Henson Airlines Flight 1517 departed Baltimore-Washington International at 9:59 a.m., operating on behalf of Piedmont Airlines as Piedmont Commuter. Captain Martin Burns III was 27. First Officer Zilda Spadaro-Wolan was 26. Both were young pilots, building hours on the Beech 99 in Henson's regional fleet. The flight proceeded normally for fifteen minutes. At 10:14 a.m., Captain Burns radioed Washington Center with a concern: he believed the aircraft was too far west of his planned course. The controller acknowledged and tried to refine the position. The next attempts to reach Flight 1517 went unanswered. The plane had already flown into terrain. The Civil Air Patrol did not find the wreckage on Hall Mountain until 6:42 p.m. that evening.

The NTSB's investigation, released the following year, traced the crash to a navigational error. The crew had tuned an incorrect navigational facility and failed to monitor their instruments closely enough to catch the resulting course drift. But the board identified a chain of contributing factors that pointed at the airline itself. Henson's Beech 99 fleet carried nonstandardized navigation radios, so the cockpit layout varied from aircraft to aircraft. Ambient cabin noise was loud enough to interfere with intracockpit communication. Pilot training was inadequate. The first officer had limited multiengine and instrument experience. Both pilots were stretched into roles their hours did not really support, and were carrying personal stress factors. The FAA's surveillance of Henson Airlines, the board found, had failed to detect these deficiencies. The crash, in other words, did not happen at a moment of error so much as at the end of a long road that had been allowed to bend the wrong way.

Zilda Spadaro-Wolan became, in the cruelest of recognitions, the first female commercial airline pilot to die in a crash while flying a propeller aircraft in the United States. She was 26. Martin Burns III was 27. They had spent their twenties working toward the captain's seat and the right-seat job that comes before it. Both had families. Both showed up at Baltimore that morning planning to do their work and go home. Public attention to the crash, then and since, has focused understandably on Larry Shue, whose plays continue to be staged. But the cockpit deserves equal remembering. Two young pilots died too, and the NTSB report makes clear they were trying to do their jobs in a system that had not given them what they needed.

The crash contributed to broader scrutiny of commuter aviation safety in the late 1980s. Regional carriers like Henson were rapidly expanding to feed major airline hubs, and oversight had not kept pace. The deficiencies the NTSB identified - cockpit standardization, training programs, FAA surveillance of small carriers - became targets of regulatory attention in the years that followed. Henson Airlines continued operating as Henson, The Piedmont Regional Airline after Piedmont's 1983 acquisition, and when Piedmont itself was absorbed by USAir in 1989, Henson's operation was eventually rebranded and became part of US Airways Express. The wreckage on Hall Mountain was removed; the ridge looks today like any other in the Shenandoahs. Larry Shue's plays are still performed. The Foreigner is one of the most-staged comedies in American regional theatre. Several Shenandoah Valley theatres have produced it. Audiences laugh. The author who would have laughed with them never reached the valley.