North Dakota farmer Ralph Steenson died in 2002 plane crash

A North Dakota Farmer’s Final Flight

“He had a great zest for life,” Brenda Steenson said of her father. “He was always positive and looked for the fun behind everything.” Tragically, it was that zest for life that led Ralph Steenson, a 75-year-old farmer from Cummings, North Dakota, to his final journey. InForum reported that on this day in 2002, Steenson died when his single-engine Cirrus SR20 plane crashed in New Mexico.

The 75-year-old Steenson was alone on the plane when it went down on relatively flat land about 100 miles northeast of Albuquerque, said Bill King, vice president of business administration at Cirrus Design Corp.’s Duluth, Minn., headquarters. The crash occurred between 2 and 4 p.m. on a day when flying conditions were not ideal, according to Fred Clark, assistant manager in the Federal Aviation Administration’s Albuquerque division. The distance between the clouds and the ground was relatively short, a detail that would become a critical part of the investigation.

The story of Steenson’s final flight is one of routine, passion, and an abrupt, unexplained end. He was a man who had spent his life on the land, a recently retired farmer who, for decades, balanced North Dakota winters with half the year spent in Phoenix. His passion, however, was the sky. Born on Oct. 6, 1927, Steenson began flying in the early 1950s, a pursuit that became intertwined with his identity. If he had to choose a way to leave this earth, his daughter Brenda said, this was how he would have done it.

The mission that day was simple and practical: Steenson was flying the Cirrus SR20 to Albuquerque to drop it off with his son, Jeff, for the winter. It was a familiar task. The flight began with a touch of normalcy. “When he left that day he called midway through the flight,” Brenda Steenson recalled. “He said it was a beautiful day and a great flight.” Jeff was awaiting his father at the airport in Albuquerque. When the plane didn’t arrive, he alerted the FAA, triggering a search that would end in grim discovery.

“Our thoughts and hearts are with the family,” Bill King, vice president of business administration at Cirrus Design Corp., said.

As the family awaited news, a complex investigation began. The National Transportation Safety Board, members of the FAA’s Albuquerque division, and a crew from Cirrus Design Corp. descended on the crash site. “We couldn’t get to the site until this morning,” said Greg Nickerson, supervisor of the FAA’s Albuquerque division, on the following Monday. The investigation promised to be meticulous, focusing on the aircraft’s performance, the weather conditions, and the pilot’s actions to understand what went wrong in those final hours.

The Cirrus SR20 itself was a point of both pride and scrutiny. Released in 1999, it was a modern, sophisticated aircraft for its time. “The Cirrus SR20, released in 1999, is a very robust plane,” King had stated confidently. Yet this wasn’t the first time a Cirrus SR20 had met a tragic end in New Mexico. In May of this year, another SR20 crashed, killing pilot John E. Swanstrom Jr., of Duluth.

The aftermath was a family left to grapple with a sudden, gaping hole. Steenson is survived by his wife of 51 years, Cecelia, his four children—Jeff, Mark, Brenda, and Sylvia—and nine grandchildren. The community he left behind, both in North Dakota and in the wider world of aviation, mourned a man whose passion was as clear as the skies he loved to fly through.

The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the crash of Ralph Steenson’s Cirrus SR20. But for his family, and for all who knew him, the story is less about the tragedy of the crash and more about the fullness of the life that preceded it. As Brenda Steenson put it, with a clarity that cut through the sorrow: “He was an amazing man who many people will miss tremendously.”

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