Kenneth Kirsch and Michael Greenberg had a ritual. The two friends would meet for breakfast at the café near Hammonton Municipal Airport, share a meal, then lift off in their helicopters for a morning flight. On December 28, 2025, they followed that exact pattern. By 11:30 a.m., both men were dead.
Wait, what? How does a routine so familiar turn catastrophic within minutes? The answer isn't recklessness or mechanical failure. It's about how our brains handle risk when we think we've seen it all before.
What Happened
At approximately 11:25 a.m., two Enstrom helicopters departed Hammonton Municipal Airport in southern New Jersey. Kirsch's red F-28A and Greenberg's white 280C were flying together at low altitude and unusually close proximity. Witnesses said they were "lower than typical" and "extremely close together."
Within moments, they collided. One helicopter spiraled into a tree line and burst into flames. The other crashed into a nearby field. Kirsch, 65, from Carneys Point, was airlifted to a trauma center but died from his injuries. Greenberg, 71, from Sewell, died at the scene.
Hammonton Police Chief Kevin Friel put it bluntly: "Reports were that they were flying in tandem, that they were flying close together, which is probably what caused the collision."
The NTSB is investigating. Preliminary findings? Expect them in about 30 days. Final determination? Could take up to two years.
When Normal Becomes Invisible
The breakfast detail matters. When experienced pilots follow a well-worn pattern, the flight stops feeling like a high-consequence operation. It starts feeling like, well, grabbing breakfast with a friend. And that's exactly when risk becomes hardest to see.
"This is just a quick hop." "We've done this a thousand times." These aren't quotes from the investigation. They're phrases that echo through every airport coffee shop where pilots gather. They're also the sound of vigilance quietly slipping away.
The Physics of Close Flying
Here's what most people don't realize: outside controlled airspace, preventing collisions depends on pilots literally seeing each other and taking evasive action. It's called "see-and-avoid," and it sounds simple until you grasp its limits.
Closing speeds between helicopters can exceed 150 mph. At low altitude, you have seconds to spot, identify, and react. Helicopter cockpits have blind spots. Your attention splits between instrument checks, obstacle scanning, and tracking that other aircraft you had in sight a moment ago.
Former FAA and NTSB investigator Alan Diehl notes that nearly all midair collisions trace back to detection and avoidance failures. By the time you're asking whether both pilots could realistically see each other, the margin for error has already vanished.
Add tandem flying to the equation. When you're within a few rotor diameters of another helicopter, tiny mismatches cascade instantly. One pilot adjusts climb rate. The other doesn't notice. Suddenly you're not parallel anymore. At 500 feet above ground, there's no time to fix it.
The first minutes after departure make everything worse. You're managing engine parameters, establishing climb profile, scanning for traffic, navigating. It's cognitive overload by design. Now add another helicopter close enough to see the other pilot's face. If something goes wrong, you have neither altitude to trade for time nor speed to trade for maneuvering. The escape options that exist at 3,000 feet disappear at 300.
The Complacency Trap
Kirsch and Greenberg weren't rookies. They were experienced local pilots who knew the area, the airport, and each other. That familiarity creates efficiency until it creates assumptions.
"I know what he'll do" replaces "I need to verify his position." "We've got this pattern down" replaces "Let's brief today's plan." The line between earned confidence and overconfidence blurs most dangerously during casual flights with friends, where nobody wants to be the one who suggests maybe we should formalize this.
This isn't character judgment. It's human factors science. Familiarity breeds efficiency, but it also breeds complacency. And complacency doesn't announce itself. It's just the slow fade of vigilance you don't notice until something breaks.
The Safety Paradox
Here's what makes this story worth examining: American general aviation is statistically safer than it's been in over a decade. The FAA's 2024 data shows a fatal accident rate of 0.68 per 100,000 flight hours, the lowest since 2009. Preliminary 2025 numbers show continued declines.
Overall safety is improving. But improvement at the macro level doesn't eliminate micro-level risks where moment-to-moment human limits meet physics. This crash didn't happen because general aviation is dangerous. It happened because even in a safe system, the space between "I've got this" and catastrophe can be measured in rotor lengths.
What Happens Next
Investigators will examine three areas: pilot factors (communications, visual acquisition, any spacing plan, workload management), aircraft factors (performance differences, cockpit visibility, mechanical condition), and environmental factors (visibility, sun angle, traffic pattern congestion, airspace rules).
Early narratives often change as data replaces assumptions. The truth will emerge slowly.
The Lesson Beyond Aviation
If you fly, treat fun flights like real operations. Brief the plan. Establish spacing standards. Set explicit "knock it off" criteria if proximity gets uncomfortable. Name the social risk out loud: friends can normalize tighter margins. Saying "let's give each other more room" isn't overcautious. It's professional.
If you don't fly, the lesson still applies. It's about how ordinary routines lower our guard in any high-consequence activity. Where do you confuse familiarity with safety? Driving the same route so automatically you barely remember it? Skipping safety checks because "it's always fine"? The danger isn't recklessness. It's how normal becomes invisible.
The Final Word
Kirsch and Greenberg were friends sharing a routine they loved. They weren't reckless. They were human. Their story isn't a morality tale about bad pilots. It's a reminder that skill doesn't cancel physics, and experience can quietly erode the very vigilance that created it.
The most dangerous flights aren't always the complex ones. Sometimes they're the flights that feel so routine, you forget how thin the margins really are. The more normal something feels, the more carefully we should look at it. Not because we should live in fear, but because curiosity about our own blind spots is the only real armor we have.