A March 5, 2023 discovery flight departure from Republic Airport (KFRG) in Farmingdale, New York ended in a fatal in-flight fire and crash short of runway 32, killing CFI Fasil and his two passengers — a woman named Reva and her mother, who had booked the flight as a surprise gift. The NTSB investigated the accident and found that the 23-year-old instructor held a commercial pilot certificate and CFI with single and multi-engine ratings, had accumulated approximately 330 total hours, and had roughly 120 hours in type. He had been employed by the flight school since November 2022 and, according to a close friend, was actively seeking to exit the organization in the weeks preceding the crash — reportedly in pursuit of a charter flying position once he accumulated sufficient hours. The NTSB docket and final report form the basis of what is publicly known about the structural and cultural failures that preceded the accident.
The flight school operated under Part 61, a federally permissible structure that imposes no mandatory syllabus review by the FAA. While Part 61 operations are entirely legal and represent the majority of flight training conducted in the United States, the owner's characterization of the school's operating philosophy is operationally significant: CFIs were classified as independent contractors, each treated as a self-contained flight school, with no standardized operating procedures documented or enforced. The NTSB found no safety officer on staff, no formal safety program, and no structured safety meeting schedule. When asked about safety meetings, the owner acknowledged they occurred only intermittently. The daily safety discrepancy sheets the owner described were never produced to investigators and do not appear in the final docket — a gap that raises serious questions about whether those records existed in a meaningful form or were maintained with any regularity.
The most operationally alarming allegation to emerge from NTSB interviews involves the reported suppression of maintenance and airworthiness discrepancy reporting. One instructor stated that the owner explicitly instructed CFIs never to report aircraft difficulties over the radio, on the grounds that ATC could initiate certificate action against the pilot. This claim is factually incorrect and represents a fundamental misunderstanding — or deliberate misrepresentation — of how FAA enforcement works. ATC does not have authority to take a pilot's certificate; that authority rests with the FAA, and even then, enforcement actions require formal process. More critically, pilots operating under FAA regulations have both a legal obligation and a professional duty to ground or return aircraft exhibiting airworthiness concerns. The same instructor alleged that after she reported a partial power loss event on a specific aircraft, that aircraft was immediately re-dispatched to another instructor, who also experienced problems and returned it. If accurate, this describes a maintenance release process that bypassed standard airworthiness determination entirely.
For professional pilots operating under Part 91, 91K, or 135, the structural vulnerabilities exposed in this accident are directly relevant to their own operational environments, particularly those who fly for small operators or fractional programs with limited formal safety infrastructure. The absence of a Safety Management System (SMS) or even an informal safety reporting culture creates the exact conditions under which known mechanical discrepancies migrate from one flight to the next unaddressed. The FAA has been steadily expanding SMS requirements — mandatory for Part 121 carriers since 2018 and progressively encouraged across the general aviation ecosystem — precisely because the data consistently shows that accidents cluster around operators where reporting is discouraged, records are inconsistent, and individual pilots are left to absorb institutional risk without organizational support. An instructor reluctant to ground an aircraft for fear of career or certificate consequences is an instructor whose judgment about airworthiness has been compromised by the operational culture above him.
This accident fits a well-documented pattern in fatal general aviation accidents involving flight training operations: a young, relatively low-time CFI employed by an under-resourced school, flying an aircraft with a potentially unresolved maintenance history, with no institutional framework to identify or interrupt the chain of events before a flight departs. The NTSB has repeatedly cited inadequate safety culture, deferred maintenance communication, and the misclassification of safety reporting obligations as contributing factors in training-related accidents. Litigation remains ongoing, and the full causal chain — including the precise nature of the in-flight fire — is the subject of legal proceedings. What the publicly available record already establishes, however, is that the conditions permitting this accident were not created on the morning of March 5th. They were built, incrementally, through a series of organizational decisions that treated safety as a cost center rather than a foundational operational requirement.