I read the National Transportation Safety Board’s preliminary report on the Greg Biffle plane crash shortly after it was issued Friday. Twice, in fact. Then I interviewed an aviation safety expert who has 20-plus years of experience in the field to make sure I understood it.
And after all that, you know how I felt?
Worse than before. Emptier somehow.
I don’t know what I expected from the NTSB report, but for me, there was no closure. And I doubt it brought much closure to the many others more deeply affected by this tragedy.
We at least know more now about this crash after this federal report, though we don’t know anywhere close to everything. The NTSB’s preliminary eight-page report cites several problems with the Dec. 18 Cessna Citation 550 flight from Statesville Regional Airport, which is about 40 miles north of Charlotte. But a definitive cause of the crash wasn’t revealed. That will likely come in the final report, which may not be issued until 2027.
The report is difficult to read. There are times you want to cringe and other times you want to scream.
It brings to life the terrifying moments before the crash, as parts of the plane stopped working and the pilot took a sweeping left turn and attempted to land right back at the same Statesville airport from which he had departed just 10 minutes earlier.
The flight path overview and sequence of events of the Statesville Regional Airport plane crash that killed seven people, including NASCAR star Greg Biffle, his wife and two children on Dec. 18, 2025. The graphic is part of the NTSB’s preliminary report about the crash; the plane is moving counterclockwise in this graphic. National Transportation Safety Board
Instead, the plane hit a light stanchion, sheared off the tops of some trees and burst into flames well short of the runway. There were seven people on board — former NASCAR star driver Biffle, his wife, Cristina, his two children, Emma and Ryder, and his best friend and employee Craig Wadsworth among them. Pilot Dennis Dutton and his son, Jack Dutton, were in the cockpit.
They had all been headed to Florida. No one survived.
It had been unclear for more than a month, but we now know who the primary pilot was — Dennis Dutton, a seasoned pilot seated in the left-hand cockpit seat that signifies you’re in charge. Dutton was certified to fly the plane with the limitation “CE-500 Second in Command Required.” In other words, he was supposed to have a co-pilot who was also certified to fly that Cessna.
Dutton’s 20-year-old son, Jack, was in the right-hand seat of the cockpit. But while Jack Dutton had some piloting experience, planned to follow in his father’s footsteps and was in the professional flight program at Auburn, he wasn’t yet certified to be a co-pilot of that Cessna.
As the NTSB report states plainly: “The right seat passenger was not qualified to perform second in command duties.” (Biffle often piloted helicopters, most famously during his laudable work in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. But he also wasn’t certified to fly the Cessna).
Photos of the seven people who died in a plane crash on Dec. 18, 2025, in Statesville. JEFF SINER [email protected]
So did not having two experienced pilots in the cockpit cause the plane to crash?
I posed this question to Anthony Brickhouse, who was once an NTSB investigator. Brickhouse then became a professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida, for 23 years and is now a U.S.-based aviation safety consultant.
“I’m not going to say that’s why they crashed,” said Brickhouse, who reviewed the NTSB report Friday afternoon, shortly after it was published. “It could be a contributing factor. … You had a very seasoned pilot who was certificated to fly the aircraft, and then you have a private pilot who is relatively inexperienced and definitely inexperienced in jet aircraft. And if you have issues going on, that pilot (Jack Dutton) isn’t going to be extremely helpful, because they just don’t have the experience. They don’t have the knowledge.”
But, Brickhouse emphasized, the lack of an experienced co-pilot was only one factor. There are still many questions the report doesn’t answer. “Planes make emergency landings all the time that don’t end in tragedy,” Brickhouse said.
The Cessna also had some instrument failures at times, and the cockpit voice recorder largely went out for three minutes and 55 seconds. The left engine initially didn’t start and, once it did, may have been producing more power than the right. Visibility also kept decreasing.
People comfort each other as they observe wreckage from the crashed plane on Dec. 18, 2025, at Statesville Regional Airport. Khadejeh Nikouyeh [email protected]
“We’re having some issues here,” Jack Dutton said on the radio, about two minutes before the crash.
Brickhouse said the report shows that the crash — like most crashes — wasn’t caused by one issue but instead by a cascading series of problems.
“I really can’t pinpoint one thing,” he said. “Just from the preliminary report, there’s at least four or five different things worth looking deeper into. And that’s most accidents. It’s never just one thing. It’s always a series. And typically, if you remove one of those negative factors, you probably don’t have an accident. It’s literally that close.”
Instead, seven people died, and no one in the NASCAR community is anywhere close to over it.
Garrett Mitchell wipes tears from his eyes as he speaks during a memorial ceremony at Bojangles Coliseum in Charlotte on Jan. 16, 2026, for the seven victims of the Biffle plane crash. JEFF SINER [email protected]
I was among the hundreds of people who went to the memorial service in Charlotte on Jan. 16. It was filled with laughter, tears and a lot of people wondering how this unimaginable tragedy ever happened.
Even now, after this report, we still don’t really know that.
And when we do know, how much difference will it really make?
This story was originally published January 31, 2026 at 5:00 AM.
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Scott Fowler
The Charlotte Observer
Columnist Scott Fowler has written for The Charlotte Observer since 1994. He has earned 24 national APSE sportswriting awards and hosted The Observer’s podcast “Carruth,” which Sports Illustrated once named “Podcast of the Year.” Fowler hosts the online series and podcast “Sports Legends of the Carolinas,” which features 1-on-1 interviews with NC and SC sports icons. He also writes occasionally about non-sports subjects, such as the 5-part series “9/11/74,” which chronicled the plane crash of Eastern Air Lines Flight 212 in Charlotte in 1974.
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