Instructor, passenger killed in Broward plane crash. A third person is still hospitalized
A second person has died after a plane trying to takeoff crashed at North Perry Airport on Friday afternoon, authorities said Saturday. A third victim is still in the hospital.
The pilot died at the crash site and a female passenger sitting in the front seat later died at the hospital, said Aaron McCarter, a National Transportation Safety Board air safety investigator. A man sitting in the backseat is still in the hospital in critical condition.
The three aboard the aircraft have not yet been identified by authorities.
Around noon Friday, the flight instructor was planning on taking the two passengers on a “discovery flight” at North Perry Airport in Pembroke Pines, McCarter said.
“A discovery flight is something like, ‘Yea, I would like to learn how to fly’ or ‘I would like to go on my first flight,’ ” he said. “It’s designed to spur the interest of a paying passenger to become a pilot.”
Shortly after takeoff the plane went into a “very high angle of attack, crested the angle of attack at the top, did a nose-down attitude followed promptly by a left turn and impacted the ground in between the runways,” McCarter said.
While there was no fire, the plane was destroyed.
In order to better investigate the incident, the plane was moved to Florida Air Recovery in Fort Pierce, where NTSB agents will try to put the plane back together and figure out what happened.
It’s unclear exactly what the cause of the crash was, but McCarter will be looking into an assortment of factors.
One being the high heat and weather conditions South Florida has been experiencing for the past few weeks.
The weight of the passengers, how much gasoline was in the plane, the high temperatures and other factors could have all created an environment that adversely affected the plane, McCarter said.
“I’m looking very closely at the weather. ... It was about 95 degrees Fahrenheit and about 80% humidity ...,” he said. “That actually does have an effect on the aircraft performance.”
North Perry Airport has seen a few planes takeoff and later crash this year.
In May, a banner plane crashed at the Broward airport, injuring the pilot. The week before, a banner plane from Perry Airport crashed on the street near a Target shopping center in Hollywood. The pilot died in the fiery crash.
McCarter said there will be a natural increase in crashes as more people fly during the summer, but if an airport is seeing an abnormal amount of crashes the NTSB would conduct an investigation if necessary.
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