On Thursday, October 29, two helicopters that had taken off from the area around the city’s municipal airport collided over farmland southeast of McMinnville. All three people aboard were killed: pilot Tyler Delane Sturdevant of Newberg, instructor Maddie Aasbo of Texas, and her student, 31-year-old British citizen Christopher James Jowin. One helicopter was on a training flight, while the other was airborne after maintenance work; investigators will now have to determine why their flight paths crossed.
The Yamhill County dispatch center received a call at about 2:10 p.m. Witnesses reported that two aircraft collided in midair near Highway 233, close to its intersection with Crookshank Road, and then crashed into a field. Sheriff’s deputies, McMinnville police, Oregon State Police, firefighters and medics responded. There were no survivors.
The crash did not occur on airport property, but very close to it—in airspace where training, private and maintenance flights can follow one another over a landscape of vineyards, farms and two-lane roads familiar to local residents. McMinnville Municipal Airport remained open; Highway 233 and several local roads were closed to give first responders and investigators access to the wreckage.
According to the sheriff’s office, the 1995 two-seat Robinson R22 carried 22-year-old Maddie Aasbo and her student, Christopher Jowin. Aasbo was the instructor, and the flight was classified as a training flight. Jowin, whose name was initially withheld pending notification of his relatives, was a British citizen. The British Foreign Office said it was in contact with local authorities and his family.
The second aircraft was a 2018 Airbus AS350B3, piloted alone by 38-year-old Tyler Sturdevant of Newberg. He was a senior pilot at Precision, a company involved in charter and helicopter maintenance operations. Preliminary information indicated that his flight was related to a technical inspection of the helicopter. In the first hours after the crash, reports differed about who had been aboard each aircraft, but the sheriff’s office later clarified the passengers’ and pilots’ assignments.
One of the helicopters belonged to Jerry Trimble Helicopters, a flight school based in McMinnville. The company confirmed that its aircraft was involved in the incident, offered condolences to the victims’ families and said it was cooperating with the investigation. In a small aviation community, where people recognize one another’s voices over the radio and meet at the same airfields, the deaths of a young instructor, her student and an experienced pilot were an especially heavy loss.
The Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating. Investigators will need to reconstruct the helicopters’ routes, examine communications and tracking data, weather conditions, the aircraft’s mechanical condition, the pilots’ experience, camera footage and eyewitness accounts. At this stage, authorities have not identified a cause of the collision or any factor that may have contributed to it.
The NTSB’s first preliminary report usually contains only established facts, not a finding of fault; a final explanation may take many months. For now, the field beside Highway 233 remains the place where an ordinary October day in the Yamhill Valley ended for three families—and left the central question unanswered: how did two helicopters end up in the same spot in the sky?
Based on: 3 killed in helicopter collision that shut down part of an Oregon highway