409 Statesville Citation 550 Crash (Greg Biffle): New ADS-B Clue & Rain-Induced Illusions

Max talks with host Scott Hamilton of WBT, Charlotte's News Talk radio, about the Statesville, North Carolina Citation 550 crash that killed NASCAR driver Greg Biffle and six others, then expands the conversation with a fresh technical finding and a practical training takeaway for pilots. While preparing for the short radio interview, Max revisited the ADS-B track and noticed something he hadn't seen anyone else write about: the altitude anomaly isn't merely a "jump," it's an impossible spike.

The key number is stark. The ADS-B data shows a reported climb of 1,374 feet in 1.64 seconds, which implies a climb rate of almost 50,000 feet per minute—a rate that doesn't make sense for a Citation.

Max's point is that this isn't a real aircraft maneuver; it's a data or sensor-path artifact. What makes it more compelling is what happens immediately beforehand: for 34 seconds, there were 14 ADS-B transmissions in a row with the exact same reported altitude.

That kind of perfectly flat series is abnormal even if an aircraft is "steady," because pressure altitude reporting typically wiggles at least a little from sample to sample.

Max lays out a simple, pilot-intuitive interpretation: the aircraft was likely climbing normally, but the altitude value feeding ADS-B froze for about 34 seconds and then unfroze, "catching up" in one big correction.

If you treat that 1,374-foot change as occurring across the 34-second freeze rather than across 1.64 seconds, you get a climb rate around 2,200 fpm—entirely plausible for a departing Citation.

About 20 seconds after the correction, the aircraft turned back toward the airport.

Max also notes there is audio where a pilot announces on CTAF they are returning because they were "having issues," and he believes those "issues" were likely altimeter/altitude-related rather than a direct cause of the crash.

From there, he turns the discussion into something useful for any pilot: how altitude gets measured, encoded, and transmitted—and what kinds of failures can create misleading outputs. In the Citation 550, there are multiple static ports feeding pilot-side and copilot-side instruments, plus potentially additional static sources feeding backups.

Depending on the configuration, ADS-B altitude can be sourced through a blind encoder tied to the static system, an air data computer, or an encoding ("coding") altimeter common in older round-gauge aircraft.

The operational point: pilots might see one thing on their instruments while the transmitted pressure altitude shows something else—or the opposite—depending on where the fault lives.

Max then shifts to the accident sequence on return. Regardless of what prompted the turnback, he argues the crash itself likely occurred on short final for a different reason: visual illusions in rain and degraded visibility.

The aircraft struck the approach lighting system short of the runway threshold, which is exactly the kind of outcome that can happen when pilo