Plane collision leaves 4 adults dead
Both craft go down near Lake Pleasant; 1 catches fire upon impact
Four adults, including two flight instructors, were killed Friday morning when two single-engine planes collided above a remote desert area in north Phoenix, authorities said.
The identities were not released pending notification of family members.
“This is a tragic event,” Phoenix police spokesman Steve Martos said at the scene. “It could have been much worse and be in a congested area where people reside.”
Martos said planes frequently fly in the area because of the open airspace.
A pilot reported seeing the two small aircraft collide in midair about15 miles northwest of Phoenix Deer Valley Airport, said Ian Gregor, a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration.
Numerous 911 calls about the midair crash came in around 10 a.m., authorities said.
Gregor said the planes went down near New River Road’s Mile Post 7, north of Carefree Highway and west of Lake Pleasant Parkway.
Fire crews went to the area, near Lake Pleasant, and found the two planes. One, believed to be a Cessna, caught fire upon impact and was “unrecognizable,” according to Capt. Dave Wilson of the Daisy Mountain Fire Department.
He said the plane contained two people, whose gender could not be determined at the scene because
the bodies were burnt.
Identification of these two victims will be made by the Medical Examiners Office, Martos said.
Martos said the identities of the two men in the other aircraft are known but the family has yet to be notified.
Wilson said the other aircraft, a Piper Archer III, appeared to have made a rough landing and was mostly intact. It was about 100 yards from the other plane with the two unidentifiable victims inside, he said.
“I thought possibly we might have survivors,” said battalion Chief Gary Bernard of the Peoria Fire Department.
The Phoenix Police Department is investigating the cause of the crash, along with investigators from the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board.
An NTSB preliminary report is expected to be posted on the agency’s website, ntsb.gov, within a week or two, Gregor said. He said it typically takes NTSB months to come up with a probable cause for the collision.
The Cessna is part of Westwind School of Aeronautics at Deer Valley Airport, Martos said.
The Piper is owned by Bird Acquisition LLC, which operates TransPac Aviation Academy, a local flight school that trains U.S. and international pilots. Bird Acquisition is a Massachusetts company with an office location at the Deer Valley Airport.
TransPac says on its website that it puts safety first and has a fleet of 60 Piper planes, which are maintained by FAA-certified pilots. At least two additional TransPac planes have been involved in fatal crashes in recent years.
On Feb. 25, 2011, a Piper owned by Bird and operated by TransPac crashed and caught fire in the mountains about 20 miles northeast of Deer Valley Airport, fatally injuring a flight instructor and two students, according to a preliminary report issued by the NTSB.
The victims and the wreckage were found at the summit of Bronco Peak, with an elevation of 4,600 feet. The NTSB concluded the plane collided with a rock outcropping but did not issue a cause for the accident.
About a year earlier, on Jan. 28, 2010, a student pilot from China was killed in a crash involving another Piper operated by TransPac near Deer Valley Road and Interstate 17. The NTSB concluded the student took off with marginal visibility because of low clouds and fog. The pilot hit some wires, overflew the runway and crashed in a field.
Stephen Goddard, the company’s CEO, posted a statement on TransPac’s website, extending condolences to family, friends and colleagues of the two instructors who died.
“I was terribly saddened to learn of the loss of two of our members of the TransPac Aviation Academy family,” Goddard’s statement read. “The individuals involved were deeply connected here at TransPac and their loss is felt by all of us.”
Goddard declined to release personal information of the two men out of respect for the families during their grieving.
Deer Valley Airport is one of the busiest general-aviation airports in the country and has more than1,200 planes based there.
It has a fueling station, avionics repair, aircraft rentals, new- and used-aircraft sales, a pilot shop, a restaurant, charter flights and two flight-training schools: Westwind School of Aeronautics and TransPac Aviation Academy.
Typically, Arizona’s fatal crash rate, measured by deadly crashes per 100,000 hours of flight, is well above the U.S. average.
Arizona was double the national rate in 2008, at 2.76 per 100,000 flight hours.
Causes are myriad, and safety experts have no clear explanations why Arizona consistently records a higher fatal-crash rate for light aircraft than the U.S. average.