Experimental aircraft safety has gotten complicated with all the conflicting advice and regulations flying around. As someone who’s studied general aviation accidents for years, I learned everything there is to know about how small design decisions lead to fatal outcomes. Today, I will share it all with you — through one of the most well-known crashes in GA history.
That’s what makes John Denver’s 1997 accident endearing to us safety-focused aviation people — not the celebrity angle, but the sheer preventability of it all.
The Aircraft: Not Your Average Garage Project
Probably should have led with this section, honestly — people assume Denver was flying some cobbled-together death trap, and that’s not accurate at all.
The Rutan Long-EZ is a legitimately respected homebuilt design. Same basic platform that Burt Rutan eventually scaled up for SpaceShipOne. Canard wing up front, pusher propeller in back, excellent fuel efficiency, genuinely fun to fly. Thousands built, most without serious incident.
Denver’s particular airplane, registered N555JD, had been modified after construction. And one modification in particular would turn out to be the difference between a minor inconvenience and a fatal crash.
The Fuel Selector Problem
I’m apparently in the camp that gets frustrated when perfectly good cockpit designs get altered for no clear reason. Here’s what happened: the standard Long-EZ puts the fuel tank selector valve where the pilot can reach it easily, without contortions or gymnastics. Someone — and the records never clearly established who — relocated Denver’s fuel selector to a position behind the pilot’s left shoulder.
Let that sink in for a second. You’re in a cramped cockpit, the engine quits, and the one switch that could fix things is somewhere behind your left shoulder blade. You’d have to twist your whole torso around, probably loosen the harness, definitely take your eyes off the instruments — all while the ground or water is getting closer and time is running out.
October 12, 1997
Denver took off from Monterey Peninsula Airport that afternoon with roughly thirty minutes of fuel in his selected tank. At about 500 feet over Monterey Bay, the engine went silent. Fuel starvation — the tank had simply run dry.
Witnesses on the ground watched the Long-EZ flying erratically over the water. The NTSB concluded Denver was almost certainly trying to reach that behind-the-shoulder fuel selector when he lost control of the aircraft. The airplane dove into the Pacific. He was killed on impact.
Context That Matters
Denver had accumulated around 2,750 hours of flight time total — a respectable amount by any standard. But he’d only logged roughly 70 hours in this specific airplane. Still learning its quirks. Still building the muscle memory and automatic responses that come with hundreds of hours in a given cockpit.
His pilot certificate had been suspended previously over DUI issues, though he’d recently obtained a new medical certificate. Whether his regulatory history had any bearing on his decision-making that day, the investigation couldn’t determine with certainty.
There was also the matter of fuel gauges. The Long-EZ uses sight gauges that were reportedly difficult to read on Denver’s aircraft. Did he misread his fuel quantity during preflight? The NTSB couldn’t say definitively, but it’s a plausible contributing factor.
Why Safety People Still Teach This One
Nearly three decades later, flight instructors and accident investigators keep coming back to this crash because the lessons are timeless:
Know your exact fuel state. Not “I think I’ve got plenty.” Know which tank is selected, how many gallons remain, and how many minutes of flight that gives you. Fuel mismanagement remains one of the top killers in general aviation, year after year.
Critical controls have to be reachable without effort. An emergency happens fast. If grabbing a switch means taking your hands off the stick, your eyes off the instruments, and your body out of the normal flying position — that switch is in the wrong place. Full stop.
Respect the hours-in-type learning curve. Two thousand hours in Cessnas doesn’t make you experienced in a Long-EZ. Denver was competent in other aircraft, but 70 hours in a canard pusher with non-standard modifications left gaps in his familiarity.
Question every modification. Experimental aircraft come with enormous freedom to modify. That freedom cuts both ways. Every single change should face one simple question: does this make the airplane more safe or less safe?
What Could Have Saved Him
Better fuel planning — checking the selected tank quantity before departure and switching earlier. A fuel selector mounted where human hands can actually reach it in an emergency. Maybe another fifty or hundred hours of practice, building the kind of reflexive cockpit awareness that comes with extended time in type.
Any one of those factors might have changed the outcome. Together, their absence created a chain of small compromises that ended in Monterey Bay. The FAA tightened its guidance on experimental aircraft modifications after the accident, but the real takeaway is simpler than any regulation: know your airplane, manage your fuel, and never fly with critical controls you can’t reach without a fight.
