A canopy door from a
two-engine plane belonging to Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University came
undone during a training run over Palm Coast’s C-Section around 4:30
p.m. Thursday and fell to earth, slamming the pavement within yards of
several houses around a cul-de-sac. No one was injured on the ground,
and the pilot and trainee aboard the plane made it safely back to the
Flagler County Airport.
The cause of the
mishap is unknown. It is the first time in recent memory that an
Embry-Riddle training plane–the likes of which fly above Flagler
routinely–has had any sort of accident.
“We are still
investigating, and it’s going to be several days until we’re exactly
sure what happened,” Embry-Riddle Spokesman James Roddy said. Many
questions remain unanswered, including whether the Federal Aviation
Administration will be investigating the mishap, and where the plane
was. Roddy said he “assumed” it was grounded.
The plane is a Diamond DA42, which seats four, has a top speed of around 220 mph and a range of about 1,000 miles.
A
resident of the C Section called 911 to report hearing a loud crash
outside, and seeing what looked like a plane door siting in the road
near 16 College Court. The plane was flying overhead. At 5:23 p.m.,
Embry-Riddle called local authorities to alert them that one of their
planes had lost a door, and that the plane had landed safely. The
Flagler County Sheriff’s Office turned the door over to university
officials at Airport Director Roy Sieger’s request at 5:45 p.m.
“Witnesses,”
a sheriff’s report found, “stated that they didn’t see it fall but
heard the crash and went outside to see it sitting in the middle of the
street. The falling door did not strike anything or anybody, other than
the street, and it didn’t cause any damage to anything as a result.”
Embry-Riddle, Roddy said, conducts some 250 training flights a day.
“This is an incredibly rare event for us,” Roddy said. “In fact I had
our director of aviation pull information, the last six and a half
years we have flown 388,000 hours of flight, and we’ve had one accident
in those six and a half years, and it was a bird strike. So these events
for Embry-Riddle are incredibly rare. Safety is the absolute number one
priority for us.” The identities of the pilot and the trainee were not
released.
For Palm Coast and Flagler County, it is only the latest in a series
of plane emergencies, some minor, one disastrous, this year.
The evening of March 13, a single-engine Piper on a training from Phoenix East flight school in Daytona Beach executed an emergency landing on Palm Coast Parkway,
just west of Belle Terre. No one was injured, and only a semi truck
sustained minor damage when the edge of the plan’s left wing clipped a
part of the cab. In April, an experimental plane crashed into Lake Disston at the west end of the county. Its two occupants swam safely to shore.
On Jan. 5, three people aboard a BE35 aircraft died when the plane
crashed into a house on Utica Path in Palm Coast, just short of the
runway at the Flagler County Airport. The plane had developed engine
troubles minutes earlier. The house was virtually demolished by fire,
but its occupant survived unharmed.
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