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

[Res Ipsa]

Maybe the kind of man that is supposed to be Mormon Prophet would have that clear memory and say that, but I do take it for granted that Nelson is not that kind of man. A decent old guy who sincerely believed all his Mormon stuff might still let this one slide, it seems to me. So that story isn't the bombshell this plane story is, in my eyes.

The 1985 story is more lucid than Dew's account, and it's from the horse's mouth. The only material myth detail for me that Dew adds is the "another plane dispatched" to fill the hole left in other accounts.

The 1985 story is detailed enough that it's hard to blame bad memory, if it didn't really happen as stated. Two examples. 1) the detailed pilot dialogue "The halfway point; the point of no return" that a real pilot would unlikely say as it's illogical, yet exactly what a pilot would say in an airplane disaster movie, and just as in the movie, the incident happens right after foreshadowed by the pilot statement, which is also right at the most dramatically disastrous point that it could happen. 2) The pilot purposefully dives the plane in order to put out the fire, which also allows allows the pilot to dramatically pull up at the last second, avoiding oblivion. In Dew's account, poor retelling, memory, fact-checking of original versions leave the plane headed for the ground ad hoc, merely at the halfway point when it happens, and without the dramatic storyboard timing. In other words, the story devolved due to bad memory, rather than evolved, and is now less mythical due to losing story elements. The exception being the introduction of the second plane.

The other interesting thing in the 1985 version is the landing. There is no mention of a field. He says the pilot follows a highway until he lands the plane safely.

[Lem]

I am outside the camp of those who think he made the event up in it's entirety....

Then you're in good company, because based on what I've read, it seems no one on this thread is in that camp.

[Gadianton]

Did he fabricate the entire incident? I find that less plausible than the alternative. Does the retelling's shift to being about his feeling calm in the face of death matter? Maybe. It could be he invented and assigned this significance to the story at a later date such as the 1985 telling. If the current project of this thread had a purpose and need statement, how exactly would this difference fall under that statement? I leave the content of the statement open since I'm not sure. I mean, there's argument about how certain one ought to be over if the event is a complete fabrication but that doesn't clarify the goal. If the ROI is high enough to warrant more effort, what is the expected return?

Two other airplane accounts for Nelson. 1) Nelson arrives at an event after bad storms and clouds dispersed. He told the Saints that he only made it to speak because they prayed, and because they prayed, the storm suddenly dispersed. 2) after a stream of hectic-flight minutia, Nelson and wife need to get off a plane where the airline won't allow it so he can speak to the Saints, I don't recall the details, but the details sorted themselves to where because Nelson didn't have luggage, the stewardess couldn't prevent them from getting off, and so they made it.

Neither story seems embellished in terms of factual content, but are chuck full of silly spiritual interpretation. And so I think it's most likely that a discovery author like Nelson invented the plane incident as the catalyst to writing the book to make the book production itself a satisfactory story. Maybe a plane incident happened at some point in his life where an engine went out, and maybe it dipped briefly (I'm equally okay with believing it was a dream, or his thoughts after watching a war movie), but that didn't push him to start the book the next day, beginning with explaining himself in the forward, "Had I not just stared death in the face, I would not be writing this sentence, nor commencing this great work...."

Now how you get the elaborate, Hollywood storyboard version of 1985 is a whole other question. That is the suspicious material that for me, reaches the threshold of a good old-fashioned lie, without some good explaining.

[Res Ipsa]

Were you able to locate any incidents from 1973 through 1977 in Utah? If so, would you mind posting a screen shot of the list of hits.

Database returns no incidents at all pre1978. I think you said that once before, but I misread that some incidents were included.

ETA: it does seem to include a very large number of accidents with minor damage. Eg, not substantial damage, which as written appears to exclude damage to just 1 engine, minor skin punctures, or damage to landing gears (among other minor damages).

It gets a little confusing because the discussion involves at least three different databases: The FAA Accident and Incident Database (AIDS); the NTSB's Accident Database & Synopses; and the Aviation DB database, which pulls and aggregates accident and incident data from the other two. I avoid using the Aviation DB database because I prefer to work off of primary data sources when available and because I've noticed several errors in the Aviation DB's description of what is in its database. For example, it lists the wrong year for the earliest FAA incident report. It says it is reporting accidents from the FAA's database, when the database itself contains only incidents.

The Aviation DB is convenient, but the trade off is that you may be misled about what you are looking at.

The classification of an occurrence as an "incident" or an "accident" is determined by the severity of the damage to the aircraft and the severity of injuries to the people. If the NTSB classifies the damage as "substantial" or "destroyed," it's an accident. If there is a "serious" or "fatal" injury, it is an accident. Otherwise, it's an incident.

What the database is pulling up for events in the 1970s is data taken from written probable cause reports of the NTSB and entered into a database. It does not include a full, detailed description of the damage. But it does include the NTSB's classification of the damage. I don't think you or I or anyone on this board is in a position to overcall the NTSB's classification of the damage based on the relatively terse summary that we can find in the NTSB database.

When we compare the record from the NTSB database with that of the same event in the Aviation DB database, there are differences in formatting and labels. Although the classification of accident v. incident is important for certain notification and reporting requirements, it isn't relevant to the NTSB's final conclusions of the probable cause of the accident. Yet, for some reason unknown to me, they maintain the distinction throughout the process. When the summaries were prepared for the older records in the NTSB, they didn't include the accident/incident classification. My wild-ass guess is that the database was originally intended for accidents only, as the name of the database suggests. At some point, the NTSB decided to include "selected" incidents in the database. So, the database was set up to report only accidents, and the selected incidents had to be shoehorned in to a database that didn't include a the accident/incident distinction.

The Aviation DB takes the NTSB summary and arranges it in a different format. Even though the NTSB report itself doesn't use the labels "accident" and "incident," the creators of the Aviation DB can distinguish between them by using the damage and injury classification that is included in the NTSB record. So, a search for incidents should pull up the 1970 incident record that I posted a screenshot of upthread. But it doesn't. Another reason to use the primary sources rather than something that aggregates and reformats the primary sources.

Because the exercise is to find relevant documents, it doesn't matter what we think a report shows in terms of classification. It matters how NTSB personnel classified them 45 years ago.

[Physics Guy]

Maybe the kind of man that is supposed to be Mormon Prophet would have that clear memory and say that, but I do take it for granted that Nelson is not that kind of man. A decent old guy who sincerely believed all his Mormon stuff might still let this one slide, it seems to me. So that story isn't the bombshell this plane story is, in my eyes.

The 1985 story is more lucid than Dew's account, and it's from the horse's mouth. The only material myth detail for me that Dew adds is the "another plane dispatched" to fill the hole left in other accounts.

Just to avoid possible confusion, what I wrote about Dew's story plausibly being her fault rather than Nelson's was referring to the story to which IHAQ linked as an example of a fake Nelson story. That story was about Nelson baptising people he met in Korea and stuff, not about the airplane incident. I didn't even realise that Dew had also retold the airplane adventure. Dew can't take the fall for that one because Nelson has published it himself.

[Res Ipsa]

Did he fabricate the entire incident? I find that less plausible than the alternative. Does the retelling's shift to being about his feeling calm in the face of death matter? Maybe. It could be he invented and assigned this significance to the story at a later date such as the 1985 telling. If the current project of this thread had a purpose and need statement, how exactly would this difference fall under that statement? I leave the content of the statement open since I'm not sure. I mean, there's argument about how certain one ought to be over if the event is a complete fabrication but that doesn't clarify the goal. If the ROI is high enough to warrant more effort, what is the expected return?

Two other airplane accounts for Nelson. 1) Nelson arrives at an event after bad storms and clouds dispersed. He told the Saints that he only made it to speak because they prayed, and because they prayed, the storm suddenly dispersed. 2) after a stream of hectic-flight minutia, Nelson and wife need to get off a plane where the airline won't allow it so he can speak to the Saints, I don't recall the details, but the details sorted themselves to where because Nelson didn't have luggage, the stewardess couldn't prevent them from getting off, and so they made it.

Neither story seems embellished in terms of factual content, but are chuck full of silly spiritual interpretation. And so I think it's most likely that a discovery author like Nelson invented the plane incident as the catalyst to writing the book to make the book production itself a satisfactory story. Maybe a plane incident happened at some point in his life where an engine went out, and maybe it dipped briefly (I'm equally okay with believing it was a dream, or his thoughts after watching a war movie), but that didn't push him to start the book the next day, beginning with explaining himself in the forward, "Had I not just stared death in the face, I would not be writing this sentence, nor commencing this great work...."

Now how you get the elaborate, Hollywood storyboard version of 1985 is a whole other question. That is the suspicious material that for me, reaches the threshold of a good old-fashioned lie, without some good explaining.

That's interesting, Dean Robbers. My own hypothesis about story telling is narrative recollections of facts become stories only when they are interpreted as meaning something that is not literally part of the text. In fact, that's how one of the all-time winners of the Moth story telling competition teaches people how to become betters storytellers. He instructs people to keep a journal. Every day, at the end of the day, write down two or three things that you experienced that could be turned into a good story. Review those every once in a while, and think of potential themes that the stories could fit into. Next, develop a one-sentence description of the message you want to communicate to the audience through your story. Finally, from your journal prompted recollections, construct a story that communicates the message. In other words, there's a two step process at work: recalling memories and constructing a story out of those memories. That's how you get a faith promoting story out of a mundane set of facts.

[Dr Moore]

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.

To ask the question a different way, I see many, many accident-types in the database, for which the damage type was "minor." What's the difference between an incident and an accident-minor damage?

[Dr Moore]

Did he fabricate the entire incident? I find that less plausible than the alternative. Does the retelling's shift to being about his feeling calm in the face of death matter? Maybe. It could be he invented and assigned this significance to the story at a later date such as the 1985 telling. If the current project of this thread had a purpose and need statement, how exactly would this difference fall under that statement? I leave the content of the statement open since I'm not sure. I mean, there's argument about how certain one ought to be over if the event is a complete fabrication but that doesn't clarify the goal. If the ROI is high enough to warrant more effort, what is the expected return?

Hi Honor,
For me, it's just curiosity about the facts behind the story. I've learned a lot through this thread, slow as it may have moved toward knowing what we know vs what we (maybe) can't know. If there is a spectrum of truth here, with one end a total fabrication and other end it happened just like Nelson says it happened, then where is this story?

I do not think this was a total fabrication, and my sense is no one here does either. It could be, however, and at this point there is no evidence to support it *not* being a total fabrication, other than his persistence and sincerity in telling the story over and over. In other words, his good word, such as it's worth. And the fact that he did actually appear in St. George on the date in question, give the invocation at Rolfe Kerr's inauguration, and we know Nelson didn't live in St. George. So he must have gone there, and his story says he flew a direct flight on the date of the event.

So while I don't believe it's a total fabrication, it's possible.

Likewise, I do not believe things happened the way he claims. I'm still trying to understand the data and why we find absolutely zero corroborating evidence of a plane going down in a field near Delta UT with an exploded engine in a field en route from SLC to St. George. It's possible that everything went like he claims, but there's no evidence.

Part of why this thread keeps going, I think, is that truly the available data, or evidence, appears to allow for any scenario in between total fabrication and accurate truth.

So I am still asking questions, and trying to rule out parts of the spectrum, to the extent that is possible. It's like a puzzle and we still have not found an edge or corner piece. That makes me even more curious.

[Res Ipsa]

Here is the substance of the FOIA I will submit to NARA:

1. Any and all records of the National Transportation Safety Board, the Federal Aviation Administration, or the Civil Aeronautics Board of aircraft accidents and/or incidents that occurred in Utah from January 1, 1970 through December 31, 1977.

2. Any and all indexes of files of the National Transportation Safety Board, the Federal Aviation Administration or the Civil Aeronautics Board that include records from January 1, 1970 through December 31, 1977.

3. Any and all records of document management procedures, including retention, disposition, destruction or transfer to any other agency or organization, of reports of the National Transportation Safety Board, the Federal Aviation Administration, or the Civil Aeronautics Board that apply to Reports of aircraft accidents or incidents.

4. Any statistical or summary reports of the National Transportation Safety Board, the Federal Aviation Administration or the Civil Aeronautics Board that include period totals of aviation accidents or incidents.

The terms "aviation accident" and "incident" refer to the defined terms found in 49 CFR § 830.2.

Any comments or suggestions would be welcome.

To avoid accusations of playing the Sagan's Dragon game, I want to lay out my expectations before I see the results of my request. I chose the time period based on the preface of in Nelson's autobiography, which states that the event prompted him to write his autobiography, I think 1970 is a reasonable earliest probable year for the accident. I think limiting the request to Utah is reasonable, given the level of detail in the first version we have, which strongly ties the story to Utah. I requested both accidents and incidents because, according to the definitions in the regulations, an engine fire could be classified as either, depending on the extent of damage. And, because an engine fire also requires the operator to file immediate notice with the NTSB, it's reasonable to assume that if Nelson's plane suffered an engine fire, the NTSB had notice of it.

I think it's reasonable to assume that, if Nelson's story is based on a real incident, that incident had to involve, at a minimum, an engine fire. I toyed with using just an engine failure as the outer range of scenarios we should consider, but fire is a universal and dramatic part of every version of the story. In addition, there is a substantial risk that an engine failure followed by an emergency landing is unfalsifiable, we have no way to predict with any level of certainty that such an event would appear in NTSB or FAA reports.

I am less confident about drawing conclusions from the NTSB reports than from the FAA reports, because it's not clear to me that the NTSB investigated all incidents it became aware of at the time. My reasons for skepticism on this issue are:

1. The FAA's description of its database:

The FAA Accident and Incident Data System (AIDS) database contains incident data records for all categories of civil aviation . Incidents are events that do not meet the aircraft damage or personal injury thresholds contained in the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) definition of an accident. For example, the database contains reports of collisions between aircraft and birds while on approach to or departure from an airport. While such a collision may not have resulted in sufficient aircraft damage to reach the damage threshold of an NTSB accident, the fact that the collision occurred is valuable safety information that may be used in the establishment of aircraft design standards or in programs to deter birds from nesting in areas adjacent to airports.

https://www.asias.faa.gov/apex/f?p=100: ... GION_VAR:1

2. The NTSB's description of its database:

The Aviation Accident Synopses World Wide Web Page provides access to short reports describing aircraft accidents and incidents and their probable cause, and contributing factors; included are civil aviation accidents within the United States, its territories and possessions, and in international waters. An accident is defined as "an occurrence associated with the operation of an aircraft which takes place between the time any person boards the aircraft with the intention of flight and all such persons have disembarked, and in which any person suffers death or serious injury, or in which the aircraft receives substantial damage". The Safety Board also investigates some incidents, including them in the database in the same form as accidents. Typically, incidents do not involve the level of injury or damage characteristic of an accident. An incident is defined as "an occurrence other than an accident, associated with the operation of an aircraft, which affects or could affect the safety of operations."

https://www.ntsb.gov/GILS/Pages/Synopses.aspx

3. A report prepared by the Rand Corporation in 2000, which identifies the NTSB's emphasis on investigating major commercial airline crashes and relative neglect of investigating incidents as a problem that needs to be corrected. (On the theory that major crashes are preceded by one or more incidents involving the same aircraft).

https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_rep ... 122z1.html

All of the above lead me to question whether we should expect to find an NTSB incident report for an engine fire followed by a safe landing. If we get NTSB incident requests in response to the FOIA request, I think it will be important to see the kinds of incidents described in the report.

On the other hand, I have more confidence in the FAA incident reports. It appears that the FAA cast a much wider net when preparing incident reports. If we get what appears to be a complete set of FAA incident reports, I think that's the best evidence we can expect to have. At that point, we would have a complete set of accident and incident reports from 1970-1977. If none of them describe an engine fire followed by a safe landing in a twin engine aircraft capable of carrying 4-6 passengers, I think it would be reasonable to conclude that fabrication or intentional embellishment is more likely than misperception and changing recollections. If there are any such incidents, I plan to check to see if there is any reason to believe Nelson was on that flight. (Check local newspapers, LDS website, etc.) That would provide some basis to find fabrication more likely than Nelson misremembering which flight he was on.

If I don't get FAA incident reports in response to the request, I think I have to be agnostic on the issue of whether the story is based on a real incident, absent some other evidence.

In any event, I'm likely to withhold any judgment on what I think is the most likely scenario until after I get a chance to see if there is a more detailed account in the autobiography. All other things being equal, I find it best to rely on the earliest available account as being the most accurate.

[IHAQ]

I think Physics guy pointed this out, the story in your link doesn't implicate Nelson as the story teller. If he were, then you'd have a point, I suppose.

It sort of does, in that Nelson and his personal records are cited as sources for the biography written by Sheri Dew. I find it incredulous that she just made stuff up about Nelson herself to make anecdotes more dramatic. Also, Tom has started a thread about that particular controversy.
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