SOUTH BEND, Ind. (AP) - The film “Invisible Sky” transports us to mysteries on the foggy late night of April 20, 2006.
Not only how a small plane crashed near the Bloomington, Ind., airport, claiming the lives of its pilot and all four of her friends on board, all in their 20s. But also how federal investigators may have missed a possible cause: a second airplane.
Could it be that Georgina Joshi, a 24-year-old opera student from South Bend, had to suddenly evade a second plane that was trying to land on another runway in the difficult flying conditions?
Could it explain the fact that Georgina’s plane didn’t suffer underbelly damage from trees, raising doubts about the investigators’ finding that she’d flown too low and ran into trees?
There isn’t any documentation for this second craft being there. Not even chatter with the air traffic controllers. Then again, Bloomington’s air traffic control tower was closed, with all communications going to Indianapolis instead.
But, the film states, there was a witness who saw another plane flying low because of the low-hanging clouds.
In 52 minutes, the film pieces together a case for key evidence that Georgina’s father, Yatish Joshi, and fellow producers claim, the National Transportation Safety Board had missed.
They argue that it’s an example of a federal agency that sets the gold standard for commercial flights but that lacks the resources to fully investigate crashes among small, private planes and, thereby, foster safety.
The film premiered last fall at the Goshen-based River Bend Film Festival, where it won the award for best documentary.
The film then went for a tour of showings to aviators and flying clubs and now is available for streaming by the general public. Yatish’s aim, though, isn’t for big audience numbers and accolades. He wants the public to pressure Congress to grant more funding for the NTSB and to make it clearer to whom the board is accountable, especially in “general aviation,” which covers small planes, farm aircraft and medical helicopters.
Yatish said the film is one element out of more than $1 million spent to also hire a private crash investigator and file a legal appeal of the NTSB’s findings that, ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear.
The court found that the NTSB is an independent agency, not subject to oversight by the courts or Congress.
He’s dumbfounded that the agency initially found that the crash was because of Georgina’s young age, inexperience and the weather, then, after 14 months of review, again came to the same conclusion.
He says his ever-precise daughter, who got into flying because he flew, knew what she was doing.
“She had an unbelievable ability to adapt to what she was doing,” her flight instructor, Ronald R. Burns, recalls in the film, noting how she’d logged hundreds of hours of flight time. “She was one of the best. … I never worried about her.”
We hear Georgina’s voice as she nears the airport, politely saying “thank you, sir” to the air traffic controller, showing no sign of distress. She and her friends were on their way back from a performance in West Lafayette of Mozart’s “Requiem.”
Woven between expert interviews, we also hear Georgina’s voice, lilting from her life on the stage, a music student at Indiana University.
“I never saw her unhappy,” Nancy Menk, music director of the South Bend Chamber Singers, says in the film. “Always full of life and full of enthusiasm, mostly for the music she was making. I always think of her singing and what a voice was lost.”
We also hear from the parents of one of the crash victims, Chris Carducci, as they express their confidence in Georgina’s flying abilities.
While all of the interviews were being done in 2016 - more than 20 hours of them - the game plan was to make 20-minute videos for a public awareness campaign, director/producer Todd Boruff says. He’d joined the project early that year.
Hearing the story fresh, he felt the potential for a film. He’d made short videos on a freelance basis, including promotional pieces for companies, but nothing of this scope. Then, as now, he works as a video producer for the University of Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters’ communications office.
Gerry Maravilla, of Los Angeles, started last September on the task of putting the film in front of audiences who could make a difference: chiefly, the aviators. As the distribution strategist/impact producer, he reached out to 1,200 to 1,500 flying clubs, blogs and journalists in aviation across the country to offer film screenings - often virtually through the pandemic.
Combined with the River Bend fest, he estimates a couple thousand people have seen it.
In Q&A sessions after the screenings, Maravilla says Yatish and his wife, Joan, who is also an executive producer for the film, got a wide range of reactions.
“It’s surprising to see how much of a lightning rod this can be,” he says because he’s more accustomed to films on delicate issues such as sexual assault and immigration.
Some skeptical pilots, he says, believe that usually “if there’s a problem, it’s the pilot’s fault.” Some delved into more technical questions, skipping over the broader systemic questions.
But, he adds, the film and Q&A sessions gave pause to some aviators.
Joan notes that two leading authors on aviation have mentioned the film, adding credence to their argument that the NTSB is lagging in its attention to general aviation.
Out of about 1,000 small-plane crashes each year, a fifth of them are fatal, the NTSB has reported. In the film, Yatish cites how the agency blames 86% of those accidents on pilots.
“How can this be?” he questions. “The NTSB is untouchable.”
If that statistic is true, Joan says to The Tribune, “What can you do to train us better? What can you do to test us better?”
She points out that crashes aren’t only a risk for people flying, but for people on the ground, too.
Joan and Yatish are trying to connect with the two congressional committees that oversee the NTSB. They haven’t yet approached the probable incoming transportation secretary, former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg, who wouldn’t have direct influence over NTSB, but they believe he could communicate with the congressional members.
Yatish, owner of South Bend-based GTA Containers Inc., had run for Congress unsuccessfully in 2018. His first wife, Louise Addicott, died 20 months after Georgina in a separate crash in a plane that he was piloting, which investigators apparently blamed on icing on the plane.
“If the film can save someone’s life or prevent what the Joshi family went through,” Boruff says, “then that’s worth it.”
WHERE TO WATCH:
“Invisible Sky” can be rented or purchased on Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play and InDemand cable providers. To watch it, set up a screening or learn more, visit invisibleskyfilm.com
__
Source: South Bend Tribune
Please read our comment policy before commenting.