The National Transportation Safety Board report in the plane crash that killed Senator Paul Wellstone last October says the Chief pilot initially decided not to fly after receiving a weather briefing that morning. After talking to a scheduler for the Wellstone campaign, however, he reversed his decision and took off for Eveleth with Senator Wellstone and 7 others aboard. The hundreds of pages of investigatory information made public today seems to lessen the likelihood that airframe icing was a significant factor in the crash, and seems to increase the role an airport navigation beacon played.

In opening up to the public its investigatory docket, the National Transportation Safety Board, makes no conclusion about what caused the plane to crash killing Senator Paul Wellstone, his wife, his daughter and five others last October.

Instead the NTSB is simply releasing mounds of information it's collected over the course of its inquiry. It will likely be many more months before the board issues a final report on the crash.

The information that's been released suggested the chief pilot was uncomfortable about taking the trip because of the weather conditions, and that a faulty navigational beacon at the Eveleth Virginia Municipal Airport - not a struggle with heavy icing took the plane off course.

According to the NTSB, a little more than two hours before the flight, Captain Richard Conry told a flight service specialist after a weather briefing quote

"Okay, ah you know I don't think I'm going to take this flight."

Conry decided not to fly when after he learned although the winds were clam, clouds between St. Paul and Eveleth were between three hundred and six hundred feet with light icing about five thousand feet and one to four miles of visibility.

Conry then called Senator Wellstone schedulers to express concerns about the weather but said he would not know the conditions in Eveleth for certain until the plane was closer to northeastern Minnesota. Eventually, in response to a question from Wellstone's scheduler, Conry assessed his chances at landing in Eveleth at quote "50-50." The scheduled, said

"Okay, well let's try it."

Shortly after the conversation with Wellstone staffers, Conry called flight service to file a flight plan and get a second weather briefing. It was about 8:15, an hour and 15 minutes before the plane left St. Paul. Over the hour conditions between St. Paul and Eveleth were improving. But the weather in Eveleth was actually worse... the cloud ceiling had dropped.

Wellstone campaign Manager Jeff Blodgett told Minnesota Public Radio last fall, there was debate about whether the Senator should go ahead with the trip.

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The flight left St. Paul at 930 and according to the NTSB information, co-pilot Michael Guess handled the radio work,a good indication it was Captain Conry flying that morning NOT the much less experienced Guess.

Shortly after ten am, air traffic controllers in Duluth advised the crew, flying then at 13 thousand feet, they could descend to four thousand feet ... below reported icing levels.

Co-pilot Guess told controllers he and Conry would fly a VOR approach to Eveleth. The VOR is radio signal designed to help pilots line up on an airport approach from several miles out. Asked whey they would do is they missed their approach, Guess told controllers, lets hope we don't have that but if they did, they would climb and circle until they figured out what to do.

About 15 minutes before the crash the plane descended to four thousand feet a little more than 30 miles out from the Eveleth-Virginia Airport.

Three minutes before the crash, nine miles away from the airport, A Duluth controller remembers seeing the plane on radar appropriately aligned with the Eveleth Airport.

But after apparently intercepting radio beacon, the plane continued to turn, veering to the south instead of heading straight West toward the runway.

According to the NTSB tests days following the crash found the VOR, rather than guiding planes straight in was sending planes first to the north and then to the south. Wellstone's plane was heading south, away from the runway. It crashed two miles south east of the airport.

navigational beacon....

Although Captain Conry has concerns about flying that morning, the weather while not good was not particularly bad.

Investigators focused on the role of icing in the crash, with a strong suspicion that ice buildup ice prevented the pilots from maintaining the necessary airspeed or altitude as it approached the airport. Ice on a plane's wing disrupts the air flow, causing the wing to lose its lift.

But the documents show that just seven miles from the airport -- about three minutes from landing -- the pilots of the King Air 100 had no difficulty maintaining altitude, and was cruising at between 180-200 knots, and it's last reported ground speed was 160 knots as it approached the runway.

Weather reports indicated that light icing conditions, but at a higher altitude than the plane's position. Two pilots who flew into Eveleth earlier in the morning both reported only light icing, and no icing below 5,000 feet, and one pilot reported that what little ice he picked up at higher elevations, was coming off at about the altitude the Wellstone was flying.

National Center for Atmospheric Research meteorologist Ben Bernstein steen who studied radar and satellite imagery along with other weather information at the time of the crash for the NTSB .

In a recent interview with Minnesota Public Radio Bernstein declined to say whether icing could have been a factor in the crash. He did say though, his analysis for the N-T-S-B concluded icing was not likely a major problem at the time the plane crashed.

"Without actually going in there with an aircraft and putting instruments and probes in there, there's no way for us to know for certain how severe the conditions may have been but looking at the data we did look at, it didn't appear to be a particularly severe situation. This case looked like something that wasn't really far out of the norm."

In addition to information about the flight itself, the NTSB docket contains a lot of information about the pilots.

It chronicles Captain Conry's 's mail fraud convictions in the early 1990's and lists several incidents of cockpit mistakes Conry has made. According to the information, Conry had flown Wellstone to Rochester three days before the deadly Eveleth crash. on that flight, after mistakingly engaging the auto pilot Conry said to his co-pilot quote

"Oh, that could have been pretty bad."

On the way back from Rochester Conry took the radio allowing his co-pilot to fly and on the radio falsely identified his plane as a "Citation" ... he was flying a King Air.

Other accounts however assess the former captain as a "by the book," "confident" and "careful" pilot .

Minneapolis attorney Charlie Hvass Junior specializes in aviation litigation but is not involved with the Wellstone crash case.

He says now that the NTSB has made public its investigatory finding, attorneys for the victims' families can be preparing what he expects will be millions of dollars in lawsuits.

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Aviation Charter, the company that operated the flight declined to comment for this report as did the Minneapolis lawfirm which is representing Wellstone's family.

This is Mark Zdechlik, Minnesota Public Radio.