Qualla: Henson Airlines Flight 1517

Henson Airlines Flight 1517: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rob Hodgkins, CC BY-SA 2.0. Larry Shue was 39 years old when he boarded Henson Airlines Flight 1517 in Baltimore on the morning of September 23, 1985. He was already an established playwright; his comedy The Foreigner had opened off-Broadway the previous November and was on its way to becoming an American theatrical staple. Shue was heading to the Shenandoah Valley. He never arrived. Twenty-eight minutes after takeoff, the Beechcraft B99 he and twelve other passengers were riding in struck the southwest face of Hall Mountain at 2,400 feet, six miles east of the airport he was trying to reach. There were no survivors.

Image: Rob Hodgkins | CC BY-SA 2.0

Henson Airlines Flight 1517: The Last Transmission

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rob Hodgkins, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 i...

Image: Rob Hodgkins | CC BY-SA 2.0

Henson Airlines Flight 1517: Cascading Failures

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rob Hodgkins, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 c...

Image: Rob Hodgkins | CC BY-SA 2.0

Henson Airlines Flight 1517: Two Lives in the Cockpit

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rob Hodgkins, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 an...

Image: Rob Hodgkins | CC BY-SA 2.0

Henson Airlines Flight 1517: What Changed

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rob Hodgkins, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 prog...

Image: Rob Hodgkins | CC BY-SA 2.0