Halladay was flying up & down ‘aggressively’
RETIRED PITCHING star Roy Halladay was flying his tiny sport plane close to the water shortly before he crashed and died off the Florida coast in the Gulf of Mexico, according to witnesses.
Halladay, a probable Baseball Hall of Famer who retired from baseball after the 2013 season, was alternately flying high and then buzzing the water before the “high-energy impact” crushed the plane and ended his life on Tuesday, said National Transportation Safety Board Investigator Noreen Price.
“Every accident is different,” Price said during a news conference in New Port Richey, Fla.
“They are very complex. So as we move forward in the factual-finding phase, if we see anything that we believe might connect it to previous accidents, we will certainly look at that.”
Video that TMZ obtained showed Halladay’s ICON A5 flying close to the water before the fatal crash.
A witness told the gossip site that Halladay was “dramatically increasing and decreasing in elevation.”
“He was flying like that all week,” another witness told TMZ. “Aggressively.”
Halladay, 40, had owned the plane for less than a month.. The son of a corporate pilot, Halladay had contract clauses that forbade him from taking up aviation until he retired from baseball. The A5, which rolled out in 2014, is an amphibious aircraft meant to be treated like an ATV — a piece of weekend recreational gear with folding wings that can easily be towed on a trailer to a lake, where it can take off from the water. “The way that a lot of people described it is a Jet Ski with wings,” Stephen Pope, editor-in-chief of Flying magazine, told The Associated Press. “It’s really a plaything.” John Murray Karkow, who led the plane’s design, died while flying an A5 over California’s Lake Berryessa on May 8. The NTSB attributed that crash to pilot error.