BEAVER DAM, Ky. — Flight student Connor Quisenberry was only about a month away from getting his pilot’s license last September when he sat inside a Beaver Dam restaurant with his family.
“I want you to go up with me first when I get my license,” Connor told his father.
“No, you’ll take your mother first,” his father replied.
Eighteen-year-old Connor, then a recent graduate of Ohio County High School, was just hours away from taking off for a night cross-country flight, a requirement for his license. His longtime dream of becoming a pilot was starting to feel more and more like reality with every flight.
Connor was in eighth grade when he told his mom, a teacher at OCHS, he wanted to take her aviation class in high school.
“When I told him that I was going to be teaching aviation, he said, ‘I’m going to take the class.’ And I said, ‘really?’ He said, ‘yeah, I want to. I think I want to be a pilot,’” recalled Aimee Quisenberry, Connor’s mother. “After the first year I said, ‘is this something you still want to do?’ And he goes, ‘yes.’ So we got him lessons over in Owensboro at the airport, and he just took off from there.”
Connor enrolled in Eagle Flight Academy at the Owensboro-Daviess County Regional Airport in April 2022 and started training to become a pilot. The program was pricey for a teenager, but Connor had some help from his parents and worked in security at Holiday World and Splashin’ Safari and in the concession stands at Beaver Dam City Park and Amphitheater to pay for his lessons.
Connor always had varied interests. He bowled for his high school bowling team, was a dedicated Eagle Scout, immersed in his church and Christian faith, and passionate about volunteerism and serving others. But it was flying that ignited something special deep within Connor. Aimee will never forget the way he beamed after his first flight.
“From that point on, that was it. As soon as he went up, he was like, this is what I want to do,” said Aimee.
He was hooked. Each hour in the air brought Connor closer to his dream of earning his private pilot’s license and, by Sept. 27, 2023, as he sat in the restaurant with his family, he was almost done.
“He was really close. He was probably about a month away from taking the written exam and doing his final check ride,” said Aimee.
After dinner, Connor would head to the airport, where he was paired with 22-year-old Certified Flight Instructor (CFI) Timothy “Junior” McKellar Jr. for his night flight. The pair had never flown together before. Connor’s usual CFI had color blindness, the Quisenberry family said, which prevented that instructor from flying at night.
The pair flew from Owensboro to Bowling Green on an instructional flight before doing take-off and landing drills at Bowling Green-Warren County Regional Airport. A threat of severe weather lingered as they departed Bowling Green for Owensboro on the night cross-country flight.
Aimee, meanwhile, waited up for her son at their Beaver Dam home, as she always did. He had told his mom he’d be home at 11:30 p.m. and it was unlike Connor to be late. She became increasingly worried with every passing minute.
“I called his phone. It went straight to voicemail. So I texted, are you still up in the air?”
No response.
Maybe it was a feeling; looking back, Aimee doesn’t know why she got on Facebook that night, but she did. The chaotic chain of events and tragic flow of information, and at times lack thereof, that followed are both blurry and unforgettable.
“I had just joined the Owensboro Police Scanner Group, and they had posted that there was a plane that they had lost contact with at the Owensboro airport,” Aimee recalled, her voice full of emotion. “They always talk about how you know — and I knew it was his plane.”
The small plane, a Piper PA28, went down in a remote area of Ohio County near Whitesville. After a desperate search that was complicated by poor weather conditions and difficult terrain, investigators found Connor and McKellar’s bodies the next morning in a hilly and heavily wooded area as local law enforcement combed through the massive 25-acre debris field.
Within hours of the crash, posts from McKellar’s Snapchat account went viral. They showed McKellar impatiently and audibly tapping his fingers on the side of the plane as Quisenberry appeared to conduct a pre-flight inspection, before telling him “C’mon.” McKellar referred to his student as “Forrest Gump Jr” in the posts, adding that Quisenberry wasn’t the smartest in his class. McKellar’s final Snapchat post, which was later included in the National Transportation Safety Board’s preliminary report, showed their flight path overtop weather radar indicating nearby severe weather. McKellar circled the storms and wrote, “headed are[sic] way like a group of pissed off hornets.”
The posts were unthinkable for Aimee and Andy Quisenberry.
“To degrade anybody, that’s not all right. You don’t have the right to do that. That’s unprofessional and, as a CFI, you should be held to a professional standard,” Aimee said. “It would be no different than me, a teacher, doing that to a student and saying, ‘look at this student. They’re slow, they’re behind.’ I would totally expect someone to come after me if I did that. Same thing for a CFI. They have no right to do that to their students.”
The Quisenberrys said the derogatory social media posts were among the factors that prompted them to file a wrongful death lawsuit this week on Connor’s behalf. They are hoping to prevent other flight students from enduring the poor treatment they believe their son received in his final hours.
“[Flight] students are paying very good money and a lot of it. To be treated that way is just wrong and my hope is that changes,” said Aimee.
The lawsuit, filed Sept. 16, almost a year after the crash, in Ohio County Circuit Court, claims the plane crash that claimed Connor’s life was a “totally unnecessary and avoidable crash.”
Eagle Flight Academy, which shut down a little more than two months after the deadly crash, and ATP Flight Academy, where McKellar received his CFI certificate, along with its related entities, are named in the complaint. Spectrum News reached out to the owner of Eagle Flight Academy and ATP for comment but, as of publishing time, we had not heard back. The lawsuit seeks a jury trial, funeral expenses and other unspecified damages.
“I just don’t want to see another family go through this,” Andy said.”If there’s a way to save one other family before I go to my grave. I’ve done my job.”
The accident remains under investigation by the NTSB. In a preliminary report released last October, investigators confirmed the airplane was flying through poor weather conditions when the accident happened.
Air traffic control recordings referenced in the report revealed a controller tried to guide the airplane away from a storm with “heavy to extreme” rain before McKellar said the plane was “getting blown around like crazy” and reported “extreme turbulence” minutes before the controller lost all communication with the aircraft.
The NTSB’s preliminary report did not identify what caused the crash, but it revealed the plane’s left wing broke off the body of the airplane and said other parts of the plane were found throughout the wreckage. The NTSB is expected to eventually determine a probable cause for the crash and issue a final report.
The lawsuit points the blame squarely at the flight instructor, claiming McKellar’s negligence caused the “totally unnecessary and avoidable crash” that resulted in his and Quisenberry’s deaths.
Connor’s parents describe life without Connor as “a challenge day-to-day.” While the Quisenberrys don’t expect to find solace in any outcome, they hope their son’s story, which sparked widespread criticism among the CFI community, and the wrongful death lawsuit raise awareness about what they believe are unprofessional and unsafe behaviors at some flight schools that could be putting student pilots, like Connor, in danger.
“There will always be a missing piece,” said Aimee. “Days do get easier, but there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think of him.”
Andy Quisenberry has played back in his mind that night at the restaurant over and over again. His son, as he painstakingly calculated it, was approximately 12 to 15 miles and less than 10 flight hours away from becoming a pilot. He was so close. Andy now hopes to get his pilot’s license so he can fulfill the longtime dream his son came so close to achieving.