GILLETTE, Wyo. — Seven people died on July 26, 2024, when a private plane carrying three members of the Grammy-nominated Southern gospel group The Nelons broke apart in flight and crashed in remote country north of Gillette, a loss that cut through a family ministry nearly half a century old and through the wider Christian music world that had traveled with them for decades.
Killed were founding member Kelly Nelon Clark; her husband and the group’s manager, Jason Clark; their daughter Amber Nelon Kistler; Amber’s husband, Nathan Kistler; the group’s assistant, Melodi Hodges; the pilot, Larry Haynie; and Haynie’s wife, Melissa. There were no survivors. The only performing member of the current quartet not aboard was Autumn Nelon Streetman, Kelly and Jason’s younger daughter. She and her husband, Jamie Streetman, were traveling separately and learned of the crash after they had reached the Pacific Northwest.
The party had been on its way to join the Gaither Homecoming Cruise to Alaska, a weeklong gathering that draws some of the best-known names in gospel music. The Nelons were booked as a headline act. Their aircraft, a single-engine Pilatus PC-12/47E registered N357HE and operated by Haynie Enterprises, had left Nebraska City Municipal Airport in Nebraska and was bound for Billings Logan International Airport in Montana, a planned fuel stop on the longer trip toward Seattle, where the cruise was to sail.
Shortly after 1 p.m. local time, the airplane went down in Campbell County, roughly a dozen miles northeast of the small community of Recluse and just south of the Montana line. The impact ignited a grass fire that crews contained. Campbell County emergency personnel reached a wreckage site already beyond any chance of rescue. A distress signal had gone out in the final minutes of the flight.
Federal investigators later reconstructed what those minutes looked like. In a final report released in 2026, the National Transportation Safety Board found that the airplane, cruising near 26,000 feet, flew into convective weather. Cloud tops in the area reached about 28,500 feet, and modeling suggested an updraft strong enough to overwhelm the autopilot. About fifteen seconds before the aircraft entered an area of precipitation, the autopilot disconnected. Haynie reported the failure and declared an emergency to air traffic control.
Investigators concluded that the disconnect distracted him as he tried to reengage the system, and that his instrument scan broke down while he was hand-flying in instrument conditions. The airplane’s track in the last two minutes — erratic changes in altitude and heading, ending in a steep, rapidly descending right turn — was consistent with spatial disorientation. The probable cause, the board said, was the pilot’s loss of control in those conditions, which led to an in-flight breakup. The weather-related autopilot disconnect was listed as a contributing factor. Haynie, a former chairman of the Georgia Board of Corrections, was remembered by state officials for a long career in public service as well as for the flight that ended in Campbell County.
The names landed with particular force in gospel circles because The Nelons were not a visiting act. The group was formed in the 1970s by Rex Nelon, a Gospel Music Hall of Fame patriarch whose name the quartet still carried. Over the decades it collected multiple Gospel Music Association Dove Awards, three Grammy nominations, and, in 2016, induction into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame. Fans knew the family for close harmonies, traditional Southern gospel arrangements, and a stage presence that treated a concert as an extension of church.
After the victims were identified, Autumn Nelon Streetman spoke for the family that remained. She called the loss indescribable and thanked friends, colleagues, and listeners who had already begun to write and pray. “Thank you for the prayers that have already been extended to me, my husband, Jamie, and our team as we navigate these coming days,” she said. “We ask for your continued prayers, love, and support as we mourn the loss of our family and our dearest friends.” Gaither Music said she and her husband would return home to begin the practical work of funerals and unfinished business, and asked that the Clark, Kistler, Haynie, and Hodges families be held in prayer.
Bill Gaither, whose Homecoming series had booked the group for the Alaska voyage, called the crash an unfathomable loss for the gospel community and praised the family’s warmth and the hope that ran through their songs. Other artists, churches, and fans filled social media with clips of old performances and with the ordinary details of people who had shared green rooms, church aisles, and late buses with the Clarks.
Memorial plans took shape in Georgia and Tennessee, the states where the group had been based and where much of its audience still lives. The NTSB’s work, begun in the days after the crash and finished more than two years later, closed the factual question of how the airplane came apart. It did not close the other one: a family quartet reduced, in a single afternoon over the high plains, to the daughter who had taken a different flight.
