Taos pilots locate plane crash site northeast of Angel Fire

TAOS — A social media plea from a woman searching for her husband led three Taos aviators on Tuesday to discover the plane crash site of Mario Acosta, a 64-year-old Angel Fire pilot who took off for Hobbs in portentous weather last weekend but never reached his destination.

The National Transportation Safety Board and New Mexico State Police deployed investigators on Thursday to Cimarron Canyon, a rugged and densely forested section of Carson National Forest, where the local pilots spotted the wreckage of Acosta’s Beechcraft Bonanza during the Tuesday flyover.

State Police spokesperson Amanda Richards said in an update on Friday that a body was located inside the aircraft debris, but an “official identity has not been confirmed.”

As of Thursday evening, Acosta himself had not been located, but his family and the pilots who spotted the crash site fear the aviation accident was likely fatal.

Taos pilots Michael McCann, Ricky Carlini and Colin Harmon took off from Taos Regional Airport in McCann’s Cessna 206 on Tuesday in search of Acosta’s missing aircraft. McCann took action after seeing a social media post about the disappearance.

The missing pilot’s wife, Leah Tenorio-Acosta, had created the post Monday afternoon asking for assistance in locating her husband after he took off from Angel Fire Airport on Sunday but never reached Lea County Regional Airport, 4 miles west of Hobbs.

“Facebook family and friends, I’m reaching out in a way I never do, but I’ve never been in this situation before,” a previous version of her post read. “My husband Mario left the Angel Fire airport in his Beechcraft Bonanza airplane, blue & white, at 1:30 pm, Sunday, headed for Hobbs, NM. He never made it to his destination.”

“All of the necessary associations and (officials) have been notified,” she added. “But because it seems his transponder may have malfunctioned, they may not be looking in the right areas. He may have gone off course to avoid the weather.”

McCann called Tenorio-Acosta on Tuesday morning to gather more details before buzzing off the Taos Mesa tarmac with his copilots. They followed Acosta’s flight path into the mountains east of Taos until they saw something amiss in a steep wash below a saddle about 22 miles northeast of Angel Fire Airport. They circled back, cutting a wide low arc over the trees.

“Sure enough, we saw the telltale signs,” said McCann, who’s flown commercial aircraft for a major international airline for 27 years and also runs the local tour company, Fly Taos Sky. “There was shrapnel. It was really badly broken up. It was a disastrous crash, with burnt trees within proximity of the crash site.”

McCann reported what he had found to Tenorio-Acosta, who told him she had urged her husband to stay home on Sunday in light of a forecast that called for thunderstorms, which can be particularly dangerous in the high mountains that hem in Angel Fire’s tiny airport.

“She said she was very concerned, but he was dismissive,” McCann said. “And then she told me something very, very important that was a huge red flag: She said he always likes to fly over the dam and then fly down over Cimarron Canyon. It’s probably some of the most spectacular scenery in the country, and I get it — but that’s not something you would do, especially in a thunderstorm.”

McCann said that high-elevation flying presents extra challenges for pilots, especially those who are operating smaller aircraft. Mountains, he said, can generate their own weather systems — known as microclimates. These can create sudden shifts in turbulence that disorient pilots who may already be hyper focused on navigating the variegated topography that defines mountain ranges like the Sangre de Cristos.

Speaking to the Journal in May, New Mexico Department of Transportation Aviation Division Director Jessi Litz-Rowden said airport managers don’t dictate when general aviation pilots like Acosta take flight. Instead, their focus is on ensuring proper airport maintenance, with annual checks scheduled alongside the Federal Aviation Administration. They also advocate and help fund general aviation, which is generally considered more dangerous than commercial flying, with most accidents occurring due to pilot error.

“They have access to all of the information to make the best decision that they can possibly make. Whether or not they make that decision is solely on that individual’s responsibility, unless they’re operating for a company,” Litz-Rowden said, adding that commercial pilots “are under a very strict set of guidelines on where they can fly, how they can fly, what the winds have to be when they need to divert.”

According to the National Transportation Safety Board database, Angel Fire has seen a total of seven fatal plane crashes, and nearby Taos has logged 12. New Mexico has recorded a total of 394 fatal crashes dating back to 1965, when a 29-year-old flight school student lost control of a Cessna 210 during a snowstorm over Piñon, a tiny ranching outpost in the southern part of the state.

A new entry for a fatal crash was entered into the database this week for July 6 but remains under investigation.

“It’s so sad, man,” said McCann, who regularly flies over 200 passengers from LAX to Australia in a Boeing 787 Dreamliner, the same model that crashed during an Air India flight on June 12, killing 260 people. “I’ve made this a passion in my life the last 10 years to avoid this kind of loss for families and lives.”