TLDR: The main-linked thread to /r/Flying is the most interesting, so if you don't wanna go through every link, at least read through that. xx

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This accident was initially and briefly covered here on rDrama when the incident occurred. It's been just over a month since this incident occurred, and significant details have come to light that make for good reading. I'm also going to put a disclaimer here that my knowledge of aviation is limited to ~35 mins flying a DJI Mavic drone and a couple of hours in MS Flight Sim.

Background

TNFlyGirl, real name Jenny Blalock, was a 45yo white woman who ran the most white-woman business possible - converting timber from old tobacco farm barns into floorboards. She also ran a high-end custom house-building company, Luxe Home & Designs. I haven't been able to find any indication of her net worth, and whether she was "self-made" or her parents were well-off (her father owned a plumbing supply business), but she was obviously doing well enough to learn to fly and buy herself a plane.

In addition to her businesses, she ran a YouTube channel TNFlyGirl. At the time of her death, she had 16k subscribers (she's gained 5k since her death, which makes her dying the best thing that's happened to her channel). Her channel was a 'warts-and-all' aviation channel that she was using to document her journey, not shying away from showing the hiccups and struggles she was having along the way. While her aviation videos remained on her channel for a time after the accident, they have since been removed / delisted.

In May 2022, she passed her private pilot exam, and then in July 2022, she traded her Piper for a Beechcraft. This appears to be significant, as lots of comments made after her death are to the effect of "too much plane for her".

On December 7th, 2023, while en route from Knoxville, TN to Benton, AR, she and her father were both killed when the plane crashed near Pulaski, TN. A witness reported that the plane was traveling at high speed and that the engine was running at the time of impact(read: not engine failure). The weather was described as "clear, with 10 miles visibility and light winds". The NTSB also reported that two intact digital video recording devices (likely GoPros) were recovered and retained for further examination.

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Initial Reddit Thread

Let's go back to the original r/Flying thread that @peepeehands linked:

TNFlyGirl crash

This kind of accident terrifies me as a student pilot. Has anyone looked into flight tracking or anything to see if there are any initial details? I read that she reported I think alternator or battery issues like a week before, maybe repeated?

edit: I don't have a dog in this fight, I don't subscribe to her channel and had never heard of her before this accident. But man, what's up with the impulse to immediately sh1t on her piloting skills and dismiss her as a reckless YouTuber who somehow had it coming? I was asking a simple question about how a plane can fall from the sky in clear VFR conditions. Thank you to those that took the time to answer that.

For everyone else, thank you for teaching by example. I now definitely know what kind of pilot I want to be when it comes to accident reviews.

This is the earliest Reddit thread on the incident. The top comments seem to indicate that this might be a result of pilot error:

I don't know a single thing about that accident, but I watched a couple of her recent videos and - not sure how to put this tastefully - 400 hours and a youtube channel does not mean someone is a good example to follow. As a student pilot you should realize there is a risk and you can die doing this, which is why you need to hold yourself to a high standard and make sure you know what you're doing.

What did she do wrong in her vids? Elaborate so we can understand better

I just started analyzing some of her videos last night. In one of the few remaining videos still up, I was able to point out several red flags in her flying. These included..

Taking off left of centerline.

Retracting gear with usable runway remaining.

Tinkering in the cockpit with knobs and switches while in the climb out (should be looking out the window if VFR)

Very poor atc calls for a 400 hour pilot.

Flew a straight in approach to a non towered field while traffic was in the pattern. Highly frowned upon!!

Made a base turn without ever visually identifying traffic that was on a final approach. While it didn't result in anything happening, you should never turn onto final if you know someone's on final approach and do not see them. Recipe for disaster. Her situational awareness and ability to spot traffic was poor at best.

Little to no crosswind corrections on landing.

Landed well right of centerline and side loaded the heck out of the landing.

In her next takeoff roll (same video), she added no croww

Another person comes in to decry the callous nature of the thread

Anyone mocking a GA pilot's accident should be fricking banned. That shits despicable…

Only for someone to post this reply:

In her grumpy ATC Controller video, she mocks the controller who has queried her multiple times about being off course to her instructor “I'm still tickled bout that- ‘having problems with your autopilot?' hahaha I don't know why I think that's funny”

If she were alive she'd be mocking herself.

5:30.

link to since-deleted video on her channel

This comment touches on what the current (Jan 2024. suspected cause of the accident is, issues with her understanding of the autopilot and it's impact on trim:

It's hard to go back and watch the videos of her struggling with the autopilot for a year, knowing it's not up-to-snuff but still handing control of her aircraft over to it repeatedly. I wonder if she ever brought an avionics expert up in the right seat or considered marking it inoperable. She says she's receiving training from her father but it's not clear what certificates he has or who pilot-in-command is, and he falls asleep in the right seat occasionally. I look forward to reading the NTSB report to get some non-armchair opinions but I think it's going to come down to a combination of ADM and won't be very satisfying, like reading "the proximate cause was failure to use checklists".

Of course, there's always one scrote to blame her looks:

"Beautiful woman [or man] syndrome." My son, a former CFI, saw people like Jenny in his work. It's a serious analysis of someone who has reached adulthood thinking they're way more talented, charming, smart, or funny than they are because people always tell them that so they can be around them. He had to tell a very attractive woman he wouldn't continue training her (when he really needed students) because she just wasn't getting it. She would've ended up like Jenny, and he might have been in the right seat.

It might explain why Jenny got so overconfident that she bought a Beech when she should've bought a 172 - or quit flying. Too bad someone didn't tell her.

Sad tale.

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YouTube Experts Discuss

Several days later, YouTuber Juan Browne of the blancolirio channel posted this 21-min video criticizing her flight instructor(s) and putting forward his hypothesis that the pilot's misunderstanding of her autopilot system was to blame for the accident. It's a good watch, but you can skip to 13:59 for the key analysis.

A week later, he released a follow-up video based on the NTSB's preliminary report into the accident.

His first video spawned the following thread with some mildly interesting comments:

/r/aviation - https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/18hzkt0/tnflygirl_crash

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/r/Flying Disucssion Post Preliminary Report Release

/r/flying - https://old.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/18o3nku/tnflygirl_crash_ntsb_preliminary_report

TNFlyGirl crash: NTSB Preliminary Report

First want to say condolences to her and her father's loved ones. A tragic accident all around.

The preliminary report is here: https://data.ntsb.gov/carol-repgen/api/Aviation/ReportMain/GenerateNewestReport/193491/pdf

Video by blancolirio talking about it:

There didn't seem to be any structural failure or stall/spin. Prelim suggests loss of control of the aircraft.

Likely lots of factors well before this singular flight led up to this accident, it's sad that she seemed to be enthusiastic about flying and learning and maybe just didn't have the appropriate support and instruction. Not for me to say though. Thinking of her family and friends.

As is often the case with niche, more specialised subs, a blunt truth is upmarseyd to the top:

It's really hard to forgive a grown butt adult for not recognizing how far out of their element they operated consistently. Downmarsey away, aviation isn't for everyone.

More commentary on her abilities:

From the report: 140 nautical miles into the trip, the controller advised the pilot that she was left of course. The pilot acknowledged and responded that she was correcting.

Based on the Latitude, Longitude in the report, the crash was about 17 miles south of a direct route from KDKX to KSUZ. If she was flying direct, that is pretty far off course.

And those wild oscillations from the report: About 1019, the airplane entered the first of a series of climbs and descents with corresponding fluctuations in its observed groundspeed. During these oscillations, which varied in magnitude, the airplane's altitude varied between about 6,400 ft and about 5,300 ft. About 1057, the airplane entered a descent that arrested about 4,300 ft at a groundspeed of 143 kts, after which it climbed to 6,050 ft and slowed to 85 kts. The airplane then began to descend rapidly before ADS-B contact was lost

It looks like she was totally out of control.

Seems like in every one of her recent videos, she was "correcting" in response to ATC. In one of them she was annoyed with how many times the controller told her she wasn't on course.

Holy crap. The very first one I watched, she had her dad flying after he clearly said “I can't see the screens” when she told him to hold an altitude and heading while she drank her water and relaxed. She announced her position wrong (slightly but noticeably) and she darn near didn't make the landing due to being off centerline.

This is as sad as it gets. Someone with the zeal for aviation gets shit instruction (watch her other videos, you can see how heavy handed her CFIs are) and dies as a result.

Yeah in the first video that I watched, while on short final she started trimming the wrong direction when her CFI said to trim nose down, got flustered and says “ah shit”, he responds “that's alright I got it”, and they continue to land. That is not an inconsequential mixup for a PPL and indicates a problem that needs addressing, so to see a CFI treat it so nonchalant was really disappointing.

Regardless of what caused this accident, her instructors failed her. I'm sure the two onboard cameras will sled more light for the final report but it sadly seems like the writing was on the wall. RIP to both souls.

Feel so bad for the family. Someone has some explaining to do as sadly she was operating well beyond her capabilities but didn't know. At least that's my take after watching Juan.

Her videos, many of which have been since deleted, are pretty eye opening. She lacked even the most basic of skills such as handling the airplane and using the radio at the same time. She was also utterly confused by her auto pilot system which she seemed to rely on to compensate for her lack of hand flying skills.

She was so behind the airplane, every video I saw of her flying

Based on her videos, she was a tragic accident waiting to happen. Way behind that airplane constantly. I can totally see how she could have ended up with a bunch of nose down trim on AP, disconnect it and get going too fast to correct it with back pressure alone.

She had her camera's so I guess we will find out...

It's super sad that at no point did any of her CFIs or DPEs catch this and help her correct being so behind that aircraft.

And finally, a downmarseyd comment suggesting that the fact that she was a Southerner contributed to her accident, which leads to some bickering:

Please feel free to take offense and call me a dirty yankee, but could southernness be some part of the problem here? I haven't seen any of her videos in full, but if I understand the situation, she was a well-off, relatively attractive woman.

From what's described here, and clips in other videos, her CFIs didn't make it clear that she didn't know what she was doing. One specifically was doing everything for her to such a degree that viewers pointed it out and she sought out a new CFI. Somehow a DPE passed her and gave her a PPL despite people here describing that she didn't understand that you need to add power to climb and which way to turn the trim wheel.

Was a little bit of this "southern gentlemen" on one hand being too polite and on the other perhaps having lower expectations of a well-off woman hobbyist than they would a man they thought was on track to the airlines?

edit: I see some downmarseys. Evidently my slander is unworthy of a substantive response.

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Pilots Discuss

There was also this post on an old-school Professional Pilots forum:

https://www.pprune.org/accidents-close-calls/656333-tnflygirl-crash-analysis.html

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Finally, it wouldn't be an rDrama thread without actual, unpleasant friction between people - and for that, we head over to her Instagram page, where people are going at it about her piloting skills, and 'disrespecting the deceased':

Profile: 865flygirl

Notable post - a photo of her plane taken less than a week before her accident:

The lack of emotional intelligence in this thread is alarming! You all should be ashamed of yourselves. Your parents FAILED!

how? it's important to criticise accidental deaths so lessons can be learned and further lives saved.

well unless you were in the cockpit with her and you WERE NOT, you are only making assumptions and you know what they say about assumptions!

to be fair, she broadcast her thorough lack of basic aviation skills to the entire world to see in an attempt to garner views. While I've only seen a handful of said videos, her lack of basic skills was evident. What's happened is tragic. No one will dispute that. But it was also 100 percent avoidable. She looked and sounded VERY opposed to critique and many of her videos show an outright lack of regard towards instruction. That's what we call in the business a "hazardous attitude" and it's one of the first things new pilots learn about in ground school. I don't need to assume she was a poor pilot. She verified it with her content. So that's no assumption. The only assumption one can make at this point is what part of her hazardous flying actually brought that plane down. The ntsb will determine that, but based on early findings - it seems like a lack of understanding of the plane she was flying is going to be the root cause or at the very least - a contributing factor. "thoughts and prayers" dont change anything and when you spend so much time sharing content with the public, it's open for critique. I can guarantee that if she'd have spent as much time in her aviation studies as she did editing and posting YouTube and Instagram content for "likes", she'd still be alive today.

Also, you are pretty slimy lowdown scumbag dirt ball to be insulting a dead girl. That ranks right up there with kicking puppies and drowning kittens. Wouldn't be surprised if you have a background of playing with minors as well.

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So there you have it. Really just a bunch of conjecture and educated guesses, but until the footage is released of her piloting herself and her father into the ground, that's all we've got.