Finally answers to the fatal plane crash in East Hampton in 2022

Manufacturer accused of fatal error

It took just 15 minutes after Kent Feuerring took off from East Hampton Town Airport in his Seamax M-22 on October 6, 2022, for the right wing to separate from the plane and cause it to crash in Three Mile Harbor. It took nearly two years for the National Transportation Safety Board to release its final report on the fatal accident, which it did last week. It accused the manufacturer of using a nut that was not suitable for the task assigned to it.

A preliminary report released a month after the accident described undamaged threads on the bolt to which the nut must have been attached. The final report contradicted this, stating: “The bolt contact surfaces on the thread flanks showed evidence of repeated contact loading.” The nut was no longer on the bolt, having broken off, but “fracture patterns” proved it was “seized in place at the time of failure.”

The September 18 report, written by lead investigator Ryan Enders, concludes that the probable cause of the accident was “in-flight separation of the right wing resulting from the manufacturer's use of a bolt and nut on the upper wing strut that was inconsistent with the design intent and usage limitations of the nut.”

The nut's threads cracked due to the load. Additionally, the nut on the left side of the plane had “partially broken, rolled and displaced threads, with similar deformation of the rolled threads as the nut on the right,” the report said. This likely “represented an earlier stage of the failure history in the joint,” meaning it too was doomed to fail.

The report cites surveillance video from the airport. Mr. Feuerring, the president of the East Hampton Aviation Association, arrived at 11:59 a.m., took the plane out of the hangar at 12:06 p.m., performed a preflight check and started the engine at 12:09 p.m. He taxied for takeoff at 12:14 p.m. He took off at 12:19 p.m. and flew south until he paralleled the Atlantic coast. At Two Mile Hollow Beach in East Hampton Village, he turned north. Shortly thereafter, “contact was lost as the plane was over Three Mile Harbor.”

The plane crashed and exploded in 1.20 meters of water in the harbor. The wing landed in a tree 235 meters away.

According to the report, the self-locking nut used since 1991 was only effective when “the threaded parts are held in place by a positive locking mechanism”. In the case of the Seamax M-22, this was not the case. The nut was “intended for use in shear applications” and not “at the external attachment point” which would be “primarily subject to tensile loads”.

After the December 2022 crash, the Federal Aviation Administration recommended “repeatedly checking the attachment security of the strut mounting hardware before each flight.” In February, Seamax requested an inspection of the parts, but it was not until September 2023, almost a year after Mr. Feuerring's death, that it recommended replacement. This fact is all the more glaring considering that even earlier, in February 2021, the right wing had detached from another Seamax M-22 in Italy, causing another fatal accident.

The Seamax M-22 is a lightweight amphibious aircraft with folding wings for easy transport. The company's website shows an aircraft stranded in crystal clear water with the cockpit door open. The aircraft flown by Mr. Feuerring was manufactured in 2022 and is registered to N46PD, a limited liability company located at 300 Pantigo Place, Suite 102, which is the address of Sabin Metal Corporation. The list price was $189,400.

A call to Seamax to ask why the recommended use of the nut was not specified and why it took almost a year after Mr Feuerring's crash to recommend replacing such nuts went straight to voicemail and was not answered. Mr Feuerring was 57 years old at the time of the accident and was flying alone. He was an experienced pilot and was described by others as conscientious and careful.