation do come.”
Life is such a paradox, she said.
“The very thing my father loved took his life, but his grandson was born with a deep love for airplanes,” Homrich said. “Sometimes, we just move through the fear and choose joy. Even if it’s mixed with terror, the joy is worth it. It’s always worth it.”
This story was originally published October 9, 2020 at 4:41 AM.