‘The most terrifying thing I think I’ve experienced’: Eastern Iowa air traffic controller recalls guiding pilot through harrowing landing

As the plane’s altitude continued to fall, Nathan Mencke, working from the air traffic control tower during a training shift, could not help but fear the worst.

This plane may crash.

“Yeah, it absolutely was a thought,” Mencke said, recently recalling the harrowing experience in November of 2024.

According to a press release issued by a public relations firm working with the Federal Aviation Administration, pilot Minnetta Gardinier on that day was flying a Cessna Cardinal and making an approach into the Iowa City Municipal Airport. Mencke was working in the Cedar Rapids Tower, an FAA Control Tower and Approach Control at The Eastern Iowa Airport.

Mencke was working a training shift — he estimates he was about three months into his training on radar — with his supervisor and air traffic controller Devin Turner.

The weather was less than ideal for flying, Mencke recalled in an interview: some “decent” winds were blowing from the south to southeast and low-hanging clouds hovered at around 1,000 feet.

“It wasn’t a great day to be out flying,” Mencke said. “Nothing that was unsafe. It just makes things a lot more complicated.”

Gardinier was making a GPS approach into the airport, but was getting blown around by the wind, Mencke said. He thought something looked wrong as Gardinier relayed to the tower the difficulty she was having with the winds. They decided Gardinier would circle back and restart her approach.

Then the real trouble started.

The press release says Gardinier “encountered severe spatial disorientation and an impending stall-spin incident due to low visibility and extreme wind.” The plane stalled, Mencke said, and he watched as her altitude began to plummet from above 3,000 feet diving quickly to the mid-2,000s. Alarms were going off inside the tower.

“We didn’t know it at the time, but she was fighting against the autopilot in the plane,” Mencke said. “She was trying to do one thing and the plane was trying to do something else. … It ended up stalling out the plane … and she ended up going into a stall spin. …

“I give off our low-altitude alerts that we give in those situations and tell her you need to climb, you need to do something,” Mencke said. “We didn’t completely know. We had an idea what was happening, but in the moment we’re not exactly sure. We just know the plane is not in a good situation and it looks like it is going down right now. We need to do something.”

‘Planning for a worst-case scenario’

As Mencke and Turner continued to communicate with Gardinier, Mencke’s concern grew.

“It’s a feeling that’s almost hard to explain. But just in the moment you realize this is real and things are happening very quickly,” Mencke said.

“In the moment it is, and even looking back, probably the most terrifying thing I think I’ve experienced,” he said. “We were all planning for a worst-case scenario at that point.”

Mencke said while he and Turner did everything they could to help Gardinier, there also was a degree of helplessness that he felt in the moment.

“Because there’s only so much that we can do on our end to try and remedy a situation like that,” Mencke said. “At the end, it really comes down to the pilot recovering and being able to get out of that. At that point, we’re just kind of along for the ride, monitoring and hoping that it all works out.”

Gardinier did recover, and it did all work out. And not a second too soon. Mencke estimates that the plane was just a few hundred feet above the ground when Gardinier was able to recover and regain control.

Turner and Mencke once again rerouted Gardinier onto her approach, and this time she was able to keep the plane stable and land safely.

“She came back and said, ‘I’ve landed. I am safe on the ground. Thank you guys for everything,’” Mencke said.

In a letter she wrote thanking Turner, Mencke and the air traffic control team, Gardinier shared that during the incident she also had started to fear the worst.

“I really believed that I wouldn’t survive this flight,” Gardinier said in the letter. “As I worked to pull out of this spin, it was the ATC copilot in my headset that provided the calm, quiet instructions supporting my efforts.”

Turner and Mencke were honored for their efforts at the National Air Traffic Controllers Association’s annual conference this month in Las Vegas. Turner received the Archie League Medal of Safety Award.

Nationally, the FAA is experiencing a shortage of air traffic controllers. The agency needs about 3,000 more to fully staff the country’s system, according to the Associated Press.

Because of the shortage, controllers often are forced to work mandatory overtime, leading to concerns about fatigue after highly publicized close calls between planes that were following orders from controllers, the AP reported.

Mencke said he was glad to be able to share the story at the national conference, and that it was an honor to be recognized by his peers. He said it was good to share a story that illustrates how air traffic controllers work hard to ensure everyone experiences safe air travel and, “to make sure everyone gets home safe and back to their families and loved ones.”

Mencke said the experience is something he will never forget.

“At the end of the day, everything worked out,” he said. “In this situation, it was the best possible outcome we could have hoped for.”

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