A grieving daughter has revealed a heartbreaking detail about the private plane crash that killed her father and brother, saying a glitch in the aircraft’s weather tracking system may have led them straight into a deadly storm.
Kelsey Lewis told the Daily Mail that the weather software on the Beechcraft Baron 55 was reportedly 30 minutes off, which she believes caused her dad, Jimmy Don Lewis, 48, and her brother, Brayden Ty Lewis, 22, to think they could safely fly through a gap in the storm.
The father and son had just attended a St. Louis Cardinals game before taking off from St. Louis Regional Airport Thursday night. The plane lost contact at 10:48 p.m. and crashed around 11 p.m., according to investigators.
Kelsey said she had flown with her dad and brother earlier that day to pick up a new car in Illinois. She described an eerie feeling that night, checking the plane’s status repeatedly as storms rolled in.
“My dad, when it came to flying, he was very, very cautious of everything,” Kelsey told the outlet. She emphasized that her father, an experienced pilot, would never have knowingly flown into dangerous weather.
The Monroe County Sheriff’s Department said preliminary flight data shows the aircraft began a turn, possibly to avoid the storm, before entering what appeared to be a descending spiral.
When the plane failed to land in Arkansas, Kelsey and her mother, Jill, began frantically contacting authorities. They were asked to come to the sheriff’s station, where they waited hours before learning the devastating news.
“There was a discovery at 7:51 this morning. A plane and two deceased bodies,” Kelsey recalled the sheriff telling them.
Kelsey remembers her father and brother as “givers” who were incredibly close. They earned their pilot licenses together and flying was their shared passion.
The family is now planning to start a Lewis Memorial Sports Scholarship at Kansas High School, where Brayden was a quarterback and Jimmy was active in the community.
As the investigation continues, one question lingers: what exactly caused that weather tracking system to be so tragically off?
