Three of four who died in plane crash were pilots

Adding to the mystery of why two planes collided over the Everglades is that three of the four people who died had logged hours in cockpits.

“Out of the four people that were found in this wreckage, one of them was a student that was fairly new, and the others were already pilots,” Miami-Dade Police Detective Alvaro Zabaleta told reporters near the scene Wednesday.

A friend of one of the fliers called him “a pillar of the aviation community.”

The planes — a Piper PA-34 and a Cessna 172 — are registered to Dean International, Inc., a 35-year-old flight school, which operates out of Miami Executive Airport, Federal Aviation Administration records show.

The aircraft crashed in a re- mote region accessible only by air boat or helicopter. It was reported to 911 around 1 p.m. Tuesday. A large debris field was found south of mile marker 23 on the Tamiami Trail/Southwest 8th Street at 227th Avenue, about nine miles west of Miami Executive Airport.

The bodies of Jorge A. Sanchez, 22, of Homestead; Ralph Knight, 72, of Lantana and Nisha Sejwal, 19, of Miami, were recovered Tuesday afternoon. Carlos Alfredo Zanetti Scarpati, 22, of Miami, was found dead Wednesday around 9:35 a.m.

Knight was a certified airline transport pilot and flight instructor, according to the FAA.

Knight also was a designated pilot examiner, authorized by the FAA to do “check rides”

with aspiring flyers as they were about to become certified pilots. He had been in one of the planes with Sejwal, Zabaleta said.

“He’s pretty much a pillar of the [South Florida] aviation community,” said Marian Smith, manager/owner of Palm Beach Flight Training school in Lantana. She had known Knight for three decades and said he would do exams for pilots at airfields all around the region. “He was known by everybody. He was an awesome person.”

She would not speculate on what could have happened or what led to her friend’s death.

“He was a super nice person,” Smith said. “We’re all going to miss him.”

Sejwal was from New Delhi, India, and was certified as a private pilot, FAA records show.

Sanchez was a certified commercial pilot, flight instructor and ground instructor. He was in the other plane with Scarpati, who was a fairly new student at Dean International flight school, according to Zabaleta.

“It’s heartbreaking that this tragedy has occurred,” Zabaleta said.

Autopsies were in progress at the Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner’s Office on Wednesday afternoon.

The National Transportation Safety Board said part of the investigation will be to review the pilots’ medical records, flight histories and, possibly, their activities 72 hours before the accident, which is standard procedure for aviation accidents.

Severely hot weather and the wet terrain, where water sometimes rose to rescuers’ waists, hampered finding all the pieces of the wrecked aircraft, Zabaleta said.

“The environment makes it a little difficult for the investigators,” Zabaleta said. “We’re looking at swampy areas. There is a lot of mush. One of the planes is not intact. Therefore they have to go searching for parts of the aircraft, to piece the puzzle together.”

Dean International Inc. has had 21 incidents in the past 20 years, including three fatal crashes, the NTSB said.

Robert Dean, owner of the flight school whose website says it has has taught 7,000 students from around the world, did not return messages on Tuesday and Wednesday. Calls to the school Wednesday went to voicemail.

The NTSB investigates crashes and the FAA enforces compliance with federal regulations.

Dean International had eight FAA enforcement actions from 2004 to 2016: Three were administrative, meaning letters or warning notices were sent to correct practices in flight operations, training or maintenance. In three cases, no evidence of rule breaking was found and no action was taken.

Two other cases — from March and May in 2010 — were combined and a $15,000 fine was levied for violating two federal regulations, the FAA said. One was for requirements for inspecting an aircraft, specifically that a plane can’t be used for training unless there is an annual inspection or after 100 hours of time in service, and must be done by a qualified mechanic. The second regulation involved a civil plane’s “airworthiness,” that no person may operate a civil aircraft unless it is “in an airworthy condition.”