Fact Checking Nelson's "Doors Of Death" light aircraft near death experience

[Res Ipsa]

Well, from what I'm reading within those 54 reports most of them wouldn't then be regarded as having substantial damage. I'm still not sure how that would've precluded Russell M. Nelson's flight from making it into this database.

- Doc

The reports themselves classify the damage as "None," "minor," "substantial" or "destroyed" That was done at the time of the accident by personnel with access to the plane. We don't know exactly what, if anything, happened to the plane or which category the NTSB assigned. So, to make sure we've looked at all the relevant records, we need to try to get hold of the incident reports from the relevant time. After spending some time tonight working my way through the National Archives Catalog, I'm ready to submit a FOIA to NARA. We're having Buzzards luck, though. The FAA has a collection of NTSB reports, but 1976 is missing. The FAA has a collection of its reports, but I can't find a collection that predates the database. The general page on accident reports that Tapir found says there are copies in Civil Aeronautics Board files, so I'll have to add that to the list.

[honorentheos]

For giggles, I ran a query setting ACCIDENT TYPE to "FIRE/EXPLOSION - IN FLIGHT" and AIRCRAFT DAMAGE to NOT EQUAL "DEMOLISHED (D)".

Then I set the dates from April 1, 1974 to December 31, 2000. The results were typically, EVENT TYPE "INCIDENT - CARRIER" and scattered over the decades. The earliest query results were in 1978, and the first one from 8/14/1978 is EVENT TYPE "GENERAL AVIATION ACCIDENT" with almost no details. The city noted is Salina, off the I-70 near Fillmore. After that, the hits from 1978 are also noted as EVENT TYPE "INCIDENT - CARRIER".

Whatever significance that has.

[Res Ipsa]

First-this thread contains quantity and quality hardly seen on this site imho. Thanx to all for “progress” to date.
Using a simple approach but I think useful, the question of whether the Russell M. Nelson “incident “ would this have been covered by the Desert News in the edition 1,2 or maybe 3 days from the incident if it were true. Headline like “GA survives aircraft engine failure”. “Russell M Nelson head of the church Sunday school told the DN that on blah blah blah .....”
The DN reporters would surely have tied in the incident with the college inauguration (by the way was there an article about that in DN or the Church News.?)
The church loves to tell dramatic incidents involving GA’s.
by the way has anyone checked with the Utah highway patrol - certainly they would have been on the scene and if the almost doomed plane was replaced to get Nelson to the college on time the Utah troopers would be around. Now I think the troopers may have actually driven Nelson from wherever the plane landed to Saint George- perhaps Sheri figured a dispatched second plane was more dramatic than a Crown Victoria.
Any way keep on plugging you guys - I hear Cassius University Trustees are considering a special investigation award for whomever cracks the case of the almost doomed ghost flight of PSR Rusty on the details Nelson.

k

Hi Kairo, the inauguration was reported in the college newspaper. I can't remember if it was in the St. George paper. I don't recall anyone finding anything in the DN or Church News, but I don't know whether anyone looked there.

I don't think that anyone has looked for records of the Utah Highway Patrol. Not sure what's available there.

[Res Ipsa]

For giggles, I ran a query setting ACCIDENT TYPE to "FIRE/EXPLOSION - IN FLIGHT" and AIRCRAFT DAMAGE to NOT EQUAL "DEMOLISHED (D)".

Then I set the dates from April 1, 1974 to December 31, 2000. The results were typically, EVENT TYPE "INCIDENT - CARRIER".

Whatever significance that has.

If it's an incident, then it should mean that the fire damage didn't extend beyond the engine and there was not sufficient landing or other damage to qualify as "substantial damage."

ETA: I ran a variation of your query, selecting both "incident" fields and the fire/explosion in flight parameter, and the decade of the 1980s. I got 254 hits.

[Res Ipsa]

How DrW or anyone else would classify an occurrence has no relevance whatsoever to what's in the database. What's relevant is how they are classified in the database.

Hi RI. Respectfully, I didn’t ask you this question and it wasn’t about a database. I asked DrW what he thinks about the events as described by Nelson and whether those events best fit the definitions of an incident or accident with minor damages. Kindly back off a little, it’s feeling crowded in here.

I’m sure you don’t mean to talk over folks. But in this case it crept over the line of being off putting.

My apologies for the unwelcome intrusion. I do want to thank you for taking the time and effort to figure out the database coverage.

[Gadianton]

It calls into question if we are even talking about the same thing.

For me it establishes a baseline. It's the most extreme example I can think of from my personal life where I've been on the receiving end of an endless string of obvious lies. No, I don't think he'll be a GA anytime soon. Rusty isn't in the same universe that he is. I wanted your reaction to get a sense for how you're going to play the extreme example. When we're on the receiving end of a story, we have to make a first impression of it without a lot of information, so what's it going to be? Will there be consistency when moving from one example to another?

But what about the guy's actual background that served as the backdrop for his self-aggrandizing self-myth? I don't know how to judge that.

Sure. One extreme is taking at face value. The other extreme is playing psychiatrist -- there are no lies in psychiatry. Brains produce results that make perfect sense once you understand the rules of the psych profile and the inputs and variables. What about Paul H. Dunn's background? I'm not being facetious. One of my favorite missionary comps was this guy who was Mr. athlete and Mr. leadership, and he was also brilliant and about halfway through college right out of high school. Down to earth, wasn't big on rules or dramatic about his calling or stressing about personal righteousness and all that. Just a guy I could really respect and get along with. Turns out, Dunn was a friend of his family, and he just thought the guy was amazing. He had a Dunn tape he played for me I hadn't heard that he thought made Dunn the master of rising to the occasion, and I had to really stretch myself to try and appreciate his opinion, while not being able to dismiss it because the guy was anything but a tool. I was kind of a loser compared to him. Of course he knew about everything, and for him people were overreacting; if you knew the guy etc. etc., and the value of many of his stories really doesn't hinge on the content etc..

That's not trying to defend the dragon.

In psychiatry, there are no "dragons" either. we're giving Sagan full power over his narrative, but there will always be cracks in what I try to set in stone in my story. I could insist his time at that Stake Center was told from him as an adult, but you could shift to another framework for making the claim more sensible. For Sagan, perhaps the dragon claim is made by a kid? That changes everything. But even if it's an adult, we can go down the personal background path while navigating step-by-step what's going on with the claim, and ultimately, when you understand the psychology of the person making the claim, and you have full information about the scenario, it's guaranteed to make sense. Bottom line: real people make real claims, and there are no idealized dragon claims, and there are no idealized problems in the history of science.

If person A takes the claim at face value, but person B is inclined to understand holistically, then the conversation is already at an impasse.

I'm not saying that you won't try to be objective when locking down what is essential to the most basic version of the story, but as you point out, a whole lot of additional framework can be called upon to determine what that basic version is.

[honorentheos]

For giggles, I ran a query setting ACCIDENT TYPE to "FIRE/EXPLOSION - IN FLIGHT" and AIRCRAFT DAMAGE to NOT EQUAL "DEMOLISHED (D)".

Then I set the dates from April 1, 1974 to December 31, 2000. The results were typically, EVENT TYPE "INCIDENT - CARRIER".

Whatever significance that has.

If it's an incident, then it should mean that the fire damage didn't extend beyond the engine and there was not sufficient landing or other damage to qualify as "substantial damage."

ETA: I ran a variation of your query, selecting both "incident" fields and the fire/explosion in flight parameter, and the decade of the 1980s. I got 254 hits.

Interesting. I was testing the theory that an engine fire would require the event type be classified as an accident using dates both in and out of the range where incidents are reportedly included. It seems to show that a) events prior to early 1978 are classified as ACCIDENT, and b) that an inflight engine fire or explosion can be classified as an INCIDENT and not automatically an accident.

It seems you found similar results. Not that it really makes a huge difference but it does at least confirmed that an engine fire incident may not be classified in a way that would show up prior to 1978.

Though to be honest I'm unsure what the point of this exercise is in the grand scheme of things. We all know that Nelson has stretched the truth before. The variation in the accounts starting with the forward in his autobiography in 1979 to the most recent retelling, especially that in the Sheri Dew biography, confirm the narrative is inconsistent and apparently quite self-aggrandizing currently. And last I checked Nelson is still the corporate head of a tax evading widow robbing tax evading fund that they hid from their members as they asked them to volunteer to maintain the fund's properties and give them substantial amounts of their income in tithes and other offerings. So, I don't know. Nelson has moves like Van Damme.

What am I missing here that makes this worthy of being the latest big dig effort? I was totally into undercutting the Greatest Guesser claims because it was making specific claims including both procedures and data assumptions. And the authors of it were engaging criticisms of their work. The latter was really the part that made it worth while to me. Maybe that's what I don't get about this. I don't think there's an argument to engage with the Dew Biography. There's no payoff in shifting the burden of evidence from, "Nelson misrepresents the facts in self-aggrandizing ways" to "Nelson fabricated a story beginning with citing it as the motivation to write a faith-inspiring biography 40 years ago that was small print and intended only for members of his family before he was even a GA."

The latter's description in the autobiography of an airplane fire that inspired him to leave his family a record of faith-promoting events from his life up to that point is baseline plausible to me. The Dew biography is clearly an excessively embellished, practically mythologized retelling. The space between those ends? Uh, not more than the thirty minutes I just spent verifying how engine fires might be reported as incidents and not automatically accidents.

[DrW]

If you went to the database, you have noticed that the data based contains Accident Type descriptions all the way from hard landing or ground loop (minor indiscretions on the runway) to aircraft demolished ( wherein someone was likely killed). The first two would be classified as incidents, the third was an accident.

So it's just very interesting, DrW.

If Nelson's event was classified an incident, then it seems we have no record to check against.

As described, I think the code is written such that it could have been (had to have been?) classified as an accident with minor damage. I don't think Nelson's description matches the definition for substantial damage. So in your judgment, could the as-advertised Nelson flight of terror event have qualified as only an incident? I have already forgotten, or missed, the part where someone laid out the dividing line between accident--minor damage and an incident.

Dr. Moore,
As far as the transcribed data base records are concerned, it does not matter how it was classified. As Tapirrider and I have explained, any event that substantially affects the airworthiness of an aircraft or its crew must be reported to the NTSB. You can read NTSB 830 upthread again for the details. An engine fire is specifically called out under NTSB 830 as an occurrence requiring immediate notification. (See the NTSB Piper Navajo engine fire report screenshot upthread as an example.)

As I have tried to explain several times, when one searches the data base with NO RESTRICTIONS, the data base returns every record for the time span included. What you found is a data base that was transcribed and from the hardcopy records over several years (looks like 2005 to 2012 perhaps). The records from 1973 to sometime in the early 1980s were transcribed and digitized using a standard format.

The data base format was set up with a single field to categorize the event in question. That field was Accident Type. As I have just described upthread, whether the event was a ground loop, a hard landing, a prop strike, or a total demolition of the aircraft, a notation was made in the Accident Type cell. There is no incident cell in the Table.

If one wants to see what happened in Utah civil aviation in 1976, enter 1976-01-01 to 1977-01-01 for the date span, and UTAH in the State field, and run the query. (Leave every other field in default.) I just ran it again and for 1976 and 54 records came up. Nothing even remotely related to Russell M. Nelson's story in any way came up for 1976. Click the Details on any records of interest to see the information as shown below.

Whether it was an accident or an incident, it will have data entered in the Accident Type cell in the Table. More information about the event is often included in the narrative as it was for the hard landings.

In the sample below from 1976, the PA32 (single engine Piper Cherokee 6) collided with another aircraft after landing in Logan Utah in, or soon after, a snowstorm on March 9, 1976, and sustained substantial damage.

[honorentheos]

Hi Gad -

Here's where I really think we're talking about very different issues. From your post above -

That's not trying to defend the dragon.

In psychiatry, there are no "dragons" either. we're giving Sagan full power over his narrative, but there will always be cracks in what I try to set in stone in my story. I could insist his time at that Stake Center was told from him as an adult, but you could shift to another framework for making the claim more sensible.

To what end? I'm not arguing there's a dragon. The stories the guy made up are dragons. They don't exist. People have experiences from which later retellings might have originated. That's not a dragon. That's a garage. No one in the Sagan example is debating the existence of the garage because that would be irrational. It seems you are suggesting I would seek to defend the guy's basis for making up BS stories about his life to give his stories some legitimacy. But my actual reaction was already stated as I wouldn't get into a business or reputational relationship with the guy based on his behavior, and I wouldn't worry about psychoanalyzing him, either. I have no interest in legitimizing anything there. What I did to this point was bracket the question of how much of his stories are fabrications and how much of the story is based on actual experience as, "I don't know." Why? Because I CAN'T know. And there's no point in chasing that rabbit. The act of attempting to do so is so irrational it's calling into question what motivations are in play. Since the people doing so are here to interact with and explain themselves, that's about as fruitful an endeavor as I see here. But even that's really pointless.

[honorentheos]

I agree with all of the above. Even if it seems to have some dragon-like qualities. There hasn't been a great deal of evidence that came out supporting the claim. So what degree oh skepticism does the most simple telling of the story deserve? Assuming the latest, most mythologized version is broadly deserving skepticism?

So, I have a few thoughts about degrees of mythologizing and time tables, which I'll get back to later. I think an assumption of arrow-of-time is being made that doesn't apply here. More later.

Let's come back to this. I noted this above in a post to Res but I think it best belongs here.

On one end of the spectrum of what is being investigated here is,"Nelson misrepresents the facts in self-aggrandizing ways". On the other end is, "Nelson cited an incident involving a small airplane fire that he perceived to be a near-death experience as the motivation to write a faith-inspiring autobiography 40 years ago that was small print and intended only for members of his family before he was even a GA."

How plausible is it that he experienced the airplane event that was cited as a motivation for writing his small-print autobiography? Just using basic ranges of 1 - 5 with 1 being the least plausible and 5 the most, I'd land on a 4. I think it's more plausible than not, and enough so to avoid a 3. How plausible is the story presented in the Dew biography? I'd give it a 1. It contradicts his own early tellings and it has all of the appearance of modern myth-making. It's a faith-inspiring myth now.

So, what would you rate the most basic telling's plausibility? Meaning, the short autobiography preface claim not the ones provided in conferences or other gatherings. Baseline, if the event did not happen, he made it up to provide a rational for writing his autobiography that he intended to basically give to his kids, grandkids, and a handful of others before he was even a GA of any note. Is that really more probable than not?