piper cargo twin crashes in eastern washington

Peter Duniho wrote:
"steve" wrote in message
. ..
The other issue is that Interstate 90, with two full lanes in each
direction was right next to the Easton airstrip, and parallel to his
direction of flight.

That would have given him a nearly unlimited landing strip, albeit with
cars scampering out of the way.

....

There are a variety of things to question about the way things unfolded in
this accident, but the pilot choosing to not land on I-90 doesn't seem to me
to be one of them.

The pilot was a reasonably experienced CFII. When I last flew with
him, I think he probably had at least 2000 hours. Landing on a freeway
when there's a perfectly good strip nearby might be a little
embarassing to a professional pilot, but my guess is that he probably
thought he had the airstrip made. While going through the emergency
procedures checklist (or trying to control the descent without
stalling), he could have failed to see the tall tree that he ultimately
clipped with one wing. I wouldn't expect such a mishap to cause fatal
injuries because he was sufficiently low and slow that impact forces
could have been survivable, but I'm still unaware of the full set of
facts and the preliminary NTSB report is not yet published.