A father and his 22-year-old son were killed when their private plane entered a descending spiral during a storm over rural Illinois, and the dead pilot's daughter now says a weather-tracking software glitch that was 30 minutes off led them to believe they could fly safely between the storm and their destination in Arkansas.
Jimmy Don Lewis, 48, and Brayden Ty Lewis, 22, had spent the evening at a St. Louis Cardinals baseball game. They took off from St. Louis Regional Airport in Bethalto, headed for Siloam Springs Municipal Airport in Arkansas. Twenty-two minutes later, their Beechcraft Baron 55 vanished from radar near Waterloo, Illinois.
The Monroe County Sheriff's Department said preliminary flight data showed "the aircraft appeared to begin a turn, possibly in an attempt to avoid the storm, before entering what appeared to be a descending spiral." Investigators believe the crash occurred around 11 p.m. Thursday, roughly twelve minutes after the plane lost contact at 10:48 p.m. Their bodies were not discovered until 7:51 the next morning.
Earlier that same Thursday, the Lewis family had flown together to Illinois so Kelsey Lewis, Jimmy's daughter, and her fiancé could pick up a new car. Kelsey had been aboard the plane with her father and brother on that daytime flight, the same aircraft that would crash hours later.
After the family errand, Jimmy and Brayden stayed behind to catch the Cardinals game. It was the kind of outing that defined their relationship. As Kelsey Lewis told the New York Post, the two were inseparable.
"My dad and brother, they were... oh, they were thick and thin, they were so close, they did everything together."
Flying was their shared passion. Father and son had earned their pilot's licenses together. Kelsey recalled family trips by air to Branson, Missouri, and Hot Springs, Arkansas, just for dinner.
But that Thursday night, storms rolled into the region after Jimmy and Brayden took off for home. Kelsey said the weather-tracking software her father relied on was running 30 minutes behind actual conditions. That delay, she believes, led them to think they could "hit the gap" between the storm and a safe landing.
They could not.
Back in Arkansas, Kelsey was already uneasy. She monitored the plane's status from the ground, watching for updates on when they would land.
"That whole night, I don't know why, but I checked the plane status for when they would take off."
The plane never arrived. The family began making calls, reaching out to anyone who might know something. They contacted the Monroe County Sheriff's Department in Waterloo, Illinois. Then the sheriff's office asked Kelsey, her mother Jill Lewis, and Brayden's longtime girlfriend Payton to come to the station.
Kelsey knew what that meant before anyone said a word.
"Down, down deep in my mom and I's heart, when they asked us to come to the police station, we figured something wasn't okay."
At 10:30 a.m. the following morning, the sheriff delivered the news. Kelsey recalled his words: "There was a discovery at 7:51 this morning. A plane and two deceased bodies." A father and son who had been alive and laughing at a baseball game the night before were gone.
Kelsey Lewis pushed back hard against any suggestion that her father was reckless. Jimmy Don Lewis was an experienced pilot and an active community member at Kansas High School, where Brayden had once been the starting quarterback.
"My dad, when it came to flying, he was very, very, cautious of everything. Very cautious."
That caution, Kelsey said, makes the weather-tracker malfunction all the more devastating. If the software had shown conditions accurately, she believes her father would never have attempted the flight through the storm. The claim that the tracker was 30 minutes off comes from Kelsey's account; it has not been independently verified through a technical inspection, at least not publicly.
Fox News reported that the FAA and NTSB are continuing their investigation into the official cause of the crash. The Monroe County Sheriff's Department stated that investigators believe the aircraft "departed into an area of developing severe weather." What remains unclear is whether the weather-tracking software issue will factor into the federal investigation's findings, or whether other mechanical or environmental causes contributed.
The crash adds to a grim string of fatal aviation accidents in recent months that have left families shattered and investigators searching for answers.
Several key questions hang over the investigation. No official agency has confirmed or denied the weather-tracker glitch that Kelsey described. The specific storm system that moved through the area that night has not been publicly identified in detail. Whether Brayden was acting as co-pilot or riding as a passenger has not been clarified.
The exact crash site beyond "near Waterloo, Illinois" has not been disclosed publicly. And while the Monroe County Sheriff's Department issued the preliminary flight-data statement, the full scope of federal involvement, NTSB and FAA, is still developing.
These are not academic questions. If a widely used weather-tracking system fed a pilot dangerously outdated data, that is a safety issue with implications far beyond one family's grief. Pilots across the country rely on real-time weather software to make life-or-death decisions every day. A 30-minute lag is not a minor inconvenience. It is the difference between flying through a gap and flying into a wall of weather.
Fatal crashes involving small private aircraft continue to claim lives at a pace that rarely draws sustained national attention. Each one leaves behind a family trying to make sense of a routine flight that turned deadly.
Kelsey Lewis and her mother Jill plan to honor Jimmy and Brayden by establishing the Lewis Memorial Sports Scholarship at Kansas High School, where Brayden starred on the football field and where his father was a fixture in the community.
Kelsey said she draws strength from knowing what her father and brother would want.
"Neither one of them would want to see either one of us hurting."
The scholarship is a small, concrete act of remembrance in the face of a loss that defies easy consolation. A father and son who shared a cockpit, a love of flying, and a Thursday night at the ballpark are gone because, if Kelsey's account holds, the technology they trusted told them the sky was safe when it was not.
Aviation tragedies like the B-52 crash at Edwards Air Force Base and a deadly skydiving plane crash in France have reminded Americans in recent months just how unforgiving the sky can be when something goes wrong. For the Lewis family, the margin between a safe landing and a funeral was, by their daughter's telling, a half-hour of bad data.
If that turns out to be true, the investigation owes this family, and every pilot who trusts the same software, a full and honest accounting.
