Henson Airlines Flight 1517
1985 aviation accident
On September 23, 1985, Henson Airlines Flight 1517 crashed in Grottoes, Virginia, while on approach to the Shenandoah Valley Regional Airport. The two pilots and twelve passengers were killed.
Accident details
Henson Airlines Flight 1517 was a regular scheduled flight from Baltimore-Washington International Airport to Shenandoah Valley Regional Airport. The flight was operated on behalf of Piedmont Airlines as Piedmont Commuter.
At 9:59 am, Flight 1517 departed Baltimore bound for Shenandoah Valley. On board were twelve passengers and two crew members. The crew were Captain Martin Burns III (27), and First Officer Zilda Spadaro-Wolan (26).
The flight was routine until approach into Shenandoah Valley. At 10:14 am, Captain Burns told the Air Traffic Controller that he believed that the plane was too far west of his course. The controller tried several times to reach Flight 1517 by radio to no avail.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Henson Airlines Flight 1517” as 1985 aviation accident. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as 1985 aviation accident. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q18148724. Authority coordinates are 38.227, -78.777. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1985 and 1517.
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This entry incorporates text from “Henson Airlines Flight 1517” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.