Greg Biffle signs for fans after winning at Michigan International Speedway in June 2005. Photo: SSG Helen Miller, U.S. Army National Guard, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
NASCAR is a traveling show that moves by air. Drivers, owners and crew leadership spend the season hopping between Concord, the track and wherever the sponsor wants them on Tuesday, and for decades the fastest way to do that has been a business jet parked at a regional airport a few miles from the shop. Greg Biffle lived that life more fully than most. He was a licensed pilot, he owned his own aircraft through a company, and in the fall of 2024 he spent days flying a helicopter into cut-off mountain communities in western North Carolina after Hurricane Helene.
That background is why the lawsuits over the December 18, 2025, crash at Statesville Regional Airport matter well beyond one family’s tragedy. The case is turning into a detailed argument about a question every racing flight department answers before each trip, usually without thinking about it: who is responsible for this airplane, and for what?
Nothing below assigns blame. The National Transportation Safety Board has not issued a probable cause, and every claim in the litigation is an allegation until a judge or jury rules.
The flight in the federal record
The NTSB’s preliminary report on investigation WPR26MA063 lays out the basics. The airplane was a Cessna 550 Citation II, registration N257BW, owned and operated by GB Aviation Leasing LLC, Biffle’s company. It was flown as a Part 91 personal flight, meaning no charter certificate and none of the extra oversight that comes with one, bound for Sarasota, Florida. All seven people aboard were killed: Biffle; his wife, Cristina; his children, Emma and Ryder; pilot Dennis Dutton; his son, Jack Dutton; and Craig Wadsworth.
The report’s timeline is short and ugly. While taxiing, the three pilot-rated people on board discussed an inoperative thrust reverser indicator light, and during the takeoff roll one of them remarked that the left engine appeared to be making more power than the right, possibly a gauge fault. The jet left runway 10 at 10:06 a.m. under visual flight rules, with the crew planning to pick up an instrument clearance in the air. Three attempts to get that clearance went nowhere.
By 10:10 the autopilot was off and the pilot in the left seat was saying his altitude indicator wasn’t working properly, and that other left-side instruments might be affected too. Around 10:11, at roughly 4,500 feet, control passed to the right seat. Once the ground came into view at about 1,870 feet, Dennis Dutton took the airplane back, called for flaps and gear, and found the gear indicator lights dark. At 10:13:48 the right seat radioed, “we’re having some issues here.” The jet lined up on runway 28 and the recorder and GPS data stop at 10:15:23. The first impact point was an approach light station about 1,380 feet short of the runway threshold.
Three jobs, three sets of federal rules
Here’s the part racing people should pay attention to. The Federal Aviation Regulations split responsibility for a private jet in a way that maps almost perfectly onto the two sides of this case.
- The owner keeps it airworthy. 14 CFR 91.403 makes the owner or operator “primarily responsible” for maintaining the aircraft in an airworthy condition. The Dutton estates’ wrongful-death suits against Biffle’s estate, filed in April and seeking $15 million each, are built on this idea: Biffle’s company owned the jet, so the condition of the jet was his problem.
- The pilot in command owns the flight. Under 14 CFR 91.3, the pilot in command is directly responsible for, and the final authority on, the operation of the aircraft. Section 91.7 adds that the pilot in command decides whether the airplane is in condition for safe flight. That is the lane Biffle’s estate has driven into, contending in court that the Duttons were negligent.
- The second pilot has to be qualified for that seat. 14 CFR 61.55 sets out who can serve as second in command of an airplane certificated for more than one pilot: the right certificate with the right category and class rating, plus aircraft-specific familiarization and recent takeoffs, landings and engine-out work in type.
The NTSB report puts names to those roles. Dennis Dutton held an airline transport certificate, roughly 17,000 hours and type ratings running from the Airbus A350 to the DC-10. His CE-500 rating, which the report applies to this Citation, carried the limitation “Second in Command Required.” In other words, he was not rated to fly it alone.
The right seat held Jack Dutton: a private pilot with single-engine and instrument ratings and 175.3 hours, all in single-engine airplanes. The NTSB states that he “was not qualified to perform second in command duties” under 61.55. The third pilot-rated occupant, seated in the cabin just behind the cockpit, held multi-engine, instrument and helicopter ratings and about 3,500 hours, but he was not in either pilot seat.
So the paperwork gives both sides something solid. The owner’s side can point to a pilot flying outside the terms of his own rating, and to a right-seat occupant who was handed the controls in the middle of an instrument failure. The pilots’ side can point to an airplane that was showing electrical and instrument anomalies before it left the ground, and argue that no crew should have to fly around that.
What the airplane was doing
The mechanical evidence so far does not look like a classic engine failure. Investigators found both engines attached, fan blades damaged at the tips (typical of engines turning at impact) and no evidence of an uncontained failure. Both thrust reversers were stowed. The team found no sign that any part of the airplane separated before impact.
The more interesting clue is the cockpit voice recorder. Its audio quality fell apart across every channel from 10:11:04 to 10:14:09, a gap of just over three minutes that lines up with the instrument trouble. When clear audio returned, the rear passenger asked about power from the “alternator,” and the pilot said “that was the problem” without saying what had been done. A recorder losing audio at the same moment the flight instruments fail points toward a shared electrical cause, but that is a question for the final report. The airplane also had no flight data recorder, and wasn’t required to. Investigators are working from about 20 parameters logged by a Garmin GTN 750 navigator.
That thin data trail matters for the lawsuits. An electrical fault traced back to maintenance helps the owner-liability theory. A fault that a properly staffed two-pilot crew should have been able to handle helps the estate.
North Carolina doesn’t split the difference
In most states, a jury that found both the owner and the crew partly at fault would divide up the damages. North Carolina is one of a handful of jurisdictions that still apply contributory negligence, the old all-or-nothing rule: if a plaintiff’s own negligence contributed to the injury, the plaintiff generally recovers nothing.
Two more pieces of state law raise the stakes. The wrongful-death statute lets an estate sue only where the person who died could have sued had they lived, so the pilots’ estates stand in the pilots’ shoes, own conduct included. And G.S. 1-139 puts the burden of proving contributory negligence on the party raising it. Biffle’s estate has to prove the pilots were at fault. The Dutton estates don’t have to prove they weren’t.
North Carolina does soften the rule. A plaintiff can still recover if the defendant’s conduct rises to gross negligence (willful or wanton disregard for safety), or under the “last clear chance” doctrine. That is why aviation complaints in this state tend to use harder words than “careless.”
The one report the jury won’t see
Whatever the NTSB eventually concludes, federal law keeps its conclusions out of court. Under 49 U.S.C. § 1154(b), no part of a Board accident report may be admitted as evidence or used in a civil suit for damages. The same section sharply limits discovery of cockpit voice recordings. A court can order access only after reviewing the material privately and finding that what’s public isn’t enough for a fair trial, and anything released goes under a protective order.
The practical effect: the underlying facts (wreckage measurements, maintenance logs, weather data, the recorders themselves in limited form) can reach a jury through witnesses and experts, but the NTSB’s “why” never will. Both sides will need their own avionics and electrical-system experts, and they won’t wait for Washington. The NTSB’s own guidance puts final reports 12 to 24 months after an accident, or roughly December 2026 to December 2027 for this one.
Racing has read this kind of report before
The sport has been through this before. On October 24, 2004, a Beech King Air 200 operated by Hendrick Motorsports struck Bull Mountain near Stuart, Virginia, on approach to Martinsville, killing all 10 aboard. That was also a Part 91 flight, flown by a two-pilot professional crew, and the NTSB’s probable cause was the crew’s failure to properly fly the published instrument approach, including the missed approach.
The lesson carries over. Part 91 gives an owner enormous flexibility on who flies, how they train and when they go, and that flexibility is exactly why teams, drivers and owners love it. It also means nobody outside the organization checks the crew pairing before the wheels leave the ground. Charter operators under Part 135 have to meet stricter crew qualification and duty rules. A privately operated team or driver airplane meets whatever standard its owner sets, and the Biffle case is now testing, under one of the harshest fault rules in the country, what happens when that standard is questioned after the fact.
What to watch
- The court’s first rulings. Early rulings usually decide whether the complaints are legally sufficient, not who was at fault. Expect the contributory-negligence fight to come later, once discovery produces maintenance records and expert reports.
- The related cases. A claim on behalf of Emma Biffle is aimed at Dennis Dutton’s estate, and his widow has separately sued Biffle’s aviation company directly. The same facts will get argued from several directions at once.
- The NTSB docket. When the public docket fills in with systems and maintenance records, both legal teams will get their first neutral look at the Citation’s electrical history.
Biffle won titles in the Truck Series in 2000 and the Busch Series in 2002, took 19 Cup Series races, and was named one of NASCAR’s 75 Greatest Drivers. His family has already dealt with more than a family should since the crash, including being targeted twice by burglars. For a full walk through the estate’s filing and the contributory-negligence stakes, our sister site Backfire News has a detailed breakdown, along with its earlier look at how the first lawsuits lined up.
Featured image: Greg Biffle at Michigan International Speedway, June 2005. Photo: SSG Helen Miller, U.S. Army National Guard, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
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