Pilot of fatal plane crash near Sperryville was on cross-country tour
Deceased 35-year-old California man had just visited DC sights
The 35-year-old pilot and lone occupant of a small plane that ew directly above Sperryville and then for reasons unknown crashed into Buck Hollow last Monday evening had just departed an airport near the nation’s capital, where as part of his cross-country tour he visited the monuments and memorials.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) told the Rappahannock News that the plane went down Monday evening, August 31, at 7 p.m., albeit the deceased pilot and wreckage was not stumbled upon by hikers of the Buck Hollow Trail until late Wednesday morning.
Shortly before taking o on the doomed ight, the pilot, identi ed Friday as Nicolas Hellewell of San Luis Obispo, posted on his Facebook account: “[M]ade it safely into the DC . . . without getting intercepted by the Air Force. 25 mile bike ride to downtown to
nally get a tour of the monuments capital and White House. Finished o the evening with amazing beer friends and camping at the airport.”
Hellewell posted dozens of photos from his brief visit to Washington, including one of his airplane parked near the airport tarmac, the tent where he slept pitched next to it. Also posted were numerous pictures the pilot had snapped most recently above New York City and from his numerous stops stretching from the Grand Canyon of Arizona and mountains of Montana to the Great Lakes and Bar Harbor, Maine.
NTSB spokesman Peter Knudson provided this newspaper with the following timeline of the plane’s ight path based on its ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast) technology, where an aircra ’s position is determined via satellite navigation, sending out a “ping” every second:
➜ The Piper PA-20 took o from “Maryland Airport” at Indian Head in Charles County, Md., just south of the nation’s capital, “heading westbound” with Hellewell the only occupant aboard.
➜ The pilot led “no ight plan,” thus his immediate destination that late evening remains unknown. (He’d written to his friends in the south that he was beginning the southern portion of his cross-country journey and hoped to see them).
➜ Hellewell was ying under Visual Flight Rules (VFR), when weather conditions are supposed to be clear enough to allow the pilot to see where the aircra is going.
➜ Weather at the time of the crash was “overcast and rainy.” (With little time to land before dark he might have decided to risk crossing the mountains near Thornton Gap to reach the intended airport as opposed to turning back at that late hour, but that is only speculation).
➜ The “very precise” radar track route of the plane ends at approximately 7 p.m., when the Piper went down into a thick canopy of trees within the Rappahannock County portion of Shenandoah National Park, having just cleared Buck Hollow Ridge west of Sperryville.
➜ The location of the crash was “in a ravine” less than a mile below Skyline Drive.
➜ The plane upon impact was “highly fragmented.”
➜ There was “no post-crash fire.” It was on Wednesday at 11:14 a.m. that the Shenandoah National Park Communications Center received a report that the wreckage of the plane had been discovered approximately three-quarters of a mile down the Buck Hollow Trail from Skyline Drive.
Knudson said the NTSB will issue a preliminary report on the crash within a few weeks, with more detailed information, including a likely cause of the crash, in 12 to 24 months.